Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Psychonauts is based on the exploits of Raz, a young boy gifted with psychic abilities who escapes the circus to try to sneak into a summer camp for those with similar powers in order to become a "Psychonaut". He finds that there is a sinister plot occurring at the camp that only he can stop from happening. The game is centered on the widely strange and imaginative minds of various characters that Raz enters as a Psychonaut-in-training in order to help them overcome their fears or memories of their past in order to gain their help and progress in the game. Raz gains use of several psychic abilities during the game that are used for both attacking foes and solving puzzles.

My Asus Eee PC 701 is a brilliant low-cost ultraportable notebook, but it has a really small screen (seven inches diagonally). I needed to find out how to make the best use of the available area when I was using the Firefox Web browser. I used F11 to toggle the browser's built-in full screen mode, in which a modified navigation toolbar and optional tab bar are all that is displayed above a Web page, but I yearned for something even better. I found two add-ons that could meet my needs. With the FullerScreen extension, when you press the F11 key the current Web page is displayed over the entire screen -- no menus or toolbars. If you move the mouse pointer to the top or bottom of the screen area, the extension will display a full screen navigation bar, the status bar, and, if appropriate, the tab bar.

There's a debate brewing over what to do if companies offer open source code in a software-as-a service model, then duck their obligation to contribute changes back to the community. The risk involves a company taking a product based on open source code, significantly modifying it, and using it as the foundation for selling a service over the Web. Technically, SaaS doesn't distribute code to end users, so the provider isn't required to contribute code changes to the community at large, the way Red Hat must when it resells its version of Linux.

With the release of 4.1 on the horizon, and initiatives such as Krush days, recent call for help with documentation, and the perennial need for localisation it is very useful for end users to be able to easily get their hands on up-to-date builds of KDE4, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. As was the case with the run up to KDE4.0, KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.

Japanese television technology that will give viewers access to high-speed broadcasts over the internet could render conventional television obsolete and transform the media landscape within years, analysts have predicted. The country's electronics and telecommunications industries are developing a technological standard for a new "internet television" set, which will let users browse websites and watch streaming programs at the touch of a remote control.

Linux vendor Red Hat has updated its enterprise Linux version with features for big servers and some green improvements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 includes virtualization support for bigger systems and more memory architectures. The new version supports up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory, and can virtualize across non-uniform memory access (NUMA) systems. It also has new drivers to improve support for x86/64, Itanium, IBM Power and IBM System Z.

LXer Feature: 25-May-2008

In this week's Roundup we have reviews of 7 Audio Players and 42 of the best free games for Linux, the $100 laptop platform moves on, seeing Linux clearly, Chinese Linux rises 22 percent in 12 months and a great article titled Chicks Love Linux. We have lots Microsoft related articles including Microsoft blames users for Vista infections, Microsoft to make Office open to ODF format, Can Microsoft 'do' open source by 2015? and my favorite Microsoft offers cash back on searches.

About the time this site was taking shape in the very late Spring and early Summer of 2007, I was detecting a plaintive tone in the responses I was getting from a very few invited viewers. There were even complaints about the colors. Too soon I too knew that the grayish blue tone I was viewing on my main monitor did not match what others were seeing. Indeed, I needed only to move the browser to the monitor to the right of my dual monitor setup to see both the color shades and color depth differed. Not good.

The world's top handset maker Nokia Oyj expects the role of the Linux operating system in its product portfolio to increase as the role of its Internet-focused devices grows, company officials said. Linux has so far had little success on cellphones, but its role is increasing as more new Linux-based models reach the market, while Google Inc gave it a vote of confidence by using it to build its Android platform on.

So according to El Reg, it turns out ASUS is selling its Eee 900 laptops in the UK with 4400mAh batteries -- quite a bit smaller than the 5800mAh batteries that come in the US version. It's insult to injury when you consider that the larger screen necessarily sucks down more juice than on the 700 series, but ASUS explains that overseas users get a tradeoff in exchange: UK warranties last two years, supposedly longer than their US counterparts (although to be fair, we've heard of retailers listing the US Eee's warranty at two years as well). Caveat emptor, and all that.

In Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2, announced yesterday, you'll find only small, but useful, improvements, most of them for better interoperability with Microsoft protocols and formats. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2 includes support for fully virtualized Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003. Novell claims system administrators can also migrate these Windows Server guests across physical machines in real-time. Because of the Microsoft/Novell partnership, SLES is the only third-party virtualization solution offering full Microsoft support for its Windows Server guests. In return, the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hypervisor, now a release candidate, also supports SLES as a virtual guest.

The research department of Kingpin Intelligence has just published a new research report titled “Developers and Open Source”. The report concludes that based on Kingpin's research, non-Open Source respondents would prefer to use Open Source for work, but agree that existing licences and client requirements hamper migration.

Wind River is joining Intel to develop an open source Linux platform to your car and shake up the auto industry by bringing greater innovation, efficiency and development speed to the emerging in-car infotainment market. It's a radical effort to force automakers -- which tend to favor evolutionary, not revolutionary, R&D - to embrace open source as a way to speed up development. If Wind River and Intel pull it off, it would be a crucial step toward spurring innovation and cooperation in the growing but fractured in-car multimedia market.

I want to bring iTunes-loving Linux users back to reality. As you can see from the following Ubuntu Forums threads, some Ubuntu-ites are deluded about the idea of Apple porting iTunes to Linux:

Andy Updegrove has the news that South Africa has filed an official appeal, protesting the approval of OOXML, and the action means that OOXML is now in limbo until the appeal is decided. I wonder if this is why Microsoft suddenly decided to support ODF, to avoid being shut out completely pending the appeal. Might other national bodies be considering doing the same thing? Stay tuned.

Free Geek Vancouver (FGV) is now certified as the first ethical recycler in western Canada by the Basel Action Network (BAN), and an important part of the certification is the organization's refurbishing of used computers with free and open source software (FOSS).

Sometimes all it takes to foment innovation may be an idea that sounds cool. When Romanian developer Bogdan Radulescu first ran into what would eventually be known as NimbleX, a mini-live CD project designed to be fast, light, and functional for everyday use. Radulescu recieved his first computer from his parents in the fifth grade. Little did he realize that computers would consume most of his time in the future. "I think my first contact with open source was actually with Linux in the late '99. I had only a [Red Hat 6] CD that I managed to install on my computer. I didn't actually know how to do anything because it was only the CD.

It’s a big question: how trustworthy is the software I use on my computer? When it comes to open source, can you trust the quality of programmers who work for free? You can, according to a new report out this week – which also proves major open source offerings to be especially well written. It equally shows up the projects which are slow to respond to vulnerabilities.

The Debian GNU/Linux project has just endured what is probably its worst week on the security front in the 15 years of its existence following the disclosure on May 13 of a serious vulnerability in the distribution's OpenSSL package.

Open-source software helped London's Oyster card system move past a proprietary roadblock, an open-source conference in London was told last week. The Oyster contactless card system, which handles payments for travel on London's buses and Tube system, suffered from lock-in to proprietary systems, which hindered developments to the online payment systems, said Michael Robinson, a senior consultant with Deloitte, at the Open Source Forum event in London. "The hosting was on a proprietary system, centred on one application," he said. "It demanded certain hardware, and was locked into one design of infrastructure."