Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Cisco has announced an alternative to the Web-services protocol Soap--and made it open source. Cisco said its Etch messaging protocol will be more efficient than the Soap standard and the company will release the source code. A beta version of Etch will be launched this summer, as part of version 2.5 of the Cisco Unified Application Environment (CUAE). Within that environment, it will replace the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard, Soap, said Cisco, providing a more lightweight and faster interface, suitable for real-time interaction.

The idea of open-source hardware is slowly slowly but surely gaining traction. VIA Technologies, Inc., joined in on the fun today by unveiling an open source reference platform for low power notebooks, based on its own processor technology (obviously). The CAD files have been released under a Creative Commons license. The machine is tentatively named OpenBook.

On the eve of its first-ever developer conference, Google Inc. threw open the doors for its Google App Engine to all takers Tuesday and unveiled pricing details for the cloud-based development environment. Google's App Engine, which the company first announced in April, provides hosted dynamic Web serving, persistent storage, automatic scaling, a local development environment, and authentication and load balancing aimed at making it easier for developers to build Web applications.

As the popularity of blogs continues to rise, blogging software platforms continue to evolve. With the recent release of version 4.1, the popular Movable Type application offers improvements that allow bloggers to expand their control over the publishing process. Movable Type is professional open source blogging software developed by Six Apart, written in Perl, and released under the GNU GPL. It requires a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl (LAMP) server or an equivalent to run, and a mail server such as Sendmail or another SMTP-capable engine. The Apache server must be configured to execute CGI scripts. To start, you can try a functional online demo.

It seemed like such a great idea. Linux is moving from edge and departmental servers to the data center, so why not offer Linux data center automation, complete with virtualization Linux lifecycle management? Well, maybe it's still a great business idea, but Levanta wasn't able to make a go of it. Officially, there's still no word that the San Mateo, Calif.-based company is out of business, but former employees say that the company laid them off on April 1. The list of those who were fired ranges from clerical support to Madhur Kohli, the company's former vice president of engineering.

If your life is like mine, it's probably more complicated than it should be. There's that full time job, social events, and vacations to say nothing of various side businesses and their associated deadlines. The kids have Cub Scouts, soccer, and baseball. Since we homeschool, we have science club, field trips and play dates. And it seems that everyone we know has 2 email addresses and at least 3 phone numbers. Then there is the family budget, workout goals and the infamous Honey-Do List. This is a lot of information to keep track of.

You wouldn't know it by looking at the market today, but VIA Technologies was really the original mainstream company to be the proponent of the "mini-notebook" market that has become epitomized by the ASUS Eee PC. Last June VIA demonstrated and showed off a device called the VIA NanoBook at Computex in Taipei; essentially a very small form factor laptop with Windows XP on it. Looking at it next to the current generations of the Eee PC and you'd be hard pressed to find significant differences. The single area that VIA failed to address was actually PUSHING their devices into the market - we never really found them in the US and they never took off.

Ubuntu's deep software catalog, focus on usability and active community combine with long-term support to put desktop Linux's best face forward. Canonical has marshaled the best of what the open-source world has to offer in Ubuntu 8.04, a Linux-based operating system that's capable of mounting a serious challenge to Microsoft Windows on mainstream desktops and notebooks.

Anyone interested in writing academic and research papers knows that the process includes researching existing works, planning a research study, collecting and analyzing the results, and writing up the findings. In such papers, reference and citation information is essential. GPL-licensed Wikindx lets you store bibliographic references, quotations, and notes in a database, from which you can easily insert appropriate citations into a paper using its built-in Web-based word processor.

The KDE Project is happy to set the first beta of KDE 4.1, codenamed Caramel, free today. KDE 4.1 is intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users and we therefore respectfully request you to get testing Beta 1. Beta 1 is not ready for production use but is in wide use by KDE developers and is suitable for testing by Linux enthusiasts and KDE fans.

These days, business and free software co-exist with little friction. Although you still find some members of the free software community who automatically view business with suspicion, for the most part the community considers the multibillion dollar open source industry as a validation of its beliefs. Business and free software are so closely intertwined that kernel developers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton are employed by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium of corporations. But in recent months, this cooperation is showing signs of becoming strained.

Google is this week expected to release the long-awaited update to its Web Toolkit (GWT) adding support for Java 5 Standard Edition language features to speed development and performance of JavaScript. The search giant has also outlined plans for successive versions of its web toolkit. Version 1.6 is scheduled for the third quarter, under a planned quarterly cycle for "minor" updates, with a version 2.0 featuring bigger changes further out.

AirRivals is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with the characteristics of both Third-person shooters and flight simulators, developed by MasangSoft and owned by Yedang. In AirRivals, players pilot their own individual starfighters (called "Gears") throughout a number of maps, including terrestrial, lunar, and space maps. It has typical MMORPG elements such as leveling, currency, and a skills system. Ace Online is a largely Player vs. Player (PvP)-oriented game, with character leveling and item acquisition achieved through combat against Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and the completion of missions. As a player gains levels, more and more maps become accessible.

Microsoft expects to lose margin as "cloud" competitors start to eat away at its core businesses. Kudos to Microsoft for calling out the obvious. But Microsoft still has a lot to learn if it thinks it can charge more under its own cloud model because "the customer will pay Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware,"

Many hex editors try to copy an entire file into memory before they let you edit it, which explicitly limits the size of the files you can view or edit. lfhex is designed to allow you to edit binary files larger than can fit into your computer's memory. While you might normally not be working with binary files that are larger than your memory, it's good to know that your hex editor can scale to such large files when that situation arises. lfhex can load huge files quickly and does not require large amounts of memory to do so. For example, the documentation mentions that loading a 2GB file requires less than 2MB of RAM.

Why would anyone try to introduce an operating system into the existing glut unless it pays off in spades? What can a new entrant give us that the multitude of Linux distributions, the Mac OSX and old, hoary Windows hasn't?

Recently, I wrote a review of the note-taking application Tomboy. Though I find Tomboy exceptionally useful, I had a minor issue with the inability to create new notebooks from within a note. Within hours of the review appearing on Linux.com, Boyd Timothy, one of the app's developers mentioned in the article's comments that my idea had merit and said he would add the feature to an upcoming build. True to his word, he did. This is a shining example of one of the most valued yet sometimes overlooked features of open source software: it really is for the people, by the people.

It is fair to say that distributed source code management systems are taking over the world. There are plenty of centralized systems still in use, but it is a rare project which would choose to adopt a centralized SCM in 2008. Developers have gotten too used to the idea that they can carry the entire history of their project on their laptop, make their changes, and merge with others at their leisure. But, while any developer can now commit changes to a project while strapped into a seat in a tin can flying over the Pacific Ocean, that developer generally cannot simultaneously work with the project's bug database. Committing changes and making bug tracker changes are activities which often go together, but bug tracking systems remain strongly in the centralized mode.

The Asus Eee PC in subnotebook format has been the hit portable computer of the year, with the recent 900 series upgrade only brightening the Asus star. Now word comes that an Eee desktop – with the same Linux OS – will be launched at Computex and on sale later this year.

A year’s research on Novell and the openSUSE project is now published as a master’s thesis at the University of Oslo. “Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities” details the collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community. Community members and employees in Novell have participated in the study. The study deals with the tension between openness and control often found in projects that mesh corporate entities with the open source community. On the one hand, Novell wants to enable participation and contributions from external contributors, but cannot turn over full control to the community because it produces its enterprise product from openSUSE.