I Come to Bury Sender ID, Not to Praise It, Aug 27, 2004

It's a tragedy, and Sender ID will soon be history. Microsoft's uncompromising licensing attitudes show a blindness worthy of King Lear.

With security holes to the left of us and program incompatibilities to the right, SP2 is giving corporate IT departments more reasons than ever to consider a move to Linux desktops.

Telstra's recent cut-price desktop software deal with Microsoft has rapidly made its way into the marketing arsenal of at least one enterprising open source vendor.

Australian Linux and open source vendor Cybersource has cited the deal -- whereby Telstra secured a four-year Windows desktop upgrade deal at a deeply discounted price of around AU$20 million after aggressively piloting Linux and products such as StarOffice -- in marketing for a new service as an example of how Linux can be used as leverage to secure discounts from Microsoft.

The United Nations is moving to embrace open source with a new agency.

It's called the International Open Source Network (IOSN), which is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with a primary goal to promote Free and Open Source (FOSS) software usage.

"We've expressed to AOL that America Online dial-up support is the number one request we get from users and OEMs, but they have yet to release anything," said Michael Robertson, chief executive officer of Linspire. "We decided to build an open source dialer on our own so the massive AOL customer base can now use a low-cost Linux computer with their AOL accounts."

When small companies announce they’re putting Linux OS on a computer it makes news. When they announce they’re putting it on a laptop it’s even bigger news. Now you’re beginning to realize how big a deal it was when computer giant Hewlett-Packard announced they were selling a laptop with Linux inside.

Hewlett-Packard is now taking orders for their nx5000 business notebook computers with Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.1 installed. I’ve happy to report that the combination is a winner.

Mandrakesoft has teamed with French hardware maker LaCie in introducing a USB-powered mobile hard drive, according to an announcement today.

The 40GB hard drive attaches to a system's USB port, allowing users to use their PC as a Linux desktop, without modifying the host computer. The technique is similar to the way a "LiveCD" allows users to try Linux without installing, repartitioning or disturbing an existing OS configuration.

Linux supplier Lycoris has released PowerPak 1.4, which the company claims will make running Linux applications easier and make migrating from Windows to Linux easier.

Via Technologies has released a version of the open-source Xine media player that is designed to take advantage of hardware digital video acceleration capabilities in two of the company's PC chipsets, the CN400 and CLE266.

The Via-enhanced Xine Player version 3.0 (VeXP 3.0) was developed for Linux-based personal electronics devices that rely on the MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 acceleration functions of the Via chipsets, company representatives say.

Complicated battle scenarios are to be run on US Department of Defense Linux-based supercomputers.

The Pentagon is using two 256-processor Linux Networx Evolocity cluster supercomputers to conduct various disaster simulations.

The National Library Board of Singapore (NLB) has migrated to Linux as part of a move to counter end-of-life support issues with Windows NT and save an estimated 30 percent over a move to Windows 2003, according to an announcement from resource optimization company Resolvo.

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