Techie Blog

While hanging around in chat, you might make some friends, or maybe you already have one or two in same network. You can always share same room, but sometimes it's not so practical. Maybe you don't want to be in any room at all. But if you do that, you can't contact your friends at all.

If you start using Operas contact management, you can see if people are away and send private messages too. That requires that people use the online status system that you can see in chat menu or by clicking network in chat panel with right mouse button. But let's see how you can manage your contacts. Read more...

I have posted previously about IPTV, or been close enough about that subject. IPTV has some other names too (like vidcast). I'll just use IPTV, vlog doesn't really describe these shows, vidcast is more like it. But even people making those shows are not always certain about the thing. Wikipedia seems to suggest that vidcast is the right term, but some shows describe themselves as IPTV shows. Read more...

In some cases you can't avoid command line. Ubuntu for example has good graphical administration utilities, but if you search for instructions or ask for help all you get is cryptic commands. Some think it's frustrating and others like me don't mind. Graphical tools are great when you don't have much time or just don't feel like reading manuals. Why using command line is better is personal thing, but maybe you find your own reasons once you get bit more comfortable with it. But if you're planning to script some common tasks, command line teaches you many useful commands that you can use. But let's start with the basics first. Read more...

Command line in general might look something that's not very useful and it's certainly not pretty. But looks can be deceiving, Unix command line actually has long history and people who developed it certainly believed in it too (though there's sort of Unix version 2 available). I would say it's still relevant for some people including me. Read more...

Yes. You heard correctly. Microsoft are actually collaborating with Novell to help Linux and Windows work better together. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw this. But I guess both the Linux and the Windows world will benefit from this.

The news were announced in front of a bunch of shocked IT journalists in San Fransisco, Nov. 2. In fact this was really unexpected since Novell and Microsoft have been bitter rivals before.

Originally posted by the Microsoft press release:

“Too often technology companies ask their customers to adapt to them. Today we are adapting to our customers,” said Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell. “Microsoft and Novell are enabling customers to take advantage of each other’s products where it makes sense in their enterprise infrastructure. We jointly believe that our business and patent agreements make it possible to offer the highest level of interoperability with the assurance that both our companies stand behind these solutions.”

What will the results of this be?

Among the areas Microsoft and Novell will collaborate on are Viritualization, Web services for managing physical and virtual servers, Document format compatibility (ODT+Office XML).

The Open Source community will also benefit from this. Microsoft will collaborate with Novell on several Open Source projects related to file formats and web services management. Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual noncommercial open source developers.

My conclusion

The fact that Microsoft are more open to the Open Source community is great. This will benefit the Open Source community a lot. But while I think the deal was made partly from Microsofts side to benefit Open Source, I don't think it was completely selflessly. Microsoft will actually benefit a lot from this themselves. And they might actually increase the sales of their products thanks to this.

I am one step closer to liking Microsoft. But I still don't like them.

Sources
Microsoft and Novell Announce Broad Collaboration on Windows and Linux Interoperability and Support - Microsofts press releases
Microsoft omfavner Linux - ITavisen, Norwegian IT news.
Image: Microsoft and Novell Announce Broad Collaboration on Windows and Linux Interoperability and Support - Microsofts press releases