RadeonHD 1.2 Driver Released

Original link: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php...

Private deal to approve OOXML? More evidence surfaces

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

Beneath the headlines of protestors marching outside the Oslo, Norway building where Subcommittee 34 ("SC 34") of the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 was holding a meeting, SC 34 was busily adopting resolutions relevant to future work on OOXML and ISO/IEC:26300 OpenDocument. SC 34 is the JTC 1 technical committee with ISO/IEC jurisidiction over both standards.

The relevant SC 34 resolutions adopted April 9 establish two ad hoc committees to perform further work on ISO/IEC:29500-2008. Under Resolution 4:

SC 34 envisages the creation of three distinct working groups that meet the needs of:

1. ISO/IEC 29500
2. ISO/IEC 26300
3. Work on interoperability/harmonization between document format standards[.]

...

For these reasons, SC 34 hereby establishes an ad hoc group pursuant to the JTC 1 Directives, clause 2.6.2, for investigating how the first of these groups may be set up most effectively[.]

What's wrong with this picture? Several factors point to the existence of one or more deals to implement this strategy before the close of the OOXML ballot period in exchange for NBs changing their votes on OOXML. Consider the following facts and attempt to reconcile all of them in your own mind with the non-existence of such a deal:

*

All NB comments on OOXML calling for its harmonization with OpenDocument were rejected at the ballot resolution meeting in February and that decision was therefore ratified by the final vote to approve OOXML as an international standard without harmonization. In other words, the final ballot of the NBs rejected the harmonization of ODF and OOXML.
*

On the date of the official announcement of the DIS-29500 ballot results, an IBM spokesman responded,

IBM will continue to be an active supporter of ODF. We look forward to being part of the community that works to harmonize ODF and OOXML for the sake of consumers, companies and governments, when OOXML control and maintenance is fully transferred to JTC1.”

From The PMC To The IPhone And Beyond: The Evolution Of The MID And Linux' Big Break

Analyst Opinion - Last week, I was in China and witnessed the launch of the first generation Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform products based on Intel's new Atom processor. This got me thinking back to what we had before the MID and why some of those products were successful and others were not. Of course, now we can speculate who will be successful with the MID.

A good part of the MID success will be due to Linux, which has been showcased best in Lenovo's offering so far. Lenovo's product has an interface that looks like an update to what Apple has in the iPod and iPhone. Trying to copy Apple isn't unusual, but coming up with something better than Apple did is, particularly if we are talking about Linux. I think this is worth talking about.

Lessons from the PMC failure

The PMC or Portable Media Center was actually a cool little device for its time. It played videos in beautiful color long before the iPod did and its interface was one of the best that Microsoft has ever done.

Unfortunately, PMCs tended to be big, much like the first MP3 players. They lacked an iTunes-like back end (particularly for video which was their one big strength) and the vendors seemed to have the idea that demand generation marketing wasn't necessary. A lot of them either seemed to think Microsoft would do it for them (they never do) or that "if I build it they will come" approach applies to tech products (it doesn't).

The end result was that, after an initial spike, sales for these devices fell into insignificance. Although the Archos series (really the best media player almost no-one knows about), the video iPod (now iPod Classic), the current iPod Nano, the iPod Touch, and the Zune are all Portable Media Centers we don't call PMCs anymore. All but the Archos have a strong back end and a marketing budget (at least Zune used to have a marketing budget).

The Linux Preformance Advantage

Computer hardware is constantly getting better. Intel and AMD are constantly trying to have the better, faster, cheaper chips. Graphics cards achieve higher benchmarks and lower price points every month. 2GB, or even 4GB, of RAM is becoming commonplace. Everything is getting faster and costing less at the same time and this will probably remain true forever. Microsoft and most Linux distributions view these same hardware improvements differently, though.

When Vista came out, one of the big complaints about it was that is was so resource demanding. Although perhaps not quite as extreme as with Vista, it seems quite reasonable to expect that with each new release of Windows, you will need a slightly, or perhaps not so slightly, better, faster computer than before.

This is not at all true of Linux. Phoronix recently published benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 7.10 (the current version) to Ubuntu 8.04 Beta (the beta of the version that will be out very soon.) What did they find? Ubuntu 8.04 is only very slightly slower than Ubuntu 7.10. Even more impressive, when the did comparisons with even earlier versions, 7.10 had actually improved on former versions.

What all this means is that Windows is becoming more and more resource reliant while Linux essentially maintains its requirements. Microsoft is already seeing the effects of their sloppiness in bad reviews of Vista and having to extend XP’s life, but unless they change soon, they will see it even more, and pay for it too.

In the future, it seems likely that a computer with Windows will cost far more than a computer with Linux, not because of the price of the operating system (since hardware manufacturers are constantly pretending Windows is free, when in reality it is not) but because the hardware required to run Windows is so much more expensive than the hardware required to run Linux.

Returning to the present, Linux is already well on its way to removing all the road blocks to switching. Even when there are no road blocks left, though, Linux will still not win mainstream adoption, until it gets a simple reason to use it: it’s cheaper.

Of course, Linux is cheaper right now. It’s free, while Windows costs hundreds of dollars. Well, as you probably know, most places like Dell get it for much less than that. I don’t think anyone knows for sure (and it almost undoubtedly varies for deal to deal), but a safe guess would be that places like Dell get Windows for around $40 (just a guess). In addition, we repeatedly see cases of an identical Windows and Linux machine costing exactly the same price. It is not fair to give Windows an advantage like that, but it seems to be the reality. No longer will it even matter, though, when a Linux machine costs so much less than a Windows machine, just because of the hardware.

Just by continuing to use minimal resources, Linux is constantly becoming a more and more attractive option, and eventually this may be the single most important factor in winning Linux’s mainstream adoption.

Original link: http://www.linuxloop.com/news/20...

Red Hat exec hits back at govt open source shyness

A visiting Red Hat executive has said that wariness on the part of a number of government CIOs over adopting open source is not a reflection of Australia's tech savvy, but the result of a "lack of understanding" of the software and its community.

After a study released earlier this month claimed that open source is no longer a "cottage industry" in Australia, a group of CIOs from the government's three largest agencies--the Department of Defense, the Australian Tax Office and Centrelink--said they remained cautious over adopting open source.

All three IT chiefs cited concerns over support for the software as their reason for not adopting it more widely within their respective departments.

"We can't have a product where we have a problem and we don't have readily available support," said Department of Defense CIO Greg Farr.

However, a visiting Red Hat executive has today hit back at the claims saying the Australian government's caution "mostly comes from a lack of understanding of what open source actually is".

"We're not hearing those same concerns from mature markets now that open source is far more prevalent than it was four or five years ago," said Craig Munzilla, vice president of Red Hat's middleware business, JBoss.

"I actually think Australia as a whole is quite innovative and at the vanguard," he said, adding that Australia accounts for five percent of JBoss downloads worldwide, "which is huge relative to the size of the country".

According to Munzilla, companies and government departments tend to "like the flexibility of open source", but in many cases see it as unstable and volatile due to a perceived lack of support.

"I think it's from a lack of understanding of the model," he said, saying that Red Hat is in discussions with a number of government departments--which he would not name specifically--whose representatives had not displayed the same level of reservation as CIOs like Farr.

"We're engaged in a number of situations where we haven't heard that comment yet, and this is both at state and federal level," he said.

The Red Hat executive said that Australian government sector was in the midst of a "very common adoption cycle" for open source.

"You might find a group within a department that begins to download and experiment with a couple of things in non mission-critical applications," he said.

"If things go well, they'll be allowed to adopt open source for some more important applications and before you know it they're looking at taking on open source as a second standard," said Munzilla.

Original link: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/so...

Red Hat`s Challenge

To bolster growth, Red Hat must pursue the high-volume Linux space.

Five years ago, Red Hat sent a shock wave through the Linux community when it announced a new bleeding-edge development pace for its flagship distribution, Red Hat Linux.

Starting with Red Hat Linux 9, which was soon rebranded as Fedora Core, Red Hat forced its users to choose between the stable, supported and per-system fee-toting Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a fast-moving, community-supported and fee-free distribution.

At the time, the move was widely regarded as Red Hat turning its back on the high-volume, general-purpose Linux market in favor of the lower-hanging fruit of Unix-to-Linux conversions in large enterprises, typified by banks and other big financial institutions. And while the action of canceling its flagship support-optional Linux distribution spoke loudly enough, Red Hat tossed in, for good measure, some unkind words for Linux's highest-volume aspirations—those concerning Linux on the desktop.

In late 2003, Matthew Szulik, Red Hat CEO at the time, was quoted as saying Microsoft Windows was a better desktop option. Szulik confined those comments to the consumer space, but Red Hat's wafer-thin desktop options for the enterprise indicated that the biggest name in Linux wasn't ready to back desktop Linux for companies, either.

Fast-forward to today: Red Hat remains focused most keenly on the enterprise server stack, and its supported desktop offerings remain thin compared with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Ubuntu Linux. Based on Red Hat's current desktop Linux offerings, the company's position seems to be that Linux is not yet ready to challenge the Windows desktop in a serious way, and Red Hat may be correct.

While Linux is as good and perhaps better suited to the needs of knowledge workers who do not require Windows-only applications—a category into which I fall—the lack of an identity and management solution for Linux that's comparable to Microsoft's Active Directory and Group Policy is retarding Linux's growth.

But based so far on my tests of Red Hat's Fedora 9, which is due in late April, the pieces required to fill this gap for Linux—namely, the PolicyKit management and FreeIPA identity components that make their debut in this Fedora—are starting to fall into place.

The challenge that remains for Red Hat and Linux in general lies in extending the platform's software packaging embrace beyond open-source applications to include the works of third-party developers and internal enterprise development teams.

Red Hat has done well to focus on shoring up the core of the Linux platform and business, but if Linux is to grow beyond its data center environs and assume first-class status among volume platforms, now is the time for Linux's biggest brand to shore up its strength on the platform's periphery.

Original link: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-a...