Here’s an excellent article on living with Linux from New Zealand’s PC World magazine.
If you’ve wondered about running Linux in the past then I’d suggest having a read of it, it concentrates on what the experience is like, as well as looking at a functional comparison between OpenOffice.org and Microsofts Office XP.
The Ars Technica website has picked up on an article in the journal Nature about a pre-print of a paper written by two theoretical physicists from the UK on the arXiv.org e-Print archive that includes a mathematical model about why Open Source projects can inherently fix problems quicker than a Closed Source project for the same parameters.
The nub of their argument is that it is the frequent release of projects and the slew of bug reports that come back from these rapid releases that result in this effect.
Their conclusions seem to be:
Whilst the paper has a number of assumptions (they acknowledge them and proposes further work to confirm or refute their validity) it is an interesting model that could inform developers on either side of the fence on how to speed up bug fixing. This can only be good for everyone.
As most people involved with Linux and who aren’t hiding under a rock will know, SCO have begun legal action against IBM over alleged trade secret breaches in the US. They’ve also been bad mouthing the Linux community and claiming that code from Linux has been taken from their UNIX codebase. To this end LinuxTag and various German Linux companies have obtained an injunction against SCO in Germany to prevent them from repeating allegations which they refuse to publically prove.
Anyway, one of the latest developments in this have been quite interesting, in that Microsoft went and bought a UNIX license from SCO. The conspiracy theorists went ballistic over this, saying that MS were essentially funding SCO to damage Linux.
In the light of all this, SCO’s recent filing of it’s form 10-Q (a US Securities and Exchange Commission document, legally binding) makes for very interesting reading. The brief notes are:
For more info read on….
Well Microsoft have done it again.
They’ve bought out a Romanian Anti-Virus software company, most of whos business is making software for Linux gateways to protect vulnerable Windows systems from virus attack.
Guess what’s the first casualty of the takeover ? Yup, the anti-virus range.
So much for the anti-trust judgement..
Sources:
Sad news today, I
read on the BBC News Website that one of my old physics professors, Phil Williams at Aberystwyth died suddenly at the age of 64.
Very sad, he was a real character and a very likeable person, one of the most approachable people there (no offence to the other staff!). He was very much a Welshman and was strongly involved in Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales for many many years. Most of this I didn’t know until I read his obituary on the BBC, but I did hear that he was planning to stand as a candidate for the European Parliament (but I don’t think he got elected) and I was very glad to hear that he did managed to get elected to the Welsh National Assembly.
Diolch yn fawr Phil, your self-described “arm waving” explanations of Cosmology & your saxaphone playing were great fun, have a good rest now.
It’s been some time, but we’re back on air again. Numerous hardware failures (including several dieing hard disks and two completely dead PC’s) meant quite a bit of time off air, and some lost email.
We also lost email when the CGI script my webhosting company uses to administer the mail system corrupted my settings, resulting in the deletion of all users and my not being able to log in again to fix it. Eventually they got around to blanking the account and I had to start again from scratch.
Anyway, all that seems to be behind us now, so here’s hoping luck will hold for at least a little while!
Donna’s CD is now available on CDBaby.com at http://www.cdbaby.com/donnaw/ !
CDBaby is a website that sells CD’s by independent artists without needing a record company contract, thereby allowing them to earn far more in royalties from a CD than they could through a contract. A worthy project well worth supporting.
Wow! ABC Illawarra (our local radio statio) played the song “Shoes” from Donna’s CD “Nobody Nowhere”! We were over the moon when we heard it, dancing around the house and Donna was singing along to it, something she’d had recurring dreams about long before she ever thought she could make a CD!
A very big Thank You! to presenter
Tony Arthur at ABC Illawarra for playing it and literally making a dream come true!
If you want to hear bits of the music there are samples on the webpage for the CD and you can
order the CD (and Donna’s books) from her publishers.
OK folks, the
new photo gallery is now up and running, with all the photos from the old one copied over. The captions from the old photos still need to be copied though.
The Australian Federal Government is holding a
seminar to “address general OSS issues with a focus on Linux based operating systems and applications” on February 18th 2003 at the National Press Club in Canberra.
Read on for more