Archive

Even before we could send recorded sound reliably over the Internet and a file-sharing revolution set the music industry in an uproar, the large size of digital audio files was causing headaches. A minute of raw stereo sound at CD quality -- or 16-bit, 44.1 KHz sampling -- occupies 10.5 MB on a hard...

Like other governments and corporations seeking to mix yesterday's IT investments with today's emerging technology, the state of Massachusetts has directed its IT staff to begin adopting open standards and open-source software. The move mirrors other government and enterprise initiatives that have I...

In an interview with Bill Joy headlined "Joy after Sun," Fortune Magazine mentions Joy's famous "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" article from Wired, which concluded that "robotics, nanotech and genetic engineering were emerging so quickly that, if we weren't careful, they could endanger the human sp...

What is the world's most widely used operating system? It's not Windows, Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices. The T-Engine Forum, a project that counts ...

On most workday mornings, my e-mail contains a newsletter promising "unbiased opinion" -- an editorial oxymoron whose intent is probably to deny the presence of commercial advocacy. We tend to think of bias as necessarily negative, but in fact a bias is just a predisposition to believe or disbelieve...

Both VeriTest on Microsoft's behalf and IBM have recently issued reports on running Ziff Davis Media's NetBench performance benchmark on mainframe Linux. Overall, it appears that Microsoft reports better mainframe performance than IBM does. These results might seem surprising enough to those unfamil...

A looming October 14th deadline could result in a widening of SCO Group's legal assault on Linux and distributors of the open-source operating system as the Lindon, Utah-based company mulls plans to pull another Unix license, this time from SGI. SCO laid the groundwork for the move -- which would ex...

Calling it a "migration product" intended to take desktop users away from Windows and toward 64-bit computing and the new 2.6 Linux kernel, SuSE Linux announced its 9.0 desktop update will be available next month. The German software maker said SuSE Linux 9.0 will provide support for both 32- and 64...

Sun Microsystems has announced that its Java Desktop System will support AMD's new Athlon 64 processor. Marketing the JDS as "the first viable alternative to Windows in 15 years," Sun hopes to draw customers with the feel of a familiar desktop environment and a price tag that is significantly less t...

Apple this week released the latest source code for its Darwin open-source project -- Darwin 6.7 and 6.8 -- which corresponds to the Mac OS X operating system and its latest versions, 10.2.7 and 10.2.8. Among the most prominent of open-source projects from Apple, Darwin is based on FreeBSD 4.4 and i...

In recent weeks, several sources have portrayed Linux users and the community of open-source software developers as fanatics. This caricature seems now to be the most prevalent alternative to the equally unflattering images of Linux users as computer geeks or pizza-consuming programmers. For many, t...

In response to attacks on the Linux operating system launched by SCO, which claims its own Unix source code was incorporated into the open-source software, Hewlett-Packard is indemnifying its Linux customers against any potential SCO litigation. The move comes after SCO, which has sued IBM for $3 bi...

You might have been given the impression from reading another column published on this network that all of the open-source community is openly against Microsoft and wants you to move right away to GNU or Linux software. The simple truth is that the open-source community was and is quite happy doing ...

Conventional wisdom in the computing world suggests that Linux must be less expensive than Windows because it is available, at least in most cases, for free. Meanwhile, prevailing opinion also suggests that Linux is more secure than Microsoft's server software -- largely because Microsoft has been i...

Asia's PDA markets have long been dominated by local players that have developed their own proprietary operating systems, with support for local languages serving as one of their strongest selling points. But Palm and Microsoft have targeted the Asian PDA market, and regional players increasingly ar...