The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
particletree – The Importance of RSS
This essay started out as an explanation for Google’s foray into personal portal pages, but morphed into “a comprehensive breakdown of the state of RSS, taxonomies, advertising, and how it relates to the future of Google.” What follows is the result of several months of observation, notes and contemplation.
Good article. Raises the question: are RSS subscriptions the next search? I guess I better get to work on my social aggregator…
Microsoft offers three ‘critical’ patches in monthly security update – Computerworld
“In its monthly security bulletin update, Microsoft said the three critical patches should be applied immediately to guard against remote attackers being able to take complete control of a user’s compute“
InformationWeek > New Linux Release > Linux Fans Greet New Kernel Release, Version 2.6.11.12 > June 14, 2005
“For users of the kernel, the more interesting feature may be the addition of Xen, which is a virtual machine monitor, which enables multiple operating system images to execute concurrently on the same platform. Xen is included with the 2.6.11.12 kernel as a standard configuration option, meaning it doesn’t have to be added in manually via a cumbersome series of packages and patches.“
Windows to Linux: A Beginner’s Startup Guide – www.reallylinux.com “If you have any experience with Windows, the switch to Linux will be relatively simple. Truly, the biggest challenge is to find the tools and applications you need in Linux. This beginner HOW-TO article will hopefully give you plenty of ideas how to access those key tools and how they relate to Windows.“
This is a good article for those about to chase the penguin:) It includes links to a number of other good pieces on transitioning to Linux and using the applications you will find on the Linux desktop.
Sun releasing OpenSolaris technologies via open source | InfoWorld | News | 2005-06-13 | By Paul Krill
“OpenSolaris will run on Intel (Profile, Products, Articles) x86 and 64-bit AMD Opteron systems as well as on Sun’s Sparc hardware. Sun hopes to leverage the operating system by offering support packages. The company also is hopeful that seeding the market with OpenSolaris will boost demand for its portfolio of other products, Goguen said.“
When released, OpenSolaris will be available here.
Slashdot | Gentoo Founder on his way to Redmond
“Recently former founder of Gentoo Linux, Daniel Robbins, has managed to procure employment with Microsoft. Robbins describes his position as “helping Microsoft to understand Open Source and community-based projects.” Seemingly there’s no scandals as Robbins managed to finalize the transfer of all Gentoo’s IP to the Gentoo Foundation, Inc.”
BetaNews | MSN Blocks ‘Forbidden Speech’ in Blogs
“Following the lead of competitors Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has blocked the use of words such as “democracy” and “human rights” in some of its services for Chinese users – including its Spaces blogs. The move is likely to appease the Chinese government, which has strongly urged Web sites to self-censor themselves.“
OK, I get the part about needing to follow the local laws of a country, but come on. The scary part is that this could set a corporate precedent for bowing to governmental pressure to censor speech on the web even in a America. Suppose our government decides that certain words or phases needn’t be written on the web. Who will stand up to them to demand our rights?
NewsForge | Building a Linux virtual server
“With the explosive growth of the Internet, the workload on servers providing Web, email, and media services has increased greatly. More and more sites are being challenged to keep up with the growing demands and are employing several techniques to avoid overloading their servers. Building a scalable server on a cluster of computers is one of the solutions that is being effectively put to use. With such a cluster, the increasing requests can be easily managed by simply adding one or more new servers to the existing cluster as required. In this article we will look at setting up one such scalable, network load-balancing server cluster using a virtual server via the Linux Virtual Server Project.“
freshmeat.net: Project details for OS3Grid
OS3Grid is a Javascript component that allows users to create and use spreadsheet-like grids on a Web site. It is both flexible and powerful, with a rich set of features and an easy to use API for the developer. OS3Grid works well with Mozilla 1.6 , Internet Explorer 5.5 , and FireFox.
Linux Adoption Stalls, Study Says – Yahoo! News
“Linux’s strongest workload gains were in the smallest and largest organizations, while Windows gained workload fastest in the midsize companies, Cowen said. Windows, however, gained workload faster than Linux in all but the smallest companies.“
Seems like ‘Dawn of the Point-and-Click SysAdmin’. Let’s face it, it is faster and easier to deploy more Windows servers than it is Linux (or Unix for that matter). Does that make Windows better, more stable, more secure, less expensive? No, just faster and easier. Microsoft has made great strides in the educational arena, seeing that its products get lots of favorable attention in the training of new sysAdmins. If your background is in Windows, deploying and managing any other OS, especially Linux, is daunting. Nobody wants all the work of the extra work. So, more Windows:)