Operating Systems

We are constantly manipulated by statistics, some from the government, some from vendors, often from those we trust. However, sometimes those parties are not worthy of that trust. Sometimes they are being manipulated themselves and so the figures they present can be dangerously misleading. Given ho...

In a move to keep up with the competition, IBM on Monday introduced a free version of its DB2 database product. Big Blue hopes to win the favor of more software developers in smaller companies and projects. The "express" version provides the same core data server features as DB2 Universal Database E...

In recent days Massachusetts has softened its tough stance on what file formats it will store its documents in -- a stance that placed it squarely at loggerheads with Microsoft -- but, according to one state legislator, the software giant should not start breathing easy yet. The policy adopted by th...

IBM and Sun Microsystems are apparently banding together to spur adoption of the OpenDocument platform, a standard that is seen by many as one of the true threats to Microsoft's dominance of the office productivity and document management niche. Executives from each of the technology companies have ...

OpenOffice.org 2.0, the first release of the open-source productivity suite in two years, made its debut today, complete with major renovations. The OpenOffice.org Project, an international community of volunteers and sponsors banded together to support and promote OpenOffice.org, is behind the soft...

Microsoft is streamlining its Shared Source Initiative, cutting seven of its 10 templates in an effort to simplify its licenses governing source code releases. The software giant said the Microsoft Permissive License, Microsoft Community License, and Microsoft Reference License are short and easy to...

Dell yesterday began peddling its latest PC without an operating system. The computer is designed for consumers who plan to install open-source software instead of commercial tools and platforms. Dubbed the Dimension E510n PC, the computer comes with a blank hard drive and a copy of the FreeDOS oper...

Technology writer Robert X. Cringely and PBS TV on Tuesday began offering a Web-exclusive hour of tech talk, appropriately titled NerdTV. Although it may seem like a giant step toward TV on the computer, analysts don't see a significant trend toward Internet protocol TV, or IPTV, among mainstream co...

The U.S. government is again excluding non-Microsoft Internet browsers, as Hurricane Katrina victims seeking to file claims with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) may only do so with Internet Explorer 6.0 or above. Previously, the U.S. Copyright Office came under fire last month when it...

IBM Research will turn over its data search technology to the open source community, the company said today. The Unstructured Information Management Architecture searches store data not through keywords, but by analyzing the data within documents to see if they fit the concepts and facts the user is...

The idealism behind the Mozilla Foundation -- established in 2003 as a non-profit corporation to promote open-source software -- is giving way this week to financial realism: The company has announced that it is launching a for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corp., to develop, market and distribute ...

Oracle announced it's working to allow developers to use the open source PHP scripting language to work with its 10g database. The company and Zend, which was founded by the writers of PHP, will release Zend Core for Oracle some time in the third quarter. The scripting engine is designed to ease the...

OPINION

Open Source Meets Capitalism

At the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week, technology entrepreneurs gathered to discuss "open source capitalism." This conference theme demonstrates how the Open Source (OS) community is beginning to replace its corporate-hating mindset with a profit-loving meme, aiming to c...

Opera Software this week released a beta version of the next Opera browser for the desktop. The new version includes scalable vector graphics (SVG), which automatically scales any Web page to fit a user's screen. "We believe SVG will enter mainstream Web design in the future and we are very pleased ...

I mentioned last week that I was expecting the other shoe to drop this week at the Game Developers Conference 2005. That shoe was the next generation of the Xbox game machine, and it dropped like an atomic bomb. The collateral damage from the resulting explosion could be extensive. It may even ta...

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