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Linux and Open Source News for 25th August 2007
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Linux Today News Service
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Source: Linux Today JJMacey: "There are a lot of buzz-words out there and one of those is OpenSource. That means Linux to me. I took the plunge "
Source: Linux Today Blog of Helios: "With the exception of an ant colony and a kibbutz, two percent of the population will fuel and affect the progress of that society "
Source: Linux Today ConsortiumInfo: "As you will recall, the Executive Board (EB) of INCITS, the US voting body on OOXML in the ISO/IEC JTC1, posted two simultaneous, seven day written ballots "
Source: Linux Today Groklaw: "Heise is reporting now that there is an uproar over how the OOXML vote was handled in Germany "
Source: Linux Today Commercial Open Source Software: "How many active and stable projects are really out there ?"
Source: Linux Today Announcement: The second beta of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Galilee, is now available.
Source: Linux Today Seopher: "Everyone loves free software (open source or otherwise) and this list demonstrates quite how many excellent applications can be had for free "
Source: Linux Today Linux.com: "In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave us Mosaic, the first Web browser with a graphical user interface "
Source: Linux Today Linux Brain Dump: "I've been using and blogging about FreeBSD for about five years now, and I have been dabbling in Linux even longer "
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News for nerds, stuff that matters
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Source: Slashdot: Linux buddyglass writes "The majority of Slashdot readers are no doubt appreciative of Linux in the general sense, but I suspect we all have some application or aspect of the platform that we wish were more stable, performant, feature-rich, etc. So my question is: if you were able to devote a 'significant' number of resources (read: high-quality developers) to a particular app or area of the kernel, and were able to set the focus for those resources (stability, performance, new features, etc.), what application or kernel area would you attempt to improve, and what would aspect you focus on improving?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot: Linux RailGunSally writes "I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *nix systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore bean-counter from hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing 'metrics' on absolutely everything from system utilization to paper clip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdot community: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot: Linux jshriverWVU writes to let us know about the release of Wine 0.9.44. Wine is a free implementation of Windows on Unix/Linux. New in this release are: better heuristics for making windows managed; automatic detection of timezone parameters; improvements to the built-in WordPad; better signatures support in crypt32; still more gdiplus functions; and of course lots of bug fixes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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News, reviews and commentary on all aspects of Linux and open-source software, including application servers, communications and database servers.
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Source: eWEEK Linux Opinion: Citrix's XenSource deal could help both Microsoft and open source.
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The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs
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Source: ONLamp.com After reading one of my favorite blogs this morning, it got me thinking about the Zen of Mac. In the article that I linked to, Shannon mentioned that one of his hangups is not using OS X because it isn’t Open Source. The topic of smart people with hangups is very interesting actually and I would love to talk even further about it, but I am going to talk specifically about the Zen of Mac in this post.
Back in 2002, I was a systems administrator for the administration building at a Caltech, and I was solely responsible for providing support for Dr. Baltimore. Dr. Baltimore is smart. He received a Nobel Prize in his 30’s, he went to MIT, and he was the President of Caltech at the time. He is a mac guy, and that is partially why I was hired to do that job, as I have been into Mac computers for quite some time.
For those of you that remember, it was a huge deal to switch from OS 9 to OS X. It was my responsibility to design and build his OS X laptop and make sure that it was an easy transition. When the time came for me to actually deliver the laptop, things worked reasonably well and were intuitive as he would expect them to be. The punchline of this story is when I finally decided to show Dr. Baltimore the terminal. I think I mentioned something like, “One of the nice things about OS X is that it has a terminal and you can do nice things like……”.
The look on his face was priceless. I don’t remember the exact specifics of the conversation, but it was roughly, “Why would I use a terminal, it is a mac, that is the whole point!”. That taught me quite a bit, as here was one of the most successful and intelligent people on planet earth and he “got” Mac. He didn’t want to think about his computer as his thinking time was spent in other areas like making sure Caltech continued to be one of the top Science Universities and doing research on curing AIDS.
That is the Zen of Mac. You don’t think, it just works. As software engineers, systems administrators, or people that are very technical, it can be difficult to just not think about your desktop computer. The reality is that you are more productive on solving your other problems when you don’t think about your computer, it just works.
So as far as I am concerned, even though I work literally all day on linux machines from a shell, my desktop experience is OS X because it just works and I don’t have to think, my thinking can be devoted to solving my problems. Finally, for those people that are switching from a Linux desktop to an OS X computer, I would give this advice. Don’t think about how you used to do it on Linux, just forget what you know and try things out. OS X is designed to be intuitive and effortless. Fighting it to make it do what Linux does is not the proper approach. You must submit your will, relax your mind and float downstream on the white glow of the macbook pro monitor. Once you surrender your desires, and realize that desire leads to suffering you will truly appreciate the mac.
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