Kiwi leads effort to build a better browser, Sep 17, 2004

The web browser wars are over and Microsoft won, right?

Well someone's forgotten to tell Ben Goodger and his team at the Mozilla Foundation because this Kiwi software engineer is taking market share from Internet Explorer (IE) with Firefox, the browser that's smaller yet smarter than just about anything else available.

America Online said Thursday that it will not support a Microsoft-backed antispam technology called Sender ID.

The online giant cited "lackluster" industry support and compatibility issues with the antispam technology SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, that AOL supports.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is being honoured at The Economist's Third Annual Innovations Awards.

The event is held in San Francisco and awards innovators in six categories: bioscience, computing, energy and the environment, communications, "no boundaries" and social and economic innovation. Entries were nominated by Economist readers and journalists and the winners were chosen by a panel of 17 judges.

IBM attorneys have argued that SCO Group has failed to provide any evidence that IBM allowed proprietary Unix code to enter the Linux operating system.

Lawyers for IBM also argued SCO's $US5 billion ($7.2 billion) lawsuit making that claim should be dismissed.

Alone in London has built an effective office network for thirty people for under £70 a seat with second-hand and open-source components

At the Open Source in the Voluntary Sector conference in London on Wednesday, charities described how they'd managed to make the most of their IT budgets by using Linux, including a London-based charity which saved more than £28,000 by using Linux Terminal Server to build its network.

Homeless charity Alone in London spent less than £2,000 to set up a network of 30 PCs from scratch, compared to a similar-sized charity which spent £30,000 on building a network using proprietary solutions and new PCs, according to James Holland, who ran the project at Alone in London.

Shareholders of Mandrakesoft have approved a stock sale to raise as much as $7.3 million, a move that should make it easier for the Paris-based Linux seller to pursue its acquisition strategy.

A vote on Monday approved the sale of up to 1 million shares at 6 euros, or $7.31, per share, Mandrakesoft said in a statement Thursday. The company's stock was valued at 5.69 euros, or $6.93, on Thursday.

"We need this cash to clean up our balance sheet," Chairman Jacques Le Marois said in an interview.

Although Linux has captured the imagination of embedded-device designers worldwide, commercial operating systems continue to dominate real-time applications. With a multiuser architecture, a non-pre-emptable kernel, and a scheduler based on fairness instead of priority, Linux forced developers to rewrite portions of it or install a second kernel to gain real-time features. Responding to these deficiencies, a dedicated Linux support community has recently delivered an updated kernel that incorporates many time-sensitive features and makes Linux suitable for a larger range of real-time applications.

In response to the growing number of viruses infecting computers, a spokesman for Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has suggested that users consider alternatives to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser. But the agency did not recommend that users steer clear of Microsoft products, the spokesman said, refuting a press release issued Tuesday by browser developer Opera Software.

Mandrakesoft is proud to announce the release of its newest and most advanced operating system to date: Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community. The enhanced usability, hardware support and performance make this release a milestone on the way to widespread Linux adoption.

Here at the Bleeding Edge 2004 electoral campaign, we're agonising again over how to cast our vote. Should we stick with the incumbent or elect a new candidate to look after our affairs?

It's a much more difficult choice than voting for either John Howard or Mark Latham. What we have to decide is whether to stick with Windows XP or move to Linux.

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