Showing headlines posted by tadelste

H&R Block acknowledged last week that it had mailed unsolicited packages, containing their TaxCut software, to former customers early in December and that some of these packages had the former client’s social security number (SSN) embedded in the source code on the mailing label, CIO-today.com news reports. This kind of software mailing is a common marketing practice in many industries, according to WTVQ.com in Lexington, Kentucky.

Sharp used embedded Linux along with Devicescape's WiFi stack to build a 32-inch flat-panel TV/PC display with a built-in 802.11a/b/g wireless media adapter. The IT-32X2 has a built-in HDTV tuner, and USB ports for viewing photos from digital cameras or USB mass storage devices.

Mainsoft Corp. and IBM Wednesday announced an effort to work together to extend the Linux ecosystem by helping Microsoft customers move to Linux.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded a US$1.24 million three-year grant to Stanford University and software vendors Coverity Inc. and Symantec Corp. The grant will fund daily security audits and analysis of more than 40 open-source projects including Apache, Linux, Mozilla, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Most people know that you can use OpenOffice 2.0, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, to open up a Microsoft Office file and then save it in OpenOffice's native format—a zipped file that includes the document's contents as an XML file conforming to the OASIS OpenDocument standard. This works for Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. (See the XML.com article Opening Open Formats with XSLT for an example of the kind of simple new application that this makes possible: a stylesheet that extracts the slide titles and notes from a slideshow file and stores them in a single file that you can use as speaker notes when giving a presentation.) After opening one of these file types, you can even export them to an Acrobat PDF file.

This time out, the old C hacker drags himself into the 1990s to solve Sudoku puzzles.

The Damn Small Linux project released version 2.1 of its 50 megabyte LiveCD Linux distribution Tuesday. The changelog notes 31 key feature updates in v2.1, including new SATA boot-time support, new GUI controls, and much more.

Most road warriors today either carry a notebook, a PDA or a smartphone. These devices cost a lot of money so it is quite difficult for most folks to be mobile always. The most people can go is to access WAP sites using their mobile phones. Unfortunately, WAP sites are very limited and not to forget, telcos charge an arm and a leg for data access outside of their portals. I just wish that they give you an unlimited and free package during off-peak hours. This will surely encourage the masses to go online even by just browsing WAP sites.

I spent Tuesday afternoon driving down to Mountain View, Calif., about 30 to 40 minutes drive south of San Francisco, to visit Mozilla Corp., the shop behind the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail program that I've written about several times. I wanted to get some background about how this small firm, wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, goes about its business, and about what it plans to do next with its two core releases.

What's the first thing that you do once you've logged onto Linux? Is it to manually start up a processes such as Apache or MySQL, or even start your network connection? Or do you have to stop applications that have started up without your telling them to, and which are overloading your machine? If you have unwanted processes starting at boot time, or find yourself starting necessary services manually, let's make your life a little bit easier by introducing you the world of Linux services.

[Ed: From the Feel Good Department -tadelste]

When the Mars rovers blasted into space to begin a 60-million mile journey to the Red Planet, Linux was there to help NASA get them off the ground. In fact, some form of Linux has been present at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., for years, assisting researchers with projects that range from unmanned space flight to deep space exploration

The message is that spliting the Free Software movement in 1998 to start the "open source" initiative was indeed a mistake. This is something I believed in for some time already, but articles like these make me get that "told you so" feeling. They strongly reassert my view on the whole "open source" thing.

Above All Software, Comtec and Pacific Edge Software Among First to Extend Windows Solutions to Linux/eServer Platforms

This time out, the old C hacker drags himself into the 1990s to solve Sudoku puzzles.

Server and services giant IBM made a big $1 billion bet on Linux back at the end of 1999, and has made many billions of dollars since then and amassed a customer base of 12,000 companies who have deployed Linux solutions using Big Blue's hardware, software, and services. Linux is undeniably one of the key drivers for the company's growth, and to that end, IBM has bestowed on commercial Linux distributors Red Hat and Novell the titles of strategic alliance partner, vaulting them to the status of being among the top 10 partners that IBM has among a group of about 100 such partners.

Today's "big thaw" item will shock some, but Erast Benson posted on the OpenSolaris forums yesterday with news that he's got Mono working on the Nexenta distribution of OpenSolaris. He's posted a screenshot to prove it.

Leading Retail Technology Publication RIS News Includes Novell in Its Software Leaderboard 2005

At Gartner's recent 2005 Open Source Summit, Mark Driver, a Gartner vice president and research director and the official host for the conference, made some interesting projections about open source software in IT. I spoke with Driver and discussed not only the expansion of OSS into the IT world, but his plans for future conferences. In the interest of brevity and time, we agreed to utilize portions of the supplied text of his talks to supplement his answers.

The Meraka Institute will take over the running of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa as the organisation's secretariat heads to South Africa. The handover will take place at the Idlelo 2 digital commons conference in Kenya in February.

Never-ending patch cycle

Microsoft released two more critical patches on Tuesday - days after it released an emergency fix for a critical WMF vulnerability that has been exploited by hackers and virus writers. The two latest updates - which, unlike the WMF patch, came out as part of Microsoft's regular Patch Tuesday update cycle - fix a flaw in the way Microsoft Windows processes embedded web fonts (MS06-002) and a Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF) decoding vulnerability (MS06-003).

Exploitation of these vulnerabilities creates a means for hackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service on a vulnerable system. The earlier WMF vulnerability remains the easiest to exploit, but security vendors warn that the embedded web-forms flaw also caries a computer worm risk.