Ballmer on Linux, part II
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Initial coverage of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer&#39;s comments during an event in Singapore yesterday left the folks back at headquarters in Redmond trying to clarify things and put them in context.
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Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, has acknowledged Linux as the &quot;only game in town&quot; when it comes to competing with the proprietary software heavyweight&#39;s offerings, Australia&#39;s peak open source body claims.
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In the current issue: &nbsp;October 2006  Slap a "Powered by Linux" sticker on your front door. The October issue of Linux Journal takes "Linux Everywhere" literally. See how Linux runs a total multimedia center like TiVo on steroids, serves as a central phone system with call screening, regulates your home heating system, controls robots and much more.  This isn't just a digital lifestyle, it's a Linux lifestyle of leisure, which proves that geeks, particularly Linux geeks, truly have the best toys.  Not a subscriber? Check out this post to read abstracts of the current issues' articles and to read for "free" this months Bonus Article: Do-It-Yourself Robots with Linux by Michael Surran.
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I have a friend who has had nothing but nightmares result from his attempts at setting up the fabled low-latency high-performance Linux audio system. In sympathy with his plight I present here a primer in three parts for troubleshooting common and uncommon problems with the Linux sound system. Parts 1 &amp; 2 will present programs used to analyze and configure your audio setup. Part 3 will list the most frequently encountered problems along with their suggested solutions. This week, Part 1 introduces some useful system analysis tools and utilities with graphic user interfaces.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.   Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.   He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.   I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that's valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.
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Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton last week revealed some of his plans for the next kernel version, a few days after the final release of Linux 2.6.20.
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I will turn down free beer software in favor of freedom software when both exist. If you don't know the difference, that's OK. You cannot see the source code for the video drivers from ATI, for example. You can get them for free but they are not freed. The same with Adobe Acrobat Reader and plugins for the Firefox web browser.
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At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE, its relationship with the KDE community, his view of the Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE (a Dutch translation can be found at Bart&amp;David
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Greg Beaver talks about a big push that he's making towards PEAR2 by working hard on an integral piece of the puzzle - the Pyrus installer.   I'm churning out code to turn its installer, Pyrus, from vaporware into actual code. Along these lines, there has been significant progress.  The code has been developed on PHP 5.2, but will most likely target PHP 5.3 with the introduction of namespaces.  Pyrus completely revamps the way things are done.   Greg mentions some of the functionality the installer will use including XMLReader/XMLWriter, namespaces and bits of functionality from the Standard PHP Library (SPL). He's released what he's developed so far via a PEAR channel with no other dependencies.
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Travis Swicegood has made a new release of the successor to the PEAR RunTest package for PEAR2 - the new PHPT.    Since this is usable and PEAR2 is still being worked out, I've decided to release this as a standalone package for the time being with the intent of bundling it with Pyrus or including it directly in PEAR2 when PEAR2 is realized.   This provides the majority of the functionality provided by PEAR's pear run-tests command via its own phpt command and it can even provide pear style output.    Examples of its use are included as well as the method to download this latest version (via a PEAR channel, of course) or through the package's web page. Issues found with the software can be posted to the project's Google code page.
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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According to this quick post on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Zend Framework project has a new leader to take the place of Jayson Maynard when he left.    After a difficult search, we have found the seasoned veteran we need to track, manage, and coordinate our ever growing group of contributors and Zend liaisons, and our lengthy list of components and sub-projects on our published roadmap for ZF 1.0, and beyond.   Fortunately, we were introduced to Bill Karwin. Bill is up to this challenge, having performed similar project organization duties at several companies, including Borland and Lutris Technologies. He is also committed to the open-source community, and is a member of the MySQL Guild.    Cal has some other nice things to say about Bill, including a compliment on Bill's grasp on the Zend Framework project.
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Today we released version 1.6.3 of Streamline, a stream-based network subsystem for Linux.   This first release in over a half year has been thorougly stress-tested, so it should be more stable. New features include support for named and unnamed pipes, the full POSIX file IO interface, a write-after-read optimization similar to splicing, a method for catching HTTP GET requests and self-resizing (based on load) ringbuffer designs. Please read the changelog for more details.
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The latest release of the anticipated ScriptServer 2.0 has been posted by Harry Fuecks.
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Chris Chabot has posted a PHP package he's worked up that functions as a daemon sitting and listening on a socket.   To deal with 1000's of concurrent, always on (comet aka hanging iframe) http (server) connections, and an equal amount of IRC client connections, plus being able to interpret and parse and delegate all the messages and events, i needed a very fast, stable, flexible and easy to use 'daemon' library for PHP.   He links to the tarball of the release and to the project page as well as including an example of its usage - creating a simple HTTP server with various hooks built in (like on_connect, on_read, and on_timer).
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Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer reiterated the company&#39;s case against the open-source Linux operating system yesterday in an e-mail message to customers that was notable in part for its timing.