Showing headlines posted by dave

While some in the Linux community are scratching their heads over the latest acquisition by Mandriva, one prominent member has a notion what the French distribution company is doing, and wholeheartedly approves. In fact, it could be the beginning of a whole new kind of of Mandriva distribution.

A new laboratory has opened in Manchester that will allow government departments and local authorities to trial open source software in confidence in an independent test environment. Cheshire County Council is the first public sector organisation to use the facility at the National Computing Centre's (NCC) headquarters to conduct a trial for a joint open source and proprietary desktop platform.

I've been working on a Linux Tips column for an upcoming issue of PC World--a much tougher assignment than my monthly Free Agent ramble, for two reasons: First, I've got only one magazine page to work with, so I'm a bit restricted in what I can tackle. Second, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of our magazine's readers run Windows, not Linux. Since we do our darnedest to make every page of PC World engaging to our readers, I'm out to craft a Linux column that might prove relevant to those who are still computing Bill Gates-style.

New Education Information System will be set up in 10,000 schools. Not a snub to Microsoft, official says.

Using a combination of Linux, solar- and pedal-powered batteries, and wireless network links, ActionAid and Inveneo have completed the first stage of a project to provide telecommunications and Internet services to an area of Uganda that doesn't have any formal infrastructure.

Performance Doubled and J2EE Support Added in Response to Rapid Industry and Community Adoption From Apache, JBoss, Sun Microsystems, Inc., TIBCO

How does Linux compare on a large scale to a well-proven commercial UNIX product?

Welcome to our first issue of Fedora Weekly News.

The UK government is backing a National Computing Centre (NCC) test laboratory that aims to prove the viability of open source software applications and configurations for public sector organisations.

In 2002, Portland, Ore.'s Sunset Presbyterian Church had a 200+-page Web site that contained mainly static content about the church, its ministries, and events. While many people were using the Web site and submitting content for it, the all-volunteer team maintaining it, of which I was a member, was overworked. Half of our time was spent editing existing pages and removing old content. Everything was done by hand: creating pages, uploading them to the site via FTP, and checking them against the site's style guidelines. All new volunteers required lots of training to become fully contributing members. Our team needed to find a way to become more efficient.

Fast-Growing Computing Platform Ideal for Wall St. Trading Applications

'Painless' migration saves Johannesburg BRS call centre as much as R2000 per machine and cuts downtime and virus risk.

Michael Robertson has given up day-to-day control of Linspire and is leaving the company in the hands of new CEO Kevin Carmony. Robertson said, on his blog, that he wants to spend more time with his two other companies, Mp3tunes.com and Sipphone.com, which allows customers to make free long distance phone calls. However, Robertson says he will continue to advise Linspire on strategic matters.

You don't have to run Microsoft's omnipresent OS, but why should you try an alternative? For many years there have been several operating systems to choose from, but the newest ones – those based on a Linux kernel – have usually been hard to use, at least for the average user. Times have definitely changed. Get your hands on a recent version of, say, Xandros Desktop and you’d almost swear you'd been working with it forever.

As information technology becomes more pervasive, the issues of communication between information-processing machines and people becomes increasingly important. Up to now such communication has been almost entirely by means of video screens. Speech, which is by far the most widely used and natural means of communication between people, is an obvious possible substitute. However, this deceptively simple means of exchanging information is, in fact, extremely complicated. Festival Speech Synthesis System aims to make things a little easier on interface developers.

The use of Linux and virtualization makes more sense everyday.

Unisys has introduced its "Real Time Capacity" (RTC) series of ES7000 servers -- for customers running Intel-based servers on Windows or Linux, the servers provide the ability to scale their computing power as their business needs evolve, officials said. Each ES7000 RTC series server is shipped with surplus capacity that can be activated -- and paid for -- when and if needed.

With Version 3.9 of the Live CD Linux Knoppix only recently completed, the next one is already in the offing. In time for the event LinuxTag 2005, which will commence this Wednesday in Karlsruhe, the developer Klaus Knopper will be releasing the Version 4.0 of his Linux system, which can be booted and operated directly from CD. It is based on the recently released Debian 3.1 (Sarge). Knoppix was expanded compared with the state of release of Sarge by the Version 3.4.1 of the Unix/Linux desktop KDE. As a further desktop the Version 2.8 of GNOME is included, with the open-source Office Suite OpenOffice available in the beta version of the 2.0 edition.

I just finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and like pretty much everyone else who has read that book, I was awestruck and inspired. Like a couple of other authors before me (see end of blog for list), I’m seeking to apply Diamond’s analysis to the question of which type of software will prevail: open source or commercial software.

The art of hiding information from anyone except from the intended receiver has been used for many centuries. Hiding information by embedding it in other, seemingly innocuous information is known as steganography, a word that means "covered writing" in Greek. Today, steganography applications can hide one file within another on a computer. Steganography applications are available on many different platforms, including Windows, Linux, and *BSD.