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Issue 116

From Issue #116
December 2003

Dec 01, 2003  By Staff
 in
diff -u, Atanks and more!
LJ Index—December 2003

  1. Fine, in Euros, charged by the city of Munich against The SCO Group for making unsubstantiated claims about Linux: 10,000

  2. Number of PC Club stores expected to stock computers with LindowsOS preinstalled: 51

  3. Number of years ibiblio.org has been distributing and hosting with Linux: 12

  4. Percentage of surveyed UK Web surfers who would rather give up mobile phones than the Web: 40

  5. Estimated amount in billions of dollars of the Linux server market in 2002: 2

  6. Estimated amount in billions of dollars of the Linux server market in 2007: 15

  7. Projected Linux installation percentage on PCs sold in India by March 2004: 10

  8. Indian percentage of the offshore IT services market: 60

  9. Estimated annual size in billions of dollars of the offshore IT market: 16

  10. Rupert Murdoch's predicted approximate price for a personal video recorder (such as a TiVo) within one year: 0

  11. Price Echostar (DishTV) says it plans to charge for its PVR if customers sign up for two years, plus certain programming packages: 0

  12. Average annual earnings (EBIT) percentage growth target for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.: 20

  13. Billions of dollars in worldwide B2B transactions in 1999: 145

  14. Projected trillions of dollars in B2B transactions in 2004: 7.29

  15. US percentage of B2B transactions in 1999: 39

  16. Projected US percentage of B2B transactions on the Net in 2004: 39

  17. Percentage of all developers surveyed who expect to write Linux applications in the next year: 59

  18. Percentage of Linux developers who say the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit will affect their plans: 6

  19. Microsoft's projected Linux server growth percentage from July 2003–June 2004: 24

  20. Microsoft's projected Windows server growth percentage in the same period: 9.5

Sources

1: Heise Online

2: Lindows.com

3: ibiblio.org

4: the inquirer

5, 6: Giga Information Group, via Veritas

7: Red Hat

8, 9: Gartner Group

10–12: Reuters

13–16: Gartner Group

17, 18: Evans Data Corp.

19, 20: Jupiter Research

by Doc Searls

Krystal Drop: krystaldrop.sourceforge.net

by David Bandel

Krystal Drop is a game similar to Tetris in that you line up several krystals in a row. However, the alignment is vertical, and you have to pop all the similar colored crystals around the vertically aligned krystals. This is more difficult than it sounds. My games last only about a minute, but maybe I need a lot more practice. Requires: libSDL, libpthread, libSDL_image-1.2, libSDL_ttf-2.0, libGL, libSDL_mixer-1.2, libxml2, libz, libstdc++, libm, libgcc_s, glibc, libX11, libXext, libdl, libjpeg, libpng, libfreetype, libvorbisfile, libvorbis, libogg and libsmpeg.

They Said It

by Doc Searls

They are smoking crack.

—Linus Torvalds, referring to The SCO Group's claim that Linux contains a million lines of code copied from UNIX.

Linux is not a product. Rather, Linux is a collection of software components, individually crafted by thousands of independent hands around the world, with each component changing and evolving on its own independent timetable.

To think of Linux as a product is to freeze an inherently dynamic thing in time and to close something that is inherently open. It cannot be done without losing something–and something significant at that.

No, Linux is not a product. It is a process.

—Ian Murdock, news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5057321.html

When I was in 5th grade, an argument about personal calculators broke out in the Letters to the Editor column of my local newspaper, an argument conducted with religious fervor. On one side were those who felt that calculators were, on the whole, a good tool and that students should be taught to use them. On the other side were those who felt that calculators were a crutch, that their use would pollute the minds of impressionable youth and that their appearance was a sure sign of The End Times.

What both optimists and pessimists believed, however, deep down, was that their opinions mattered. “Someday”, each of them thought, “someone is going to ask me what we should do about these here calculators.” What the adults didn't understand, but me and my 5th grade posse did, was that calculators, having arrived, were never going away.

—Clay Shirky, www.corante.com/many/20030701.shtml#46771

______________________

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