The latest article on O'Reilly Network discusses one of the very few remaining enterprise components missing from Linux. In particular, the author discusses Linux's inability to interact with Microsoft's Active Directory services, as well as the lack of a good, uniform set of directory services available for Linux in general.



Now, I know most Linux advocates will say "Big deal, I can do everything I need with OpenLDAP." Well, the sad truth is, while you may be able to do everything you need with it, OpenLDAP, unfortunately, does not provide all of the features a business needs. My own company, for example, uses Active Directory to control all user authentication, permissions, remote shares, and much more. Being the good little Linux advocate that I am, I've been trying to get Linux in the door at my company. However, being able to logon and authorize against the directory service is an absolute must, and so far I've been unable to do so. Now, how in can I push for Linux on the desktop when I can't even login properly?



This is something that I really hope gets rectified soon. I'm sure the capability is there (for Active Directory authentication, at the very least), but it needs to be made much more accessible to the end user before it's useful to anyone. I know I'm anxiously looking forward to that day.



For more information, please read the full article.

Apparently Microsoft doesn't have too much faith in those who administrate MS boxes. Oh well, I guess they understand that a majority of NT, 2000, etc. admins don't know enough about their system to make it secure... but oh wait... they can't, they have to rely on patches from MS.



"Microsoft found that an overwhelming majority of the security breaches its customers have suffered resulted from configuration mistakes. These included unpatched systems and unprotected administrative accounts on servers, Stephenson said."



Geez, give them a break... I mean, if the admins had patches within the day for their problems... or easily appliable patches that don't break other things... maybe this wouldn't be such a big deal.



Now as for the unprotected admin accounts on servers... well... then that person shouldn't have a job.



Read the article here[Computerworld]

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





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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.



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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.

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