Free Republic

Ex-Microsoftie says that Windows 7 is doomed and Linux, free software, will ultimately dominate.A lot of open source advocates like to rage against the machine at Microsoft, but when a former Microsoft Research employee says that Windows 7 won't stop Linux from market domination, that's an opinion to note. Keith Curtis, author of the book After the Software Wars, says just that. But he goes further. He thinks Microsoft and its customers would be better off if the company ditched Windows and instead built its own version of the Linux operating system. These topics came up yesterday during my interview...

My logs show that only a paltry 3.6% of readers have reached Complete Enlightenment. The bad news is that 83.1% of you live a hellish existence and suffer regular torments and agony, much of it self-imposed. How I weep for you! (The remaining 13.3% are in Limbo, including the 2 jokers last month who logged on using a PlayStation 3.) There are many flavors of Linux, but I recommend Ubuntu—one of those trendy African words meaning “warm fuzzy”. Log on to the site to see pictures of multicultural people holding hands and grinning weirdly, just like the photos appearing on...

Unix code claimant SCO Group has jettisoned its controversial captain, Darl McBride, as part of the company's latest scheme to emerge from bankruptcy. The serially litigious SCO's executive ousting was revealed in a filing today with US regulators, although corresponding paperwork gives McBride's actual dismissal date as October 14. The decision to remove McBride was done under the auspices of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy trustee assigned to SCO by the US Justice Department. That leaves COO, Jeff Hunsaker, CFO, Ken Nielsen, and General Counsel, Ryan Tibbitts grappling for the helm. According to the filings with the US Securities and Exchange...

An enterprising PC user has been refunded on his copy of Windows, after he rejected Microsoft's operating system and license Reg Reader Graeme Cobbett was paid $115 (£70.34) by Dell after he bought a Studio 1555 notebook with Windows Vista already loaded and complete with a free upgrade to Windows 7. Rather than accept the Windows 7 upgrade, though, Graeme installed Ubuntu-based Linux Mint instead. Why reject Windows 7, an operating system Microsoft's been pushing ahead of Thursday's launch as making PC users happy again, after the misery of Windows Vista? Graeme, who outlined his reasons - with his experiences...

An investigative series I've been writing about organized cyber crime gangs stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses has generated more than a few responses from business owners who were concerned about how best to protect themselves from this type of fraud.

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company's Linux-based Millennium Exchange software. I saw this move coming. While the LSE never...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., have for the first time successfully demonstrated the ability to run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines. The achievement will allow cyber security researchers to more effectively observe behavior found in malicious botnets, or networks of infected machines that can operate on the scale of a million nodes. Botnets, said Sandia’s Ron Minnich, are often difficult to analyze since they are geographically spread all over the world. Sandia scientists used virtual machine (VM) technology and the power of its Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration....

Linux runs on a tiny share of corporate desktops, but open source partisans say the upcoming release of Windows 7 and the popularity of lightweight netbook PCs could help it gain ground -- even in Windows shops. Canonical Ltd.'s Ubuntu distribution is a favorite among many IT pros who would like to convert the end users they support. Canonical does not release user data, but Gerry Carr, the head of platform marketing for the company, said that whenever a new version of Windows becomes available -- especially in the case of Vista -- interest increases. "Vista was a big push...

A security researcher has discovered a cluster of infected Linux servers that have been corralled into a special ops botnet of sorts and used to distribute malware to unwitting people browsing the web. Each of the infected machines examined so far is a dedicated or virtual dedicated server running a legitimate website, Denis Sinegubko, an independent researcher based in Magnitogorsk, Russia, told The Register. But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they've also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware. "What we see here is a long awaited...

According to a leak from a BestBuy employee, Microsoft is initiating a sort of "Anti-Linux Training" course for the employees, and those who take part in the said training are rewarded with a copy of Windows 7 for only ten dollars. The leaked screenshots of the campaign show Microsoft's comparison of its own system with an obscure "Linux" and how Windows is better in every way including security, "free downloads", and software and hardware compatibility. When Microsoft said a few weeks ago that its biggest threat was Linux, I suppose a campaign such as this was to be expected. We've...

The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway. The Plasma desktop shell comes with a new default theme called Air, which looks a lot less heavy than the previous Oxygen theme. Plasma has also been improved performance-wise, and it takes up less...

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

SCO's true situation is here, in the latest 8K: Item 1.03 Bankruptcy or Receivership. On September 14, 2007, The SCO Group, Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiary, SCO Operations, Inc. (collectively, the “Debtors”), filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (the “Bankruptcy Court”). The Debtors’ Chapter 11 cases are being jointly administered under Case No. 07-11337(KG). On July 27, 2009, the Bankruptcy Court held a hearing and took evidence on cross-motions consisting of (a) the Debtor’s Motion for the Sale of Property Outside the...

Is security a sword of Damocles hanging over Linux, just waiting for its popularity to reach critical mass? That's one persistent argument in the Linux vs. Windows debates, but it's just wrong, according to those who know Linux well. For reasons both technological and behavioral, they say, Linux really is more secure. "If the anti-malware industry has anything to offer GNU/Linux," challenges blogger Robert Pogson, "let them step up."Among all the reasons geeks choose Linux, security is often near the top of the list.And no wonder -- personal preferences aside on all the other many relevant issues, there's plenty of...

From Slashdot: "Tavis Ormandy and Julien Tinnes have discovered a severe security flaw in all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures. 'Since it leads to the kernel executing code at NULL, the vulnerability is as trivial as it can get to exploit: an attacker can just put code in the first page that will get executed with kernel privileges.'" Note: this is a local exploit, not remote. Looks like the fix for this is in the current tree and is being run through the standard processes.  The above link includes all the gory details.

I think we can finally put a certain myth to rest that's been circling around the web for a while now. Microsoft often claimed that netbooks running Linux saw higher return rates than those running Windows, but according to Dell, this is utter nonsense. Todd Finch, Dell senior product marketing manager, spoke at OpenSource World, and in his talk he made it quite clear that Dell's Ubuntu netbooks see no higher return rates than the Windows variants, calling it a 'non-issue'. "They are making something of nothing," he said of Microsoft's claims.

Microsoft has long pooh-poohed Linux as a desktop competitor. But a recent filing with the Security and Exchange Commission has the company admitting for the first time that Linux represents a significant threat to Windows. TechFlash reports that in Microsoft's recent annual filing with the SEC, it listed for the first time Ubuntu's maker Canonical, and Linux distributor Red Hat as competitors to its Client division, which makes Windows. Previously, TechFlash says, Red Hat was listed but only as a competitor to its Business and Server & Tools divisions. In its annual filing, Microsoft warns that Linux is a threat...

Red Hat Enterprise clone poised to 'die' CentOS airs dirty laundry as admin 'vanishes' Posted in Operating Systems, 30th July 2009 17:40 GMT According to six concerned CentOS developers, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone is poised on the edge of the abyss. In an open letter posted to the CentOS website and the project mailing list, six fellow developers accuse project co-founder Lance Davis of putting the entire project at risk by disappearing from everyday involvement without ceding control to others. "You seem to have crawled into a hole...and this is not acceptable," the letter reads. "Please do not...

So, Microsoft submits 20000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, all licensed under the GPL. Microsoft, who considers Linux a great threat, and once called the GPL a "cancer". Opinions on this one are flying all around us, but what does Linus Torvalds, Linux' benevolent dictator, think about all this?

The first half of 2009 is over and after your summer vacation, you might want to start gearing up for the new distro releases. Once again open source proved that developers collaborating all over the world deliver constant platform improvement. Let’s see what they have in store for us this time.KSplice – Rebootless Kernel UpgradeOne of the arguments I use often when talking about the advantages of using Linux is the fact that you do not have to reboot when installing or upgrading software. Most of the time. Almost every Linux user knows you have to restart your system after...