Free Republic

Will Apple adopt Windows? By Jack Schofield / Apple/ Windows 01:15pm "The idea that Apple would ditch its own OS for Microsoft Windows came to me from Yakov Epstein, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, who wrote to me convinced that the process had already begun. I was amused, but after mulling over various coincidences, I'm convinced he may be right. This would be the most phenomenal turnabout in the history of desktop computing," writes PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak. Dvorak predicted Apple moving to Intel chips before that happened, but ... Way back then, Apple was trying...

FOSS for OS/2: Keeping the flame alive Thursday February 16, 2006 (06:00 PM GMT) By: Bruce Byfield After a decade of neglect and increasingly reluctant support from IBM, the manufacturer, the OS/2 community persists. Where users of GNU/Linux or FreeBSD have turned to free and open source software (FOSS) for political and philosophical freedom and software quality, the surviving OS/2 community has been turning to FOSS as a means of defending members' right to use the operating system of their choice. The result is a small but surprisingly diverse collection of projects that, to a GNU/Linux user, is a mixture...

Survey: Research has found that administrators are more productive when working with Linux servers rather than those running Windows, but not everyone agrees with the results

Some folks just dote on mystery. SCO must be one of them. It now turns out that, according to IBM's latest Motion to Limit SCO's Claims Relating to Allegedly Misused Material [PDF] and the Memorandum in Support [PDF], while SCO did list 294 items on its final list of allegedly misused material by the December 22, 2005 deadline, it failed to provide "basic specificity" on 201 of them. So IBM would like the court to limit SCO to the 93 items it actually provided particularized information for. Here's IBM's attached Exhibits [PDF]. Exhibit A is Todd Shaughnessy's Declaration from May...

MooBella has put Linux to work making ice cream, in a vending machine that Wallace and Gromit would be proud of. The MooBella vending machine uses Linux 2.4 and a Red Hat filesystem to make 96 varieties of ice cream, on demand, in about 45 seconds per precisely-measured serving. MooBella showed off its Linux-powered ice cream machine at a DEMO event in Colorado today. Once the customer's selection has been made, a quantity of base mix is precisely measured and pumped, aerated, flavored, and sprayed onto a flat rotating surface, where it is flash frozen. The product is then scraped...

Well, *now* SCO's really gone and done it. They got used to IBM's restraint, I guess, and told a story to the Utah court, and now they are being called on it. First, we saw Oracle dispute SCO's story about the subpoenas in its motion to quash in California, and now Intel has filed in Utah a Nonparty Intel's Response to SCO's Motion For Leave to Take Certain Prospective Depositions [PDF], and they are hopping mad. Mad enough to tell Judges Kimball and Wells that what SCO said about Intel is "unfair and untrue": Although Intel takes no position on...

Sun Microsystems' ambitions have grown another size larger. The server and software company launched its servers based on its own UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" chips in December, a major part of a drive to restore its lost luster and financial strength. But alongside the hardware launch came a more quiet software push: an attempt to make the Linux and BSD Unix open-source operating systems a serious option for buyers of Sparc-based computers. To promote the technology combination, Sun is trying to coax an accompanying software business into existence. Sun has had some experience building such software "ecosystems." For example, it's in...

Word reaches the Deeplung ear that Intel's Yonah processor, which ships under the Intel Core Duo moniker, has features that aren't being exposed to the consumer. Intel's Sossaman is the key, and Sossaman is the codename for an ultra low voltage Yonah to be shipped under the Xeon brand, into the server and workstation space. And it transpires that Sossaman supports iAMD64, er, sorry, 'EM64T', symmetric multi-processing with another Sossaman Xeon, and hardware virtualisation. Intel's implementation of the 64-bit extension to x86, SMP and hardware VT are all missing from the official specs of Intel Core Duo consumer processors, despite...

Server virtualization and cost reduction are Red Hat customers' top wants today, says Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. His team plans to deliver both by delivering commoditized virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (RHEL5), the company's upcoming new Linux distribution release. What close-to-release technologies does Red Hat have in the works? Brian Stevens: We're in the middle of our development cycle for our next major release. When you build a major release, you have the opportunity to write to do more compelling technology solutions. What's driving IT is right now is getting ready for the commoditization of virtualization solutions....

Microsoft's row with Korean regulators could boost Linux in Asia, the region's first listed Linux developer told vnunet.com today. "It should definitely have a positive public relations impact for us," said Nobu Okada, chief financial officer at Turbolinux, a Japan-based Linux developer that carried out a successful IPO in September. Microsoft said that it might stop selling Windows in Korea if regulators demand a rewrite of the operating system's code to remove certain features. As regulators from the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) met to discuss a ruling in an antitrust case aimed at Microsoft, the president of Microsoft Korea,...

VMware is getting ready to follow up on its VMware Player with a free server product for Linux and Windows. On Monday, EMC subsidiary VMware will release a beta of VMware Server that it calls an "entry-level virtualization product" to partition x86 and x86-64 servers into multiple virtual machines. Unlike the VMware Player, which has limited features compared to the desktop-oriented VMware Workstation, VMware Server will be a full-featured product that is capable of creating virtual machines and includes monitoring features and support for Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) and virtual SMP -- which allows the virtual machine to present multiple...

Video Demonstration: Linux on an iPod In his recent feature Get the most out of an old iPod, my co-editor Adam mentioned installing Linux on your iPod. This may seem like a crazy thing to do, but YouTube member greg1717 posted a video of his iPod running Linux in action, and it looks damn cool. After the jump, check out a video of browsing photos, playing video and playing games all on a 3G iPod.

Thursday February 02, 2006 (03:01 PM GMT) By: Brian L. Shaver Poker is everywhere nowadays, from television to books to poker rooms popping up in almost every casino -- and of course, you can play poker online. Unfortunately, many of the most popular sites say they require Windows. However, as with most software strings that bind you to a particular proprietary operating system, these bonds are easily cut. Looking to improve my game but frustrated by some sites' lack of support for Linux clients, I sent an email to the support for PokerStars, one of the first online gaming sites...

Linus Torvalds, father of the Linux kernel, has fleshed out his unhappiness with GPLv3 in three recent posts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Torvalds previously stated that the kernel will remain under the licensing terms of GPLv2. Yesterday, Tovalds offered his opinion as to where the battle over DRM should take place: I would suggest that anybody who wants to fight DRM practices seriously look at the equivalent angle. If you create interesting content, you can forbid that _content_ to ever be encrypted or limited. In other words, I personally think that the anti-DRM clause is much...

The System Designer allows you to design a Linux system profile which can be downloaded onto a single network install image. When inserted into a target system, the boot image will automatically build the system per your design -- all hands free, all via the network, no additional media required.

Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business - desktop software. A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as 'Goobuntu'. Google has confirmed it is working on a desktop linux project called Goobuntu, but declined to supply further details, including what the project is for. It's possible that it's just one of the toys Googleplex engineers play with on Fridays, when they get time off from buffing the search engine code...

In an exclusive interview on Friday, infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick told Tectonic that, given the choice between finding security vulnerabilities in closed and open source, he'd prefer to attack an open source environment. “Open source would be easier [to hack],” admits ex-hacker turned security consultant Mitnick. “It's less work.” Mitnick says that open source software is easier to analyse for security holes, since you can see the code. Proprietary software, on the other hand, requires either reverse engineering, getting your hands on illicit copies of the source code, or using a technique called “fuzzing”. Fuzzing means putting fake data –...

Sun is keener than ever to port Linux to its new multicore T1 chip, even if it's not expected to happen for six to nine months. The company has made T1 servers available to Linux developers and is working with unnamed Linux distributors to develop the port. And while a port may be completed this year, it will be a while before Linux on T1 appears in production environments; application certification and support will be needed as well. Mike Splain, chief technologist for Sun’s Scalable Systems Group, believes Linux running on the company’s eight-core chip will open up new options...

Linus Torvalds has weighed in on the debate over the draft of version 3 of the GPL in a post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) this afternoon. Torvalds says that the Linux kernel "in general" has always been covered under version 2 of the GPL, and that that isn't going to change. Torvalds made the statement on the LKML to clarify the version of the GPL covering the Linux kernel. While many GPLed projects include the clause, "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version," which would allow anyone to license code under the...

Red Hat representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week that the company plans to add support for Apple's new Intel Macs to its popular distribution. Fedora and several other commonly used Linux distributions support the PowerPC architecture used by Apple in the past, and Red Hat wants to ensure that its software will continue to run on new Apple hardware in the future. The current impediment is the Extensible Firmware Interface, a relatively new BIOS replacement designed by Intel that is not yet commonly used or widely supported. Linux EFI support already exists in the form of elilo, a special version...