Showing headlines posted by tadelste

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community.

Technalign, the official distributor for MEPIS Linux, said it plans to implement a serial number system for the retail version that will prevent unauthorized users from downloading free updates from Technalign's repository servers.

The team behind the GStreamer media application framework, a library for developers, recently launched its stable series with version 0.10.0, and announced plugins to support files protected by digital rights management (DRM) software and for playback of the widely used MP3 format.

The State Information Technology Agency will announce its preferred list of suppliers for South Africa's biggest open source tender on 14 February, two weeks after its published target date.

Improved performance through more competitive use of IT is what 2006 holds for chief information officers, new survey findings suggest.

Carried out by Gartner Executive Programmes, a unit of Gartner Inc, the report titled Growing IT's Contribution: The 2006 CIO Agenda, says CIOs will come under increased pressure in 2006 to perform, while making their IT organisation more externally focused.

Opponents of software patents in Europe knew this summer's overwhelming European Parliament vote against a patent directive was not the end of the fight. They are now gearing up for another round, as pro-patent lobbyists come out of their corner swinging.

Combination of ARM1176JZF-S Processor, Plus ARM Artisan Advantage Libraries and Memories Achieves More Than 750 MHz Performance for Next-Generation Digital Home Products and High-End Consumer Devices

Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software maker, will spend $120 million a year on an advertising campaign to fight its image as "a huge American company." The campaign, using television, print and the Internet, highlights Microsoft's education and economic development projects in 32 countries, including France and Taiwan, according to group advertising manager Mike Lucero. Actor William Macy of the movie "Fargo" narrates the ads.

The company's 63,000 employees are based in 102 countries, 37 percent of them outside of the United States.

[Ed: Thanks to peragrin for this story -tadelste]

At last week's launch of the first draft for the revised GNU General Public Licence (GPL3), the Debian project was out in force. Besides Branden Robinson, the Debian Project Leader, Debian members at the meeting included Don Armstrong, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bruce Perens, and several Debian members from the Boston area. In the aftermath of the meeting, a consensus is still emerging, but Debian members seem to regard GPL3 generally favorably, although some have concerns about exact wording and the implications of some parts of the draft.

If you're doing things yourself, though, or you have one of those rare hosts, then you might find that you need to weigh up the positives and negatives of different database software.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has revealed that it is working on a large content management system based on the open source application server Zope.

Ever since Linux came to the fore in the late '90s, people have had widely differing opinions about which distribution makes the best Windows desktop replacement. To his credit, DesktopLinux.com editor and inveterate operating system tester Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols isn't ducking this sticky question.

Users who signed up for the beta of Version 1.5 a few months ago are automatically receiving upgrades to the 1.5.0.1 beta. The rest of us get it later this month.

Niels Provos' Systrace is a utility that monitors and controls what an application can access on a system by creating and enforcing access policies for system calls. For the Linux crowd, it's something like the US National Security Agency's SE Linux, but it's more flexible and, if used properly, it can improve a system's overall security by "sandboxing" untrusted applications and users.

John Battelle spotted a post from Chris Marino at Tumbling Duke that has the worrisome suggestion that Google is allowing third parties to set cookies based on searches people do. But I dropped an IM to Dave Naylor, who immediately spotted this being due to Firefox prefetching.

A Taiwanese software company specializing in DVD software and other home computing software is shipping a packaged Linux-based entertainment OS. PowerCinema Linux, which targets device makers and PC integrators, can turn resource-constrained embedded devices into powerful multimedia devices, according to the company.

[Ed: This is a repeat from another publication posted for the benefit of anyone who missed it previously. -tadelste]

The CEI-430 is the Industry's First ARINC 429/717 Interface for PC/104-Plus

John "Maddog" Hall will consider parallels between open source software and music, addressing the risk that patents "kill off ideas instead of promoting them" at this year's Australasian Linux conference, to be held in Dunedin this week. "Odd things about business in the large corporate world will (hopefully) be explained," he says, including "companies who really want to do the right thing, but cannot. "The talk will, of course, partly be tongue-in-cheek, partly be around my collection of automated musical instruments, and partly have a real message," he says.

The image filter GREYCstoration may not have a name that rolls off the tongue, but it can tackle a variety of image problems -- including noise reduction, compression artifact removal, and inpainting -- with a quality that outperforms its commercial software competitors.

While most of these "real time" products achieve their scorching performance by moving data into memory, one high-performance product -- the StreamBase "stream-processing engine" from StreamBase Systems Inc. in Lexington, Mass. -- just grabs incoming data and analyzes it as it flies by.