Competition Authorities and Search

Government competition agencies are increasingly focused on Google’s growing power in search and online advertising. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission have all determined that Google is dominant in certain markets, including search advertising. In late 2008 the DOJ was prepared to go to court to block Google’s attempt to partner with its largest search rival, Yahoo!. Last year the DOJ told a federal court that Google’s book search plan is anticompetitive in several respects. (One big problem is that Google would help itself to essentially exclusive rights to tens of millions of books—effectively locking out everyone else.) Last week the DOJ reiterated that view in court, even after Google had an opportunity to address the DOJ’s concerns. This week came news that the European Commission is investigating various aspects of Google’s conduct, including claims of retaliation, exclusivity and manipulation of search results to disadvantage rivals. The European Commission is likely to treat these cases quite seriously, given that Google’s share of search and search advertising is north of 95% in many European countries.

Tiny Core- A 10 MB Tiny Linux Desktop

Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux GUI Desktop. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk. The core runs entirely in ram and boots very quickly . Also offered is Micro Core a 6 MB image that is the console based engine of Tiny Core. CLI versions of Tiny Core’s program allows the same functionality of Tiny Core’s extensions only starting with a console based system.

LXer Weekly Roundup for 28-Feb-2010

LXer Feature: 28-Feb-2010

In this week’s LXWR we have a Ubuntu fanboy comes clean, A Windows metrics source lies about his identity, is Linux Distro-hopping a Thing of the Past?, SCALE 8x: Review Of My Road Trip To L.A. and a whole lot more.

Collection of extensions for Chrome browser | Week9-10

This is a collection of Chrome extensions for week9, maybe for some of these extensions you diden`t hear about before.

Archbang is now available with an installer

Archbang, like Crunchbang Linux – but Arch and Openbox, is now available for the first time with an installer.

Anarchy in the EULA

I’ve been an avid Linux user for quite some time. In all that time, I have toyed with making my own distribution, and for me there were many problems. One of those problems was honestly wanting to maintain ownership and control of my code. I felt it would be bad policy to release an OpenSource system that contained a large amount of proprietary code… even if the software remained kostenlos. To that end, I use my code on my own machine, and simply do not release it. Others aren’t quite as thoughtful. The distribution that is currently bringing this to mind is Igelle.

Novell: Linux Breaks Even as Microsoft Deal Revenues Wane

Novell executives said this week that it’s seven-year-old Linux business has finally broken even — making good on promises made a year ago. But it hasn’t been an easy trek to begin making money off of Linux, and one factor may way against Novell’s Linux business going forward: The waning revenue from its landmark 2006 agreement with Microsoft to begin reselling Linux support subscriptions. This week, Novell reported its first-quarter fiscal 2010 earnings for the quarter ending on Jan. 31. Net revenues came in at $202 million, a decline from the $215 million reported for the first quarter of 2009. On the net income side, things are a bit brighter. Novell reported GAAP net income of $20 million, or $0.06 per share, an increase over the $11 million or $0.03 per share it reported for the first quarter of 2009.

LinuxCertified Announces its next Linux Kernel Internals Training course

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides attendees with experience in creating Linux kernel source code within various subsystems of the Linux kernel. This course teaches attendees to acquaints developers with the fundamental subsystems, data structures, and API of the Linux kernel

This class is scheduled for March 8th – March 9th, 2010.

Diving into WebKit

First of all, I want to thank Haiku, Inc. for giving me the opportunity to concentrate fully for a while on the WebKit port and browser! This is an awesome chance that I intend to make full use of. At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I’ve seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable. After we upgraded to a newer WebKit version as the basis for the port, the frequent random crashes have almost disappeared and I saw only one crash in three days. Compared to one every few minutes before.