Free Software Linux

Enjoy the rest of our videos on the Novell Video Youtube channel.

Enjoy,
RossB

What happens when you treat the IT department badly? Click below to find out… Click on the video to watch it or just go to our Youtube channel and enjoy the other fun stuff we have! Enjoy, RossB

I was watching a mashup of the godfather movie on youtube and pretending to work when I found this cartoon, and I’m still chuckling about it…

No disrespect to Dilbert, XKCD, Joy of Tech or UserFriendly, but my new tech-cartoon love is Noise to Signal.  Why?  You may ask, here’s a sample… Beware, as you follow this link back to Rob’s blog and see the rest, I’d not be drinking or eating anything, unless you have a CPR-trained person nearby.  Like my reaction after reading the below cartoon….

Wow, I really liked this article, it had me alternatively laughing and shivering over the uses people have made of Microsoft’s Flagship product. From the article: After all these years I am willing to admit that Microsoft has won the desktop and server wars. Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent. Read More.

As a service to our readers whose first language is other than English, I’ve added the Yahoo Translate function to the site, it’s in the sidebar right below the Categories. All you have to do is select your preferred language and it will translate the entire page, including all current posts on that page. Enjoy, RossB

The Situation Ok, so you know that currently SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 defaults to GNOME as the desktop, a move that garnered a few cranky folks from the KDE [KC]amp, but one that was easily understood when you realized that most corporations really needed to have a default, that way they didn’t have to stall their testing to make a decision about what Linux Desktop standard they would support. openSUSE 11.0 doesn’t force such a choice, you have several options, none is selected by default, it’s like being in line at Starbucks and having to decide if you want a twist of lemon in your half-caf, double-decaf.

Simon’s a great guy, so I almost couldn’t quote this article this way, but the headline won out… From the article: Many open source developers remain sceptical of Sun because their memories of the company focus on Sun’s interactions with the community in 2001/2002, which Sun’s chief open source officer Simon Phipps concedes was a period where Sun “screwed up”. Speaking in a recent interview with Builder AU, Phipps explained the situation in which Sun finds itself. “Open source developers have been much more sceptical of Sun, a lot of open source developers don’t remember the fact that Sun was pretty much the first open source start-up in 1982. “All they can remember is what happened in 2001/2002 when, to be quite frank with you, we screwed up. We alienated a large group of open source developers by the attitudes we had of the community back then,” said Phipps.

What?  Give Up My Precious Windows? Fancy yourself a crusader? Think Green all the time? That’s going to help with the environment, but do you want to make a real difference in the world of computing and the Internet? Then uninstall Windows and install Linux. No. Seriously. Oh you’re probably saying “It’s those silly Linux guys bashing Microsoft again”, and normally it’d be true. I’ve been known to tweak the nose of our loyal opposition/beloved partner now and then, but this time it’s truly different.  I recommend people to get off of Consumer Desktop Windows for the same reason I also recommend seatbelts and stopping smoking.  It’s not IF you’ll have a problem, it’s WHEN. A Little History - What’s a BotNet?

From the “Not Linux or Open Source, but good to know” department comes this little screed on trying to meet with people for important meetings in multiple timezones, organizations and calendaring programs. —————————— Scenario:  Try to schedule users for a meeting who are in a) Provo b) Waltham c) Nurenberg d) France.  Mix includes 3 companies, 4 operating system choices and 3 calendaring programs/standards.  Wackiness ensues, as they say in the sitcom biz. Enter meeting organizers such as  When is Good, Doodle and TimeBridge.  The basic premise is that you go to the scheduling software site and create a meeting and paint or select your available times, and then the site sends you the meeting URL so you can have all the other people select from the times you propose.

There’s a fairly funny and irony-splattered article in BusinessReviewOnline that takes some exception with the latest Aberdeen Group State of the Market Research Report, asking why companies like Symantec aren’t above companies like Skype, etc. Anyway, Novell came in 48th, a respectable showing, and since the author is taking exception to the orderings of the report, then I’m sure Novell ranks much higher as a result. Enjoy, RossB

Hey, they wrote the headline, not me.  From the article: It is time to get serious about this multi-core thing. For years, I have dreaded the day when the computing world hits the parallel wall. As I have said many times in the past, multi-core is parallel computing and parallel programming is hard, expensive, and in some cases non-portable. It adds another dimension of complexity to writing software. There is no quick fix and no solution on the horizon that addresses this issue. The computer industry is now facing a huge challenge — how to transition software to multi-core platforms. No amount of marketing or wishful thinking will help. Trust me on this one. I have been neck deep in parallel computing for 20 years. The parallel software issue is real and it is standing in front of us. Read More.

Vista was released not long ago, and has been a somewhat unrousing success, mostly due to the many ways that Microsoft counts their market share, and multitude of hostage-like OEM agreements that flood the market with Vista even if nobody seems to really want it. Now they are already planning to make a follow-on to this unpopular flop, and it’s called Windows 7. ??? I don’t know about you, but to me it seems like Microsoft’s consumer products have had more names than a B-movie method actor trying to get their first big break. Lets recap the naming cycles of Microsoft Windows consumer products, there’s a trend here, mostly that when Microsoft can’t predict what year an OS will come out, they revert to Proper Nouns in the naming scheme: