It seems like AMD might have a leg up on Intel on this one... and apparently the system integrator who did this also sells Itanium and Xeon systems.... and says that he gets significantly better performance from Opterons

Of course you have to compile the binaries on a Xeon machine... thats the catch

Read the article[The Inquirer]

This article caught my eye... especially since everyone is focusing on speech recognition and such.

Read the article

Apparently Opera contains some fishy elements that may transmit some of your personal data to them. Great, I was actually thinking of trying out opera... but not anymore.

Here is the link on The Inquirer
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9056

Finally! I read some initial announcements about this on xiph.org a while back, but I never did see anything about it from Neuros (the manufacturer) until now. Strangely, though, the press release appears to have been up for 2 months. Wonder how I missed it before...

Anyway, it basically says that Neuros and xiph.org are working together on adding Ogg Vorbis playback support to Neuros hardware devices, as well as native Linux support. Nice.

The updates will be available to existing Neuros owners through a firmware upgrade, and are targetting a Spring '03 release date.

Read the full press release for any additional details, and check out the Neuros player while you're there. It actually looks to be a very capable device, and I'm looking forward to purchasing it the very day Ogg support is officially added.

A couple weeks ago, the Mozilla development team announced that after the 1.4 release of Mozilla they'll be switching primary development to separate browser and mail clients, codenamed Firebird and Thunderbird.

Since then, there's been a whole lot of heated discussion, mostly coming from supporters of the Firebird database project, about objections to Mozilla "stealing" their name. Regardless of who thinks who did what, the database project no more owns that name than the Mozilla group does. In the immortal words of CmdrTaco, "As always, a small group of users are being real asses about the whole thing. Yay." 'Nuff said.

Anyway, in response to this debate, a "Mozilla Branding" document was released today to clarify their branding strategy. To sum up:

• "Mozilla Application Suite" is the name of the full Mozilla suite that we know it as today
• "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" are the codenames of the standalone browser and mail clients, respectively, that will be used until Mozilla 1.4 is released
• After the 1.4 release, the standalone client codenames will be dropped in favor of "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail".

The full document and additional details can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/branding.html

This article is an interview with Rob Short.. the guy who is the VP of Windows Core Tech... interesting stuff

It talks about what Linux and Unix have over 2003...

here is a tidbit:

"We've built a patch mechanism in 2003 that will be shipped externally. We'll be able to patch probably two thirds of the components without shutting the system down. That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible."

Of course this was my favorite quote


Read the rest of the story

There is an excellent and extremely thorough article on the state of Linux gaming over on linuxhardware.org. It covers much of the history of gaming in Linux, what's available now, and what we can expect in the future. A very worthy read.

Full story

Well, if you read the article you'll see that it's not exactly a confirmation, but it's the strongest evidence yet that Apple and AMD are working together. Worth a glance.

Full story

C|Net is carrying an interview with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, about Linux, FOSS, piracy, sales, and marketing, among other topics.

This guy cracks me up everytime he says something. He's so completely full of crap that I'm surprised he's even allowed to be in the IT field, let alone CEO of the most dominate software company in the market.

Some highlights:

I would argue that our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from [the open-source] community.

I'm sorry, what? What exactly did you innovate? What in your entire product line was not acquired or stolen from someone else?

Linux itself is a clone ... of a 20-year-old system.

Actually, is a 30-year-old system, and it's an evoultion of it, not a clone. And by the way, do you remember something called MS-DOS? Windows for Workgroups? Window NT? How exactly is this version so revolutionary?

A Linux PC in most countries is a PC in which somebody is being encouraged to pirate Windows.

Riiiiiiiiight.

And I also don't think hardware prices have come down, at least at the client. Hardware prices have not come down significantly in a number of years...The capability goes up, as the capability goes up in our software.
C|NET: "Average selling prices are pretty far down."
No, no, no. Not in the home. It hasn't come down in the last several years at all. Remember when sub-$1,000 PCs were all the rage. The percentage of sub-$1,000 or $500 PCs is not significantly different today than it was several years ago. There is more capability every year for the price, but the same could be said for Microsoft Office 2003.

Wow. Anyone else have a headache after reading that?

There are numerous more choice quotes, so please, grab yourself a Dew, pop some popcorn, sit back and prepare to be entertained.

Here's the full interview: http://news.com.com/2008-1082-998297.html

There's a great introduction to burning CDs under Linux on IBM's developerWorks site. It focuses on creating and recording CDs using command line utilies, and also briefly discusses configuration as well.

Burning CDs on Linux