linuxworld

EIC Squared: Olympics, LinuxWorld, and Google cookies

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about the big story of this month--the Olympics. Microsoft and NBC are hoping that their servers and software can handle the load as the Silverlight code (Microsoft's competitor to Adobe's Flash) takes its maiden voyage at NBCOlympics.com. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is advising that people traveling to the Olympics leave their phones, laptops, and other digital equipment at home. "Somebody with a wireless device in China should expect it to be compromised," said Joel Brenner, the U.S. … Read more

Zimbra officially embraced by Ubuntu

Zimbra, the open-source e-mail software that Yahoo acquired for $350 million last year, is officially coming to Ubuntu Linux.

Coinciding with this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Zimbra has announced a partnership with Ubuntu parent company Canonical.

Ubuntu users have been able to access Zimbra for the past year. But now, the e-mail software will be in the Ubuntu Partner Repository, providing easy access to both offline and online Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail, and any IMAP or POP e-mail accounts. Zimbra also offers document and spreadsheet functions, as well as mashup features with services like Flickr, Amazon.… Read more

Open-source gadgets at LinuxWorld

Attending LinuxWorld might be a first for us here at Crave. But I did want to head over to the expo, held at the Moscone Center here in San Francisco, to see Shuttle's latest mini desktop, the KPC K4800, live and in person.

Turns out there was more for us to see than we thought--bonus! Along with its just-released $299 mini desktop, Shuttle also had the $199 K4500 on display at the Foresight Linux booth. (Foresight actually created a custom OS just for Shuttle machines.) The KPC 4800 was hooked up to a new display Shuttle is offering.

The … Read more

The best news Linux could ever receive: LinuxWorld's a bust

The latest proof that Linux has conquered the corporate data center crowd: LinuxWorld is a dud.

There was a time when LinuxWorld was one of--if not the-- hottest technology conferences around. This show used to be jammed. The curious would hang on the latest pronouncement from Linus Torvalds. Jon Maddog Hall would hold court on why Linux was headed for "world domination" and if we were really lucky, Eric (Cathedral and the Bazaar) Raymond might muse about how Linux was as American as, well, handgun ownership.

But the real attraction was the novelty of a technology that was … Read more

LinuxWorld showing its true colors?

I had to laugh when this error came up today when accessing LinuxWorld's website:

www.LinuxWorldExpo.com: Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a138f' 'brandGlobalXML.selectSingleNode(...)' is null or not an object /live/template1.asp, line 42

To be fair, it's just a conference company that organizes a wide range of conferences, not all of them focused on open source. Indeed, IDG also runs (or ran) the website for OSBC and ran it on a Windows infrastructure, too.

In both cases, it's still mildly ironic to see IDG making money with open source...but paying money to Microsoft.

Stateless computing to become core to cloud computing?

As companies glom onto cloud computing, stateless computing is likely to emerge as a core tenant within the cloud and one that can deliver cost savings, predicted the chief technology architect for Merrill Lynch.

But to get to the state of stateless computing, companies will need to change the way they view their hardware needs and how they store and access the information, said Jeffrey Birnbaum of Merrill Lynch, who served as a keynote speaker Tuesday at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

"Stateless computing isn't about having no state. It's kind of a misnomer. It's about where … Read more

Open-source electronic voting

It is pretty much agreed that electronic voting systems need to provide a paper receipt for auditing, but what if instead the electronic voting system printed out a unique ballot that could be scanned and tallied before the voter left the polling station?

On Thursday Alan Dechert, president and CEO of the Open Voting Consortium, Brian J. Fox and Parker Abercrombie of The Okori Group, and Brent Turner, met with CNET News and offered a peek at a different kind of electronic voting system to be demonstrated live at this year's LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

Currently private companies provide … Read more

Attacking Web 2.0 at LinuxWorld

At LinuxWorld today, SPI Dynamic's senior security engineer, Matt Fisher, talked about the vulnerabilities of Web 2.0. His talk, although not much different from that of his colleagues Billy Hoffman and Brian Sullivan last week at Black Hat, offered some new examples of what criminals are doing online, armed with little more than a desktop browser. Cross-site scripting attacks are the No. 1 threat, according to the Mitre organization, in part because they are so easy to do.

In particular, Fisher singled out social-networking sites. Because the site depends on user content, the site allows users to upload … Read more

Interview: The state of open-source business in 2007

Don Marti very generously gave me an hour of his time last week, and this podcast is the result. We talked about a range of things, including:

The pull of open-source applications for open-source infrastructure; Microsoft's patent deals; The open-source sales cycle (with data on how long it takes for Alfresco to close deals, why people buy what they can get for free, and other interesting data); The end of proprietary software as we know it; and Other interesting things.

Don is the master editor, so you don't hear some of my goof-ups. But I thought he asked … Read more