Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The real enemy of open source remains what it has always been. Not Apple Inc. The copyright industries. Music companies. Movie companies. TV companies. Radio companies. Book companies. Magazine companies. Newspaper companies. (Often, now, the same company.) Media has feared the Web since the day it was spun. The DMCA and No Electronic Theft Act were aimed at the Internet.

Dell today flipped the switched and is now officially offering consumer desktop and notebook PCs with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. Two notebooks and one desktop join two desktop systems in Dell’s open-source product portfolio.

When a genre of software is estimated to account for 15 percent of the total revenue generated by a given sector of the IT industry and that total is $A3.5 billion, then it is time to sit up and take notice. Which is what the government of the Australian state of Queensland has done. Queensland, which styles itself as the "smart state", has provided funding to research company Longhaus to "identify the current and growing capabilities within Queensland's ICT industry" of the open source sector.

Yahoo Inc.'s board of directors landed its first endorsement from a major institutional shareholder Friday, giving it momentum in the fight with investor-agitator Carl Icahn over control of the Internet company. Bill Miller, who as Legg Mason Capital Management's chief investment officer controls 4.4% of the stock in Yahoo, said he would vote to keep the current board in place instead of backing a dissident slate nominated by Icahn.

Software installation, deployment, and configuration can be a headache and a time sink for systems administrators. To ease the process, JumpBox delivers preconfigured Web apps that run as virtual appliances on any machine, across platforms, irrespective of operating system. A JumpBox contains a streamlined Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution stripped down to running only a particular Web app and its dependencies, including a Web server (generally Apache), a database server (generally MySQL or PostgreSQL), a scripting language (such as PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby), and other essential libraries. There are preconfigured JumpBoxes available for blogging software like WordPress, content management systems like Drupal and Movable Type, wikis like MediaWiki and TikiWiki, bug tracking apps like Mantis and Bugzilla, revision control software like Trac and Subversion, customer relationship management (CRM) applications like vTiger and SugarCRM, and more.

I was going to explore the new trend of green IT or perhaps talk about the morality of threatening or blackmailing (your choice) software companies into fixing security holes, but an article in Computerworld about a hospital selecting a Linux-based email system with compatible features to Microsoft’s Exchange brought back to my mind a discussion I have had with others about the real choices there are in today's software wilderness. What started the discussion was my thought that one does not have to look too hard to find a pundit saying you have options other than Vista. As a long-time Linux user and evangelist, I knew this to be truth, but with an asterisk.

Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation says Linux is the platform of choice for the mobile and embedded platforms. Zemlin to present “The State of Mobile Linux” at OSCON. Linux is here to stay in the mobile and embedded worlds,

Linus Torvalds, an acknowledged godfather of the open-source movement, was just 21 when he changed the world by writing Linux Today, 17 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones. In fact ask yourself this: if Linux didn't exist, would Google, Facebook, PHP, Apache, or MySQL?

Over time, organizations replicate, migrate, or add complexity within database systems, often times losing control of the quality of their data. When applications begin to fail because of invalid, corrupted, or out-of-date data, the free, GPL-licensed Talend Open Profiler can give data analysts, database administrators (DBA), and business users the ability to research data structures and improve data quality. Through the use of Open Profiler, users can be alerted to hidden inconsistencies and incompatibilities between data sources and target applications. Through data analysis, business users and technical analysts can communicate both data structure and content needs.

The KOffice team announces the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.

Hector Ruiz is out as chief executive at Advanced Micro Devices as the struggling chip maker on Thursday reported its seventh consecutive quarter in the red to the tune of a $1.19 billion loss in the second quarter of this year. Dirk Meyer, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD's president and chief operating officer, has been elected by AMD's board to replace Ruiz as CEO, according to the company. Ruiz replaced Jerry Sanders as CEO in 2002 upon the AMD co-founder's retirement. Ruiz will stay on in a director's capacity at AMD, he said on Thursday's Q2 earnings call, where the news was announced at about 2 p.m., PT.

We love it when Batman defeats the Joker because we love to see the bad guys get their just desserts. But as enjoyable as it is seeing fictional villains lose, it’s far more satisfying when the bad guys get their comeuppance in real life. This is what just happened in a small but hopefully decisive way to the infamous Santa Cruz Operation.

In case you haven't noticed, the economy is collapsing. You can't afford to drive anywhere, and, even if you could, you may not have a GM car to drive there for much longer. Some of you may be losing your houses, and the mortgage companies that gave you that mortgage in the first place? IndyMac went down late last week and now the question of the day is which major national bank will follow it down.

With broadband speeds in South Africa improving at a steady pace (although still pricey) listening to commercial radio on PCs and laptops is becoming a lot easier. The problem is, however, that if you’re a Linux user most of the live streams provided by South Africa’s commercial radio stations are provided in Windows Media Format (.asx).

Even though SCO has suffered another legal defeat, the company looks like it has enough willpower, if not sense, to keep its legal losing streak going. On July 16th, Judge Dale Kimball ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell and said that the maverick Unix company owed Novell $2.5-million for its Unix deals, and, oh, by the way, Novell, not SCO, really owns Unix. With no IP rights to Unix, it would appear that SCO's lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and Linux were done. Alas, the experts say "no."

Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they're not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation.

A vendor of digital check scanners has updated its closed Linux drivers, releasing drivers for recent versions of Red Hat and Ubuntu. Digital Check can also supply custom drivers for device makers and OEMs, it says. Check scanners emerged after events on Sept. 11, 2001 grounded all commercial airplane flights in the U.S. for a week, explained Digital Check's VP of product management, Bruce Rennecker. "All checks in the U.S. stopped moving. The banking system had shut down. The Fed immediately notified banks not to worry, and to keep operating until they got trucks lined up. But that experience incented the government to stop the archaic practice of moving paper physically.

There have been several posts here about Linux in the law office, both as a server environment and as a workstation. My main concern with it on the desktop has always been the lack of native Linux applications that would be needed for lawyers, such as time and billing, financials, and case management.

The XFS filesystem is known to give good performance when storing and accessing large files. The design of XFS is extent-based, meaning that the bytes that comprise a file's contents are stored in one or more contiguous regions called extents. Depending on your usage patterns, some of the files contained in an XFS filesystem can become fragmented. You can use the xfs_fsr utility to defragment these files, thus improving system performance when it accesses them.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has labeled makers of the OpenBSD operating system a "bunch of masturbating monkeys", as part of a wider critique of what he said was self-centered behavior in the IT security industry. In an e-mail to the Linux kernel developer mailing list, Torvalds said a section of the security industry was dedicated to finding bugs in software only to publicize their findings and gain notoriety. The row erupted in the Gmane mailing list after a developer for the PaX Team, which patches the Linux kernel, accused Torvalds and other top Linux kernel developers of "covering up [the] security impact of bugs" by not clearly labeling them as security flaws.