My first reaction when I got an e-mail from Microsoft about a big announcement involving Chief Executive Steve Ballmer this afternoon was that Vista was going to be shipping early. Rumors have been flying that the new and much-delayed version of the Windows operating system is just about done.
Instead, it’s a much bigger bombshell: Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) has announced a partnership with Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ) and will help promote Linux.
This is stunning. This is like Red Sox fans announcing they’re going to root for the Yankees.
Microsoft has spent ten years bashing the free-of-charge open-source Linux operating system and trying to kill it. Now Microsoft is making nice.
Novell distributes a version of Linux called Suse. The company has been an also-ran in the Linux market, behind Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), the market leader. But support from Microsoft could give Novell a boost. Read the rest of this entry »

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released the new Linux 2.6.35 kernel, providing users of the open source operating system with new networking capabilities and performance enhancements, along with filesystem improvements.
Chief among improvements in the new 2.6.35 Linux kernel are incoming network traffic load-spreading features: Receive Packet Steering (RPS) and Receive Flow Steering (RFS), which aim to improve performance. Both enhancements were contributed by search engine giant Google.
“RPS distributes the load of received packet processing across multiple CPUs,” Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) developer Tom Herbert wrote in his Linux code commit message.”This solution queues packets early on in the receive path on the backlog queues of other CPUs. This allows protocol processing (e.g. IP and TCP) to be performed on packets in parallel”.
Receive Flow Steering (RFS) is extension to RPS and directs (or “steers”) application packets to the correct CPU. Read the rest of this entry »

Linux can learn from Microsoft? Nooooo. Yes, someone out there actually believes that! In reality, all the different operating systems beg, borrow, and steal from one another, and Linux-Watch’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has an article detailing five things that Linux can learn from Microsoft. After reading through it, most of the author’s arguments seem agreeable, but Linux supporters may feel differently. So what can Linux learn from Microsoft?
The first item on the list is the MSDN, or the Microsoft Developer Network. It’s a great starting place for developers. It offers tutorials, samples, SDKs, articles, documentation, message boards, blogs, and everything else you could dream of when programming for a Microsoft platform. The only downside is the search, which the company is apparently working on. Linux, on the other hand, has all the things that the MSDN has, but it’s not all that well organized. Typically, I find myself going to Google when I need help with some Linux programming. Everything that the MSDN offers is available for Linux, but it’s just not all in one place. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Outlook Plugin Version 1 (Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP)

Once installed, the plugin will allow classification of messages as spam or non-spam from the mail client. To use the plugin simply select the message(s) to be classified in Outlook and click on the red envelope for spam, or the green envelope for non-spam.
Note: When reporting spam it is important that you report both spam and non-spam messages. Just reporting spam will not provide the database with the information it needs to reduce or eliminate the spam messages.

Microsoft Outlook Plugin Version 2 (Windows 98/2000/NT/XP)

Once installed, the plugin will allow classification of messages as spam or non-spam from the mail client. To use the plugin simply select the message(s) to be classified in Outlook and click on the red envelope for spam, or the green envelope for non-spam.
Version 2 also contains the ability to whitelist the senders of messages classified as non-spam (click Green Envelop), and will place your Outlook contact list into your personal whitelist on initial use. Read the rest of this entry »

GigaTribe is a free software that lets you create your own personal P2P file sharing network that you can use to share large files and folders with your friends.
Your P2P network is completely secure, and only your friends can access the files and folders that you share.
Your personal P2P network created with GigaTribe will support resumption of interrupted downloads, encrypted file sharing process, and sharing unlimited files and folders with no file size restriction.
GigaTribe is a really easy to use software to setup your private P2P file sharing network, and it is completely free.

GigaTribe provides some really good features:
- You can invite up to 500 friends to your private P2P network.
- It resumes interrupted downloads. Read the rest of this entry »

The purpose of a personal experience essay is to share and elaborate on an appealing experience from your life. A personal essay is sometimes even called a life experience essay and can be difficult to write for many students.
A personal experience essay focuses on your experience and the importance of that experience and impact that it has on you.
To make your personal experience essay exciting you should start with choosing the relevant experience to base your essay upon. Describe a situation that you consider to be crucial in your development.
You may think that you have no appropriate event or experience to share, but everyone has something that shaped who they are. Whatever topic you decide on, keep in mind that your aim is to convey its importance to the audience. Your narration should give a deep insight into the details of the event and the readers must gain some meaning why this specific experience is so remarkable to you. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a computer and really don’t know where all your money goes, your life can be easier if you invest in personal-finance budget software. Nearly all of the finance programs have reports that you can customize and generate.
Want to know how much you’re spending for groceries? Or how much miscellaneous cash went to coffee in the morning?
The program will tell you. Your bank statement will include the debit-card amounts, which you’ll need to add in, but not the cash you spend. You’ll need to enter that as well.
Be cautious about the features of any software you buy. There is one brand-name software that will accumulate all of your information in one place. The ads say it can combine your bank accounts with your credit cards and investment accounts — by going into those accounts and extracting the information for you. Another software will make your payments for you automatically. Read the rest of this entry »

European governments have long complained about their dependence on Microsoft’s software, but their rhetoric has not turned into a mass migration away from Windows.
During the past few years, Europe’s elected officials have made a lot of noise about ambitious projects to switch to open source software, including big migrations of government PCs in France, Germany, Spain and Norway.
These plans are often heralded as major inroads against Microsoft’s Windows hegemony in the old country — where Microsoft has been fined close to $1 billion in antitrust violations by the European Commission.
Yet the actual migrations have been negligible. More than 95 percent of all PCs used by European government workers still run on Windows, according to the market research firm IDC.
“No one has come out and said ‘we are migrating every desktop or laptop on Linux,’” said IDC analyst Massimiliano Claps.
In Norway, a project known as eNorway 2009 was begun in 2005 to convert Norway’s public sector to open source software. Read the rest of this entry »

My first reaction when I got an e-mail from Microsoft about a big announcement involving Chief Executive Steve Ballmer this afternoon was that Vista was going to be shipping early. Rumors have been flying that the new and much-delayed version of the Windows operating system is just about done.
Instead, it’s a much bigger bombshell: Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) has announced a partnership with Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ) and will help promote Linux.
This is stunning. This is like Red Sox fans announcing they’re going to root for the Yankees.
Microsoft has spent ten years bashing the free-of-charge open-source Linux operating system and trying to kill it. Now Microsoft is making nice.
Novell distributes a version of Linux called Suse. The company has been an also-ran in the Linux market, behind Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), the market leader. But support from Microsoft could give Novell a boost. Read the rest of this entry »

Software radical Richard Stallman helped build the Linux revolution. Now he threatens to tear it apart.
The free Linux operating system set off one of the biggest revolutions in the history of computing when it leapt from the fingertips of a Finnish college kid named Linus Torvalds 15 years ago. Linux now drives $15 billion in annual sales of hardware, software and services, and this wondrous bit of code has been tweaked by thousands of independent programmers to run the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the latest cell phones and TiVo (nasdaq: TIVO - news - people ) video recorders and other gadgets.
But while Torvalds has been enshrined as the Linux movement’s creator, a lesser-known programmer–infamously more obstinate and far more eccentric than Torvalds–wields a startling amount of control as this revolution’s resident enforcer. Richard M. Stallman is a 53-year-old anticorporate crusader who has argued for 20 years that most software should be free of charge. He and a band of anarchist acolytes long have waged war on the commercial software industry, dubbing tech giants “evil” and “enemies of freedom” because they rake in sales and enforce patents and copyrights–when he argues they should be giving it all away. Read the rest of this entry »