The world's first UMTS/Edge smartphone reference design based on the Linux operating system has been unveiled. Developed by a group of companies including Samsung Electronics and Infineon Technologies, the platform is designed to incorporate advanced 3G and multimedia services such as UMTS/Edge dual mode voice calls, video calls and video streaming.

Cisco's IT Manager Manning estimates that it takes a company approximately one desktop administrator to support 40 Windows PCs, while one administrator can support between 200 and 400 Linux desktops.

First of all, to briefly identify myself to my audience, I will be 59 years of age very soon. I was first introduced to computers in 1985 while employed by IBM Corporation. I still have a fondness for DOS and I never cared too much for Windows from its beginning. I discovered Linux about the same time the beta release of Windows 95 (Chicago) came out. I couldn't do anything with Linux then, but my dislike of what Microsoft had to offer kept me coming back for another look. Finally, I think, around 1998 I successfully got a distribution of Slackware up and running on a 386 SX25.

Sun Microsystems has raised the possibility that it might offer customers its own database, a move that could trigger displeasure at Oracle but curry favor with open-source advocates.

This article presents an approach to combine the best of the open source and proprietary software development worlds

It just isn't fair that Windows users get all the viruses. I mean really, shouldn't Linux users be in on the fun as well? Well... thanks to the folks running the Wine project, Linux users can "catch the virus bug" too -- sort of.

What are we to make of IBM's silence about its desktop Linux policy?

A while back, chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano challenged the company to move its desktops to Linux by the end of 2005. What's clear is that this hasn't happened and doesn't look like happening. And there's probably a good reason.

BusinessWeek: Linus Torvalds once led a ragtag band of software geeks. Not anymore. Here's an inside look at how the unusual Linux business model increasingly threatens Microsoft.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39184876,00.htm

The year of the penguin, some people hailed 2004 at the turn of the year. And in many ways it was.