Total Members Voted: 50
Well here's what should be going on more often (along meh lines of a unified Linux OS), you make the point disciple that, that would defeat the idea of open development. I beg to differ, I believe that working towards 1 goal by all would benefit of course each developer and each section has to be entitled to express their ideas and meat out the best plans. Its not like we saying develop THIS and NOTHING else... yuh feel is Intel oh wha?Anyways here's where I planned to start off:QuoteRed Hat aims for open-source stack Column Linux distro buys JBoss, sparks M&A actionBy Martin Veitch: Tuesday 11 April 2006, 11:56COULD A THOUSAND predictions that Oracle would buy JBoss be wrong? You betcha. When JBoss founder Marc Fleury signed on the dotted line a few minutes before midnight on Friday, it put a stop to what was becoming a tediously protracted parlour game of predicting who would buy the hot open-source application server firm. Red Hat’s acquisition agreement with JBoss promises to be one of the most interesting deals of a year likely to be heavy with merger and acquisition activity. First of all, these are companies with personality. JBoss founder Marc Fleury is a hoot of course, a younger version of Philippe Kahn with bags of attitude. His story is also a good one. Five years ago he was forced to move in with the parents in law after running out of money and now he is selling his company for up to $420m with a good chunk of it in cash. His blog is often hilarious and the recent entry about his Business Week interview is well worth checking out. As is his surreal take on combining with Red Hat: "Today is the beginning of 'Red'; we are going to wonderland and the rabbit hole keeps on going. Just like the Matrix protagonist wakes up to find 'the real battle', JBoss, Inc. today is stepping up to a bigger challenge by merging with RedHat." Oh, OK then. Red Hat chief Matthew Szulik is also good value with a likeable taste for corny jokes – nothing wrong with that. They should webcast the board meetings and sell subscriptions. Second, Red Hat is clearly building a stack here and the companies that stand to be affected are some of the biggest in the business. HP’s malfunctioning efforts to build a middleware business means that it is largely unaffected but IBM and Sun will be looking at this deal with a little trepidation. JBoss is certainly going to be a lot more credible with big accounts now that it has Red Hat’s capital behind it. Third, the deal is probably going to cause a domino effect. BEA might look more attractive than ever to Oracle and others but open-source middleware firms will too. If not now, then when? Fourth, Red Hat might be glad that business is not a popularity contest. Neither firm has much respect from the open-source militant tendency and lashing them together won’t change matters. Don’t expect any penguins to get hugged. By the way, anybody who thinks that this business of prognosticating the future of technology is easy should look at the InfoWorld link here. There but for the grace of God… µ
Red Hat aims for open-source stack Column Linux distro buys JBoss, sparks M&A actionBy Martin Veitch: Tuesday 11 April 2006, 11:56COULD A THOUSAND predictions that Oracle would buy JBoss be wrong? You betcha. When JBoss founder Marc Fleury signed on the dotted line a few minutes before midnight on Friday, it put a stop to what was becoming a tediously protracted parlour game of predicting who would buy the hot open-source application server firm. Red Hat’s acquisition agreement with JBoss promises to be one of the most interesting deals of a year likely to be heavy with merger and acquisition activity. First of all, these are companies with personality. JBoss founder Marc Fleury is a hoot of course, a younger version of Philippe Kahn with bags of attitude. His story is also a good one. Five years ago he was forced to move in with the parents in law after running out of money and now he is selling his company for up to $420m with a good chunk of it in cash. His blog is often hilarious and the recent entry about his Business Week interview is well worth checking out. As is his surreal take on combining with Red Hat: "Today is the beginning of 'Red'; we are going to wonderland and the rabbit hole keeps on going. Just like the Matrix protagonist wakes up to find 'the real battle', JBoss, Inc. today is stepping up to a bigger challenge by merging with RedHat." Oh, OK then. Red Hat chief Matthew Szulik is also good value with a likeable taste for corny jokes – nothing wrong with that. They should webcast the board meetings and sell subscriptions. Second, Red Hat is clearly building a stack here and the companies that stand to be affected are some of the biggest in the business. HP’s malfunctioning efforts to build a middleware business means that it is largely unaffected but IBM and Sun will be looking at this deal with a little trepidation. JBoss is certainly going to be a lot more credible with big accounts now that it has Red Hat’s capital behind it. Third, the deal is probably going to cause a domino effect. BEA might look more attractive than ever to Oracle and others but open-source middleware firms will too. If not now, then when? Fourth, Red Hat might be glad that business is not a popularity contest. Neither firm has much respect from the open-source militant tendency and lashing them together won’t change matters. Don’t expect any penguins to get hugged. By the way, anybody who thinks that this business of prognosticating the future of technology is easy should look at the InfoWorld link here. There but for the grace of God… µ
Torvalds backs Linux overhaul Squish all bugsBy Nick Farrell: Tuesday 09 May 2006, 09:23THE BRAIN behind the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, has backed calls for an overhaul of the 2.6 version. Yesterday, we reported how Torvalds' number two, Andrew Morton, said that he wanted a bug-fixing cycle because he thought the current version was too buggy. Torvalds told Linux.com that although the story was "somewhat sensationalistic" [is that a word? ed] the worry was real. He said that the Linux teams had not had a "breather" when it comes to development and presumably everyone was suffering from oxygen depravation. He said that it may end up that 2.6.16 becomes that breather so that 2.6 can become more stable. "Otherwise, we may end up just saying, "OK, no new features for 2.6.18" or something, and forcing people to calm down a bit," Torvalds said.
Linux kernel is just not up to scratch Another Andrew Morton exclusiveBy Nick Farrell: Monday 08 May 2006, 15:16 ANDREW MORTON, the Linux lead maintainer and not the confidante of the late Princess of Wales, has made the startling claim that the Linux production kernel has too many defects. Morton told the LinuxTag conference in Wiesbaden, Germany that he was considering drastic action to resolve resolve the number of bugs in the 2.6 kernal. He said that Kernel developers needed to spend more time fixing bugs and he is planning to have an entire cycle dedicated to the task. One problem was that few developers could be arsed working on defects and this was causing problems for those using old computers or peripherals. Part of the reason for this was that many kernel developers are employed by IT companies who are not interested in five year-old peripherals that no-one is selling any more. µ
Microsoft just upped the ante on internal conflict with the release of Vista Beta 2. It boils down to this: The software giant is favoring security and IT controls over end-user productivity. Don't get me wrong, security and IT manageability are very good things. But some of the people actually using the Beta 2 Vista software describe their experience as akin to that of a rat caught in a maze.Business and home users will be nonplussed by the blizzard of protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and "Continue" boxes required by the User Account Controls feature, for example. Networking functions and settings are scattered all over the place. The same is true of what Windows XP calls Display Properties. By default, the main menus (you know, File, Edit, View, etc.) are turned off on Windows Vista folders, Internet Explorer 7 and several other programs and utilities that come with Vista. Listing 20 things you won't like about Windows Vista was unfortunately all too easy. The question is: Why couldn't Microsoft see this coming?
Microsoft gives up on WinFS Brilliant idea turns to vapourBy Nick Farrell: Tuesday 27 June 2006, 13:27SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft is dropping hints that it is giving up on its super-soaraway big idea WinFS.WinFS was originally touted to be one of the pillars that Microsoft Vista was supposed to be built upon and was supposed to revolutionise the way users manage information. The outfit later changed its mind on that one, promising that one day it would be seen as a Vista add-on. According to Quentin Clark, a official Volish blogger, it seems that Microsoft seems to stick the vapourware on the never-never, at least as Vista is concerned. You can tell he is setting people up for a fall when, on this as his bog here, he starts talking in the past tense about the great technical innovations that WinFS created. "The most visible example of this today is the work we are now doing in the next version of ADO.NET for Orcas. The Entities features we are now building in ADO.NET started as things we were building for the WinFS API," Clarke ducks and dives. The Vole has decided to that life is not going to be just about WinFS but make it more general purpose. This means shoving it into SQL and ADO.NET, and not delivering a separate WinFS offering, he bogs.WinFS has been around since it was first touted as an add on to Windows NT upgrade in 1994. It was jettisoned when Vole couldn't get it to work. In those days it was considered that Microsoft's idea of getting file systems to run objects was a bit too ahead of its time. Vista will run a more traditional file system.One of the reasons that Clark has to play down WinFS is that Microsoft made lots of promises that it would appear in the future. In 2003, Gates described it as the Holy Grail. Well they have a nasty habit of being tricky to find too.
Microsoft doesn't yet play games on Vista Games Convention 2006 Duck behind the hypeBy Fuad Abazovic in Leipzig: Friday 25 August 2006, 08:42 WE MANAGED to check some Microsoft's machines here at the games Convention. The firm has its Vista logo all over its boothm, but all the machines that we investigated were running Windows XP.Obviously, it is still not the right time to switch to Vista as things might be not stable for current games. We hope that they can meet the early 2007 schedules. One machine that we managed to take down was showing off the Age of Empires III. That's below, just in front of the Games for Windows Vista logo.
Microsoft dumps another Vista feature 32-bit versions can't play back BluRay and HD-DVDBy Nick Farrell: Friday 25 August 2006, 08:25 SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft has decided that 32-bit versions of Windows Vista will not be able to play back studio-released BluRay and HD-DVD movies.The move has removed yet another promise that Microsoft made about Vista, namely that it would be backward compatible with 32-bit processors. This means that it is almost certain that those who want to use HD-Drives or Blu-Ray and Vista will have to buy new hardware. This is good news for Intel and AMD who will have 64 bit chips available, but not so hot for those who just want install Vista on their old machines.Microsoft’s senior program manager Steve Riley made the announcement at Tech.Ed 2006 in Sydney yesterday. He said that the reason was the Hollywood Studios told Vole that they didn’t want any of their high definition content to play in x32. Hollywood fears all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection. Riley pointed out that most people didn’t have a DVD player that you know can output a proper 1080 line non-interlaced anyway. By the time they do, he said, 64 bit will be mainstream.
I voted the Steups route...cuz from their bungling, I'm fairly certain I don't want it until I have to take it.
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