I’ve been using “traditional” languages like Perl, Python and C to get my work done, and done very
well, for ages. Now suddenly I have these new kids on the block and some management
consultants who would not know their backside from a line of C code, who curl up their lips and
sneer, “Perl” You got to be kidding! I mean how can you write mission critical stuff in Perl? After
all, Perl does not have enterprise features and functionality and all things expected for developing
high-end Internet applications. Perl does not have platform independence, or multithreading and
suffers from significant speed issues.
Full Story at:-
India CNET-Anonymous Reader

In Germany, where an AOL spokesman says citizens like “to have a law on everything,” legislators are expected to restrict employers’ ability to monitor their workers’ e-mails. From Wired.com.

The Register reports that three serious IT publications have run benchmarks for
Sony’s new Crusoe laptop in the past week, published them… and
disavowed the results immediately.

You wouldn’t think that gadgets meant to keep CPUs cool would be likely to
qualify as art objects. Well, not unless you’d seen this little lot, anyway. From AustralianIT.com.

“Can we please get over our collective forkaphobia? Every few weeks something happens in the Linux
landscape, such as the recent news that the Samba project is undergoing a planned fork, or some
pseudo-technical pseudo-journalist decides to take a shot at Linux by dragging this old red herring into the
conversation, and we have to endure yet another round of angst and debate over whether Linux will
smithereen itself all over the landscape. It’s pointless, and it’s lost whatever entertainment value it had a long
time ago.” LinuxProgramming.com has this editorial.

From OSOpinion: “I think any business betting that Windows is the way to go is really placing a large amount of money on the roulette table of success… I personally would not take that kind of chance. I use the software that works now, and always will work. It works on new computers. It works on old computers too. And most importantly, it’s free. These are three things that will make me always prefer Linux to Windows, no matter how much Windows should improve.” –Kelly McNeill

From Ciol.com: In all the excitement and fury that surrounds the Open source movement and in no small measure Linux itself, it is often very easy to forget the origins and beginnings of this unique and often misunderstood development mechanism. Today, with Sun releasing StarOffice (renamed as OpenOffice [1]), we are often transported to a time when Netscape bravely ventured [2] where few had dared to go before – to release a commercial application into the open domain. In this three part series we look at the open source model and its history and the pros and cons that surround this development mechanism. –harry

Australian IT is reporting that departments in the Australian Government are lagging behind deadlines set out by the Prime Minister for adopting the Internet on existing budgets.

By Jack Bryar
NewsForge Columnist
Open Source business
Which would you rather do, wait for a gee-whiz desktop interface and
office suite that can do everything you want (and more) — or would you
rather get something that actually works? Or would you still do
nothing?

The folks over at the KDE team hope you’ll use something that works.
I think their newest offering does just that. I’ve been working my way
through KDE’s
newest offering and recommend you check out their newest slideshow
presentation concerning Kopernicus, aka KDE 2.0. If you really
really like it, maybe even develop on
it, and especially start to use it, that could make a big
difference
to a whole collection of Linux and Unix vendors.

While everyone in the Linux community has been in denial about it,
there is a division of opinion among Linux vendors concerning what
desktop platform to support. While most vendors say they support both
GNOME and KDE, they usually make it clear where their heart is. Firms
like Caldera, Corel, Mandrakesoft and SuSE Linux in particular have
promoted the KDE desktop.

There’s a lot to promote. Kopernicus includes the core libraries, an
improved desktop, the Konqueror
Web browser, a prototype office suite (KOffice), plus utility and
administration software, plus stuff for games, graphics, network
utilities, and more.

Is the desktop important? For months, many Linux vendors have
suggested that the workgroup and small Internet server market (where
Linux has developed huge momentum) was more than sufficient to carry
the
OS and its primary vendors. The sinking stock prices of many Linux
distributors suggest otherwise. Caldera has dropped nearly 40% of
its market value in the last month. Red Hat has lost
better than 30% of its value in the same period. And while vendors
like Microsoft and Apple have had their own stock troubles lately, the
low valuations of many Linux software vendors reduce their ability to
acquire other firms, or raise capital, and make them potential takeover
targets. Capturing desktops and lots of them, could become critical to
maintaining corporate independence over the longer term.

Can that be done?

For the longest time it was an article of faith among Linux
developers that the corporate desktop marketplace was nearly
impenetrable. The installed base was too embedded; losing Windows meant
losing customer’s key apps and the data that resided on them. The
technical competency of many corporate IT managers was too limited;
some
kid with a Microsoft certification wasn’t likely to be able to do much
with the array of tools that Linux apps provided. The cost of support
was hard to calculate; therefore relative cost of ownership of Linux
vs.
Windows remained an unknown. The biggest problem was that other firms
had Linux on their desktops. As every IT manager knows, there’s real
risk associated with being first.

Increasingly that reluctance is beginning to break down.

I was asked by a client last week to help him build a case for
replacing his Windows installed base with Linux. The firm has hit rough
seas recently, and the company decided it couldn’t afford to drop a
couple of million dollars on spiffy new hardware and software. It was
also looking at maintaining a prohibitively expensive customer support
system that it had bought two years ago and had never fully
implemented.

If there was a Linux or Open Source alternative to his dilemma, this
tech officer wanted to know about it. If I could surface evidence that
other companies were looking at an alternative to Windows, he wanted to
know about that, too.

I’m still looking for that evidence. I spoke to about 60 mid-sized
firms and found that 20 of them were going through a similar exercise,
but only three had actually begun to port desktops to Linux in any
significant way. Those are interesting numbers. They suggest that the
potential market for a viable Linux desktop is far larger than any
study
I’ve seen to date. But it also suggests that the barriers to adoption
remain high, whether they are critical custom Windows apps, technical
competency of the IT staff, or plain ol’ Fear, Uncertainty &
Doubt.

These issues are important to my client. The tech officer I worked
with expressed considerable fear that the company’s IT staffers would
have difficulty managing any conversion. In addition, many employees
have all sorts of downloaded software programs and browser plug-ins
loaded on their systems. Oddball software is another worry. One
department runs an old custom software program with hardly any
documentation, a constant headache now, but a potential nightmare if
the
company chose to convert. Mid-conversion catastrophes are another
concern. It’s no big thing to convert a few dozen NT stations to
Win2000
each day. Nothing breaks down during the conversion. Can the same be
said if the company began to convert to Linux, the tech officer wanted
to know. Seeing what someone else had done, learning from someone
else’s
experience, was critical.

So is the only barrier to widespread adoption a lack of early
pioneers?

Maybe. So the next question is, if those pioneers try KDE or GNOME
on
for size, will their experience be good enough to help Linux, and many
Linux vendors start to really break out into the larger corporate
marketplace?

The Bangkok Post has a story from a webmaster, discussing his efforts to improve a web site he took over for a client that had been built with Front Page and dotted with redundant .asp files.