As the US struggles with a continuing recession, both the private and public sectors are looking for ways to cut or mitigate operating costs, particularly in the arena of information technology.
Starting today, a new coalition of technology industry companies, organizations, and academic institutions will be actively promoting one sure way of cutting IT costs: using open source software and open technology solutions.
The growing popularity of free open source software (FOSS) is a sure sign that consumers and software developers alike are becoming more disenchanted with costly proprietary products. However, the promise of free software can be tarnished when software packages need configuration help and that help proves hard to find. When users have to wade through dozens of forum messages seeking a solution, the FOSS philosophy can turn into a turn-off.
As free software use grows in business, so will the demand for qualified tech help. The demand for open source support specialists is growing at a tremendous rate, according to Kim Weins, senior vice president of products and marketing at OpenLogic.
With interest heating up around Linux on netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs, more and more people are hunting for good word processing software that runs on Linux. Luckily, while a lot of word processing options for Linux have fallen by the wayside, new ones keep springing up, too. Meanwhile, some of the older standbys are picking up features that rival those of Microsoft Word.
The end result is a wide range of choices for Linux across several different categories of software. Whether you want to crank out your master’s thesis or dash off a few quick business letters, you can take your pick from among dozens of different open source word processors, “proprietary” Linux word processors, open source desktop publishing (DTP) programs, and online offerings.
To help users sift through the choices, Linux.com is launching a series of articles about software in these four categories. For starters, we’ll dive into a sampling of five different applications: OpenOffice.org Write; AbiWord; KWord; LYX, and e:doc.
When Microsoft offered more details about Office 2010 earlier this week, The VAR Guy noticed a rather interesting nugget of information involving Microsoft Office for the Web’s anticipated browser support and software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The software giant, it seems, will be giving equal time to Firefox (the open source web browser) and Apple’s Safari. Here’s the scoop.
Linux is gaining momentum and people are starting to switch over to this computer operating system. I have been using GNU/Linux for years and would like to warn you about it. My consciousness wouldn’t allow me not to speak out about the OS. Linux is a free operating system that anyone can download and use.
This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It’s just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.
Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.
For most of this week, prominent Web sites in both South Korea and the United States have been being bombarded by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. At times, these assaults have knocked out multiple major sites. North Korea has been taking the blame for these attacks, but no one has any proof yet. What we do know is that the weapon that’s doing this damage is compromised Windows PCs.
Here we are in 2009, after Windows has been ‘fixed’ over and over again. We’ve seen major new revisions, such as XP SP3; an entirely new version, Vista; and, by my count, at least 60 major security patches, and a malware worm dating from January of 2004 is still alive and well and attacking from Windows.
Most of you have seen the news today from Google formally announcing their Chrome Operating System for netbooks using Intel x86 and ARM chips. The is painted as a classic “clash of the titans” between Google and Microsoft, with Google finally directly assaulting Microsoft’s top cash business. (They have already opened the war against Microsoft’s other cash cow, Office, with Google Docs.) While this is a great story, I prefer to frame at as David vs Goliath with the little OS that could, Linux, as the foundation of this announcement, as well as the other operating systems challenging Windows.
Abundant performance delivered by today’s quad-core processors has shifted the performance bottleneck from the CPU and memory to the disk I/O subsystem in most of day-to-day usage scenarios. In order to optimize system’s responsiveness, performance-hungry computer enthusiasts carefully selecting top-notch, 10K RPM mechanical drives and stunningly fast SSD disks. But, what about the operating system – which one of modern operating systems is capable of utilizing fast hard drives and multi-core CPUs most effectively?
The performance advantage of the EXT3 file system used in Ubuntu Linux may be very significant when processing large amounts of small to medium-sized files and computer users and IT professionals constantly working with large amounts data should seriously consider using Ubuntu Linux as the main file and data management platform.
The most important single fact you need to keep in mind is that everyone who uses a computer already knows Google, and most of them trust it. Only PC power users know about Linux and are numbered in millions compared to the hundreds of millions who know Windows.
Here’s how it will work in Chrome OS. When you launch an application on the Web, say Google Docs, Chrome will use Google Gears to not only provide the ability to do work offline, but also to cache your online data in the open-source lightweight DBMS Sqlite. As a user, you’ll never see any of this. You’ll just find yourself doing most of your work in the Chrome browser interface.
Once Google has this working really well, you may not even be able to tell when you’re on the net and when you’re not. I’m told off the record by Google engineers that the goal is to make the desktop invisible. You’ll be spending 99% of your time in the browser.