Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because "from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."

Although most Eee PC owners are satisfied with their $350 to $399 USD purchases, they have been faced with the prospect of voiding their warranty by simply removing two screws from the bottom access panel to upgrade the memory. ASUS covered one of the screws holding the access panel with a yellow "WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED" warranty sticker. As pointed out by Cliff Biffle, this action violated the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act with regards to "unacceptable tie-ins."

Cebu is scheduled to hold an international open source conference next year, following a visit from an open source advocate, the Cebu-based executive director of an information and communications technology group has said. Bonifacio Belen, executive director of the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (CEDF-IT), said the open source conference is slated for June 2008.

Addictive 3D games for Linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most are cross platform and all of them completely free. You don’t have to use ‘Wine’ to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.

Google has a preview release of Picasa 2.7 for Linux. The previous version launched last year didn't include the features from Picasa 2.5+ for Windows (like the Picasa Web integration), so this is a good opportunity to add these features to Linux. Here's what is new in Picasa 2.7 for Linux:

The best innovations tend to be cheap and disruptive. Hand in hand as they're usually found, these characteristics go some way to explaining why I like the EeePC (Asus's new laptop) so much. The other reasons are obvious, it's small, it's light, it has WiFi, Firefox and Open Office, and judging by the reactions of those who saw Paul and I with them at Bar Camp Leeds, it's cool enough for everyone to want one!

Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, talks to ZDNet U.K. about the security of Firefox and Internet Explorer, online privacy, and the future of open source.

Today, you will learn how to install Ubuntu Gutsy (as a second operating system) on your PlayStation 3 gaming console. For those of you who think for a second (and who are scared) that this will replace their PS3 operating system, well you guys are wrong, because this will NOT erase your PlayStation 3 native operating system (called XMB) and it will run as an alternative OS on your PS3 console. Ready? Are you excited? Let's go!

Wide-screen monitors are great for productivity, but they have a dark side, too: they tempt you into keeping dozens of Firefox tabs open at the same time. Before you know it, the page titles in a long row of tabs become indistinguishable. But the ChromaTabs extension has a novel solution to the problem: it renders each tab in a different color -- a unique color for each site that remains the same on every visit.

It's one thing for a vendor to claim that Linux is ready for the embedded development market. It's quite another to have a multi-year study involving hundreds of projects and over 1,300 developers report it. Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) has revealed in a new report how effective embedded Linux has been for developers to develop projects. The report contrasts the use of non-supported, roll your own Linux, supported Linux efforts, as well as proprietary embedded operating systems like Symbian and Windows CE.

E-mail clients are often loaded down with too many features. Rather than one big groupware package like Outlook or Evolution, sometimes a simple e-mail client is all you need. We look at three Linux e-mail-only clients and see how they fare against today's standards . The e-mail clients we'll look at include Balsa, KMail, and Sylpheed.

Moving to Linux used to be a big deal. Sure, it was cheaper, more reliable and more flexible — but who did you turn to when things went wrong? In an enterprise world that had grown up with the idea that Unix needed to be complex and expensive — and that Windows was a quick-and-dirty plan B — the idea of getting a robust, scalable operating system for free just didn't click for many years. Fortunately for Linux, the support structure that gradually built up around this rogue operating system — which is now the favourite son of one-time Unix diehards HP, IBM, Novell and Sun — has dispensed with that fear.

The kernel puts limits on which functions can be used from a loadable module. But instead of an all-or-none approach, one plan would create access control lists of which modules are allowed to use which functions. The idea behind this restriction is to place limits on the reach of modules and to provide a relatively well-defined module API.

A talking penguin is the latest Linux loving gadget to hit the market. For the £89.95, the Tux Droid will sit on your desk and, using open source software, will receive and interpret an array of information from the internet. This felt-covered, gorgeous-looking gadget uses wireless technology to fetch information. The wireless is enabled by a USB transmitter (which is, of course, designed to look like a fish), and which will transmit information to the penguin from anywhere in your home.

Earlier this week we pointed you to an interview with security guru Bruce Schneier, who has previously advised Lifehacker readers on how to pick secure passwords. Turns out he'll be visiting our shores as a keynote speaker at Linux.conf.au in January.

It has taken more than two years, but the One Laptop Per Child initiative has finally released its much-anticipated laptop: the OLPC XO-1. The XO-1 costs $200 each to donate, but for a limited time — until Dec. 31, 2007 — people can avail themselves of the "Give One, Get One" promotion to give a $399 donation ($200 of which is tax-deductible). This is certainly a different business model in this "me, me, me" holiday season: Instead of buying something for yourself, you buy technology for a child who needs it, with a fringe benefit of a gift laptop for your household.

While I was browsing through the recently posted distributions on some website in search for the newest and greatest, I ran into Paldo. Curious as I am, I’ve downloaded the iso and fired-up a vmware session just to see what’s up with this distribution. And was I impressed? Well, not that much but this one has a lot of potential and it might someday impress all of us. But let’s start with the beginning.

Nigerian schoolchildren no doubt appreciate the innovative little machines that are trickling into Africa via Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program. But IBM thinks the developing world needs a little more processing power to cross the digital divide--about 14,000 times more, by the company's estimation. The computer giant announced Tuesday it will donate one of its BlueGene/P supercomputers to the Center for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, South Africa.

[Only vaguely related to Linux, but good news nonetheless - Sander]

One question that people who don't know how open-source businesses work is: "How do you make money from open-source software?" SourceForge.net has a new answer to that question: sell services and support to customers using an eBay-like market. SourceForge.net, with millions of monthly visitors, is already one of the world's largest Web sites for open-source development and distribution. What it didn't have, though, was any way for its uses to cash in on their open-source projects. On Dec. 6, that changed forever. Today, SourceForge launched an online marketplace for technology professionals to buy and sell service and support for open-source software.

A recent Forbes review gushed over Zonbu's Linux-based Zonbox network PC. Joining the chorus of other positive reviews, in "Hassle-Free PC" Daniel Lyons writes that he was "blown away" by the performance, stability and ease of use of the eco-friendly, power-thrifty mini-PC. "Zonbu is riding two of tech's hottest trends: open-source software and 'cloud computing,'" writes Lyons. Later, after coming up with only one criticism (his printer wasn't supported), the reviewer concludes, "Zonbu can't edit movies or manage a big photo library, but as a second PC for the kids, the kitchen, or the weekend house where you just need to browse the Web, it's a killer product."