Showing headlines posted by tadelste

Advanced Interoperability and Functionality Technology Now Available for Mainstream Consumer Electronics Equipment

If you use Linux, or another free operating system, and need optical character recognition (OCR) software, be prepared for a challenge. OCR is a tricky problem on any computing platform -- both because it is conceptually hard, and because the task does not lend itself to simple, easy-to-use interfaces.

I wrote the following as a letter to the Globe and Mail editor in response to End of the free Napster clones?

This article quotes Eric Garland as saying that "The open-source community will continue to build new, uncensored versions,"

This falsely suggests that the Open Source community is deliberately building tools to break the law. What we are doing is building tools to put the owners of computers (rather than third parties) in control of their own computers, protecting the property, privacy and other rights of those owners. Peer to Peer technology is quite legitimate, and is used by our community to legally share our own software and the works of the large number of copyright holders who authorize their works to be shared. While it is possible to abuse these tools to infringe copyright, we must remember that the "software manufacturing" competitors to Open Source do not hold the moral high ground.

GNU developers have released a telephony stack, an open source alternative to competing proprietary VoIP solutions. The GNU telephony stack provides a sacalable environment for building and deploying enterprise level VoIP solutions compatible with current standards and hardware. With an emphasis on modularity and extensible functionality, the GNU telephony stack can be integrated with other systems and services like web servers and databases.

The halls of investing are littered with companies that had great businesses, but eventually stagnating growth, which inevitably gave their management the urge to do something in order to prove the growth story was still alive. Peter Lynch referred to this phenomenon as diworsification.

Diworsification pretty much sums up how I have felt about Motley Fool Stock Advisor selection eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and its acquisition of Skype, which lets users chat via voice and video over the Internet. Internet telephony isn't all that unique; offerings from Apple Computer's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iChat service, Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL TotalTalk service, and a number of free software packages such as Gizmo allow you to do the same.

Before Linux, asset performance management provider Datastream ran its enterprise on proprietary Sun hardware and the Solaris operating system. But Jim Plourde, vice president of hosted solutions at Datastream, says he wasn't happy with the performance or the price of Sun hardware with its mission-critical database operations. In 2002, a move to lower-priced Intel servers was on the horizon, but Plourde still had operating system choices to make.

A Chinese mobile phone software vendor has licensed a suite of A/V (audio-visual) codecs for its Linux smartphone software stack. China MobileSoft (CMS) says A/V technology from InterVideo will enable users of phones based on its Linux smartphone stack to record and play "high-quality, jitter-free video clips."

First Multi-Terabyte Product Aimed at Home Media Market Stores Up to 5000 Hours of Video or 640,000 Tunes

Motorola announces a Linux-Java smartphone under the moniker A910. It has Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, with a 1.3 megapixel camera. It has a TransFlash (micro-SD) slot, with voice recognition software. The A910 is expected to be available in 1st Quarter of 2006. Whether its available in our shores, that's an unknown.

Newest Music-Optimized Mobile Delivers More Tunes Much Faster

In a few weeks, IBM will be delivering an update to OS/400, which has been i5/OS for the past year. Everyone knows its reputation for handling heavy-duty workloads by virtue of its impressive architecture and long list of applications. As an iSeries customer, you firmly believe that you get what you pay for. For instance, you get the capability to run multiple operating systems. In the past, OS/400 may have been enough. But as you look ahead, and certainly as IBM looks ahead, Linux could begin pulling more and more weight.

MINNEAPOLIS, Jan. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Telsasoft today announced that West Central Wireless of San Angelo, Texas has purchased a set of GSM CDR (Call Detail Record) reports to complement their next generation integrated OSS network management solution also purchased from Telsasoft for their GSM network infrastructure.

Open source software is off to a good start, but it won't revolutionize IT until the community gets serious about defining business frameworks and processes, says Charles E. Bess P.E. and EDS Fellow.

It's prediction time for Bess, and he opines on the future of Linux and open source in this interview. He also lists the hot new technologies that will shake up the IT world in 2006. As head futurist for EDS Corp., a global technology services company based in Plano, Tex., Bess studies the future implications of changes within the software industry.

While some security researchers advise Windows users to rush to install an unofficial patch to fix a vulnerability in the way the OS renders graphics files, Microsoft wants customers to wait another week for its official security update, it announced today.

The problem involves the way various versions of Windows handle graphics in the WMF (Windows Metafile) format. When a vulnerable computer opens a maliciously crafted WMF file, it can be forced to execute arbitrary code. Microsoft published a first security advisory on 28 December, saying it had received notification of the problem on 27 December and was investigating whether a patch was necessary.

Happy New Year to all of you. New Year in the western world is the typical point in time to take a look backward and forward to see what happened and what one expects to happen next year. Also, we're almost in the middle between release of sarge and release of etch, another good reason to look both ways. :)

Stephan Binner has released a VMware player image of KDE 3.5 with KOffice running on OpenSuSE 10.

Open source software got an enterprise shot in the arm recently when Fidelity Investments Inc. created a policy and governance structure that gives open source and proprietary products equal consideration in buying decisions.

Fidelity has more than a dozen open source packages in production and is willing to evaluate open source options in almost any application, according to Charles Pickelhaupt, a vice president in Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology. A new review board has been set up to weigh licensing options, which are one of Fidelity's biggest open source concerns.

THE EUROPEAN IT Service Center (EITSC) is expected to complete a revised open source curriculum for colleges this year, part of a major learning project to create a pool of open source developers in the country.

Under the project name "Philippine Open Source Initiative" (POSITIVE), the EITSC hopes that the new open source curriculum will be integrated in several partner schools by the start of the school year in June 2006. These schools include Don Bosco Technical College, Cebu Institute of Technology, the Asia Pacific College, Angeles University Foundation, and the Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology.

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Mohammed Adnène Trojette summarised all major Debian events in 2005 in the [1]timeline for 2005. Philip Charles [2]reported that he has uploaded the latest [3]CD images for Debian GNU/Hurd. Manoj Srivastava [4]announced that the debian-private list is only private for three years after the general resolution on the [5]declassification procedure has passed.

The announcement represents the most significant elevation of IBM's strategic partnerships with its key Linux Distribution Partners since it embraced Linux six years ago, a testament to a Linux market that continues to experience strong growth. The alliances are timed to tap the boom in IBM's Linux growth expanding its base of 12,000 enterprise deployments worldwide.