Showing headlines posted by jhansonxi

I use XP in VMware Player to run some CAD applications on my Ubuntu system. I don't actually have to use XP for them as they function under Wine but I've been too busy to reinstall them and recreate their configurations. This setup works more or less but there are a few bugs and performance problems I've had to find workarounds for.

Given the prevalence of DirectX nowadays, we tend to forget that 10 years ago an all-out war was being waged between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics in the field of 3D APIs. The two companies were both trying to win over developers, with Microsoft using its financial muscle and SGI relying on its experience and its reputation in the field of real-time 3D.

The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.

Microsoft Windows never lets us down when it comes to BSOD amusement and at the 2008 Summer Olympic Opening Ceremonies it struck again.

[Here is a link to the pic they mention - Scott]

OpenOffice is much more than a simple alternative to Microsoft Office... Here, we’ll show you some simple tips and tricks so that you can use OpenOffice in the easiest and most efficient way possible

Normally all applications should be installed using your distro's package manager in order to set up dependencies correctly (like libraries). Once in a while you may encounter a problem with either a broken package database or synchronization problem due to hardware faults or naughty user behavior (like deletion of an application's files manually). The solution to a broken package problem is to first let the package manager try to fix it. But there are limits to what kind of a mess they can fix and sometimes you have to tread into the risky world of tool abuse to get the job done.

I set up a lot of PCs and while I have a fast 10Mbs Internet connection I wanted to utilize my faster internal network bandwidth better. With a new distro release it's less important as most of what I need is on the CD but as updates are released I end up downloading increasing amounts of data for each install. I've been doing lazy tricks like copying /var/cache/apt/archives to a network-shared directory but it's sloppy and multiple versions of packages accumulate. Setting up local repository was the answer for me.

.Microsoft Corp. withdrew its $42.3 billion bid to buy Yahoo Inc. on Saturday, scrapping an attempt to snap up the tarnished Internet icon in hopes of toppling online search and advertising leader Google Inc. The decision to walk away from the deal came after last-ditch efforts to negotiate a mutually acceptable sale price proved unsuccessful.

In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library's book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible. Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.

In this interview, the CEO of Epic Games (Unreal Tournament, etc.) predicts the game engines of the future may be using software rendering due to increasing CPU performance which eliminates the need for an API. GPUs are evolving into generic array processors which could even run the Linux kernel some day.

157 software tools. No fees. No expiration dates. No problems. Sometimes even no downloads. No kidding.

"Hear what Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates had to say during his last official visit to the UK before he 'retires' later this year. IT PRO attended the special event hosted by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and, after Gates had done his thing there was a Q&A session with the billionaire and industry figurehead." And also note how some of his answers match up rather nicely with F/OSS.

So, E-Lead will apparently be showing off a new UMPC that looks (not-so-) surprisingly like the Eee PC that everyone has fallen in love with. The main differences are the lack of flash memory, a different distro of Linux, and some sort of weird input interface.

University of Washington - A former assistant professor from Harvard, now at UofW, Dr. William Stein, and several students, have created a new open-source complex math solving tool called Sage. It is an Internet-based graphical tool which allows the user to do basically anything mathematically, from "mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming."

The Motion Picture of Association of America is urging some of the nation's largest universities to deploy custom software designed to pinpoint students who may be using the schools' networks to illegally download pirated movies. A closer look at the MPAA's software, however, raises some serious privacy and security concerns for both the entertainment industry and the schools that choose to deploy the technology.

I was thinking of ignoring the Black Friday sales this year as it's annoying to have to get up really early, stand in line freezing for hours, fight my way into the store along with a few hundred other people, get 1/10th of what I wanted, then spend another hour in the check-out line. But then I spent Wednesday night stuck at my office because a large snowstorm had blocked all the roads and they weren't be plowed out until the following afternoon. So to pass the time I started checking out the leaked BF advertisements to see what was available and I decided to try my luck at the Staples store in Alpena.

DivX, Inc. today announced it has acquired MainConcept AG, a leading provider of H.264 and other high-quality video technologies for the broadcast, film, consumer electronics and computer software markets. The acquisition is a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $22 million with additional payments of up to approximately $6 million upon the achievement by MainConcept of certain product development goals and certain financial milestones during 2008.

In this review several IM clients (including the open source Jabber) are compared by protocol, security, and licensing.

Sacramento (CA) – A new California study has found that several electronic voting machines have serious security vulnerabilities. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen commissioned the study which pitted two hacker teams, better known as “Red Teams” against voting machines manufactured by Diebold, Hart and Sequoia. The hackers found several security problems and were able to change firmware, access the election database and even open up the machines without detection.

Crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a way to move sideways on a swing, a technique for exercising cats using a laser pointer — these are among the inventions patented in the United States over the years. Now Congress is trying to cut down on poor-quality or downright ridiculous patents, and at the same time adapt the patent system to a high-tech era in which computers and other electronic devices may contain thousands of patentable parts.