smashedbug.com, tech music and geek news

Apache, a web server popular among the *nix community, hit an all time high this month according to the Netcraft Web Server Survey. Netcraft reported 63.98% of sites on the Internet were hosted on an Apache web server. Microsoft continues to lose web server market share. In March 2002, Microsoft reached its peak holding unto 34.02% of the market. This month, the percentage was 23.75%.

In addition, the site also shows servers with the longest uptime. The top 50 sites on the list all ran a variant of BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc..). The site www.daiko-lab.co.jp has the longest reported uptime, 1605 days (4.4 years).

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, sat down for an interview with eWeek Editor Peter Galli.

The bottom line: SCO showed some code snippets that they claimed they owned the intellectual property (IP) rights to. These code snippets were analyzed by the open source community and found to be historical code (some code over 30 years old) that was published into public domain, under the BSD license (which was found to be infringement free back in the early 1990s) or some other public code that was NOT owned by SCO.

Infact EVERY SINGLE piece of code that SCO demonstrated publically has been found NOT to be owned by SCO. In anycase, Torvalds is quite annoyed with SCO and in one point in the article describes SCO as “smoking crack”.

In this interview, Sterling Ball, CEO of Ernie Ball, the world’s leading maker of premium guitar strings, sits down with C|Net to discuss his decision to wipe Microsoft from the company and use Open Source Software (OSS).

Bottom line: Microsoft via the BSA charged his company $100,000 in fines back in 2000 and made a “case study” about his company not being in compliance. He decided that this was no way to treat a customer and wiped Microsoft from his company (totally and completely).

Few interesting tidbits:

1. Use of thin-terminals where possible — was able to use older computers that were made “obsolete” by Windows 2000.

2. Centralized administration — IT staff can troubleshoot a significant amount of problems without roaming around the entire company. Heck, they can troubleshoot from anywhere in the world via SSH

3. Ernie Ball saved $80,000 instantly when deciding to change over from Microsoft, and is now much further ahead financially due to the decision

4. Claims less support calls, no virus issues, lower IT costs, job-customized desktops — his example — don’t need a web browser? you don’t get a web browser. Desktops only get the apps they need to do their job.

In anycase, it is very cool to see a non-tech company switched completely over to OSS and able to thrive in the marketplace.

Well its been a while since I did a FreeBSD update …

I have been using FreeBSD now as my primary OS for about a month. It is setup as a fully graphical box. It was originally setup as a server, text only box and has been converted over to a workstation. It is setup to update software on a nightly basis using the very useful ports system. The bottom line — everything just works. I can do all I need to do on the Internet (web browsing, email, instant messaging, ftp, etc..), word processing, desktop publishing (scribus), listen to music, watch DVDs, play a handful of games (I’ll admit, I use my Windows box to play StarCraft still…) and I am as productivty (perhaps more so) than on my W2K machine.

Yesterday I purchased a new keyboard (my puppy chewed the cord on my old keyboard) and was able to map all the extended multimedia keys to applications. This is pretty nice — click a few multimedia keys and trigger my apps. Infact, I ended up making my task bar hidden on default to free up more screen for applications. (virtual desktop switching, music selection, volume control and common application launching can all be done with one key press.. very nice)

I did find an interesting post on the BSD Forums website regarding installing a Windows server versus a FreeBSD server. It is attached for your viewing pleasure.
(more…)

Here is an interesting article that talks about Microsoft, worms/viruses, EULAs, and lots of other tid bits that lead up to the MSBlaster worm. The article is also attached.
(more…)