Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

You can do your part to help tackle such global issues as disease control and climate prediction simply by volunteering your computer's resources to solve complex computational problems. The concept, known as volunteer computing, benefits universities and research institutions around the world, who conduct projects that often have humanitarian goals, such as predicting and controlling the spread of malaria in Africa.

It was one security embarrassment after another for Apple the week of March 24. It began at the CanSecWest show, where the annual hacker contest challenged attendees to compromise a Vista system, a Ubuntu Linux system and a MacBook Air. The first day was reserved for preauthentication attacks and would have netted $20,000, but nobody took the prize.

I put out a list of open-source business influencers recently, knowing full well that it would cause some controversy. Few lists can be all-encompassing, and somebody is bound to feel slighted. You receive an award and go to thank the folks who helped you along the way with your project and you're bound to leave somebody out.

I have been covering Microsoft for over 25 years - I've even written a few books about Windows. During that time, I've developed a certain respect for a company that just doesn't give up, and whose ability to spin surpasses even that of politicians. To be sure, Microsoft has crossed the line several times, but it has always worked within the system, however much it has attempted to use it for its own ends. No more: in the course of trying to force OOXML through the ISO fast-track process, it has finally gone further and attacked the system itself; in the process it has destroyed the credibility of the ISO, with serious knock-on consequences for the whole concept of open standards.

Linux user groups across the region are ramping up efforts and activities this year to raise public awareness of open source and attract more members. The Beijing Linux Group (BLUG), for one, had a particularly busy year in 2007 and has no plans to slow things down this year.

Nowadays, Web browsers can act as front ends to many other kinds of applications. For instance, if you want to browse and open the files on your hard drive from within Firefox, turn to the Firefly extension.

Back in November of 2005, when polled on application areas that they would be reluctant to trust to open source, the following group of individuals - nearly to a person - pointed to mission critical databases. What’s changed since November of 2005? Little.

Asa Dotzler has been there from the beginning. As Mozilla's director of community development, he's had a hand in birthing some of the web's most successful open-source software projects, most notably the Mozilla and Firefox web browsers. Asa (pronounced A-suh) first got involved with Mozilla in 1998, when he was still an architecture student at Auburn University. He was interested in free software, but like many, he found the Linux distributions of the day too abstract. But when he heard Netscape had released its browser code under a free software license on March 31, 1998, he felt the urge to get involved. He knew web browsers -- and the problems with them -- so he eagerly offered his services.

LXer Feature: 30-Mar-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have alternative development tools for Linux, hacker super bowl pits Mac OS Vs. Linux and Vista, is open source anti-American? and What CAN’T Linux do? Also, the Var guy suggests that Costco's not mentioning Linux in their marketing of the Eee PC is a good thing and in our FUD section we a couple of articles about the OOXML vote and our own Sander Marechal responds to Patrick Durusau's letter.

So here it is… the one week results from our previous poll on software piracy. In that short time, we’ve had nearly 500 photographers cast their votes and the outcome is quite interesting. It looks like Adobe’s high-end photo editing software packages (like Photoshop and Lightroom) are hot items in the pirated software market.

[Notice the stats on Open Source users. - Scott]

Internet search is the biggest battleground for Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., but the fight is quickly spreading to a new front where the stakes may be just as big. Last year, Google introduced a package of online products that includes word processing, spreadsheet and e-mail software as an alternative to Microsoft Office, the longtime market dominator. Google's goal is to become the go-to source for an array of basic technology products.

A laptop running a fully patched version of Microsoft's Vista operating system was the second and final machine to fall in a hacking contest that pitted the security of Windows, OS X and Ubuntu Linux. With both a Windows and Mac machine felled, only the Linux box remained standing following the three-day competition.

"Software patents are evil." Ask almost any free or open source software advocate, and they'll you that software patents kill creativity and keep computer science from advancing as rapidly as it would if everyone shared their basic work with everyone else, unencumbered by patents or other restrictions. But computer science professor Fred Popowich of Simon Fraser University says this is not necessarily true. So does attorney Larry Rosen, who spent many years as legal counsel for the Open Source Initiative starting (literally) before it had a name.

So, you know, SCO has been suing various people in the Linux community for the last few years, claiming that some code in Linux was stolen from them. So, I’m willing to bet that a lot of people were wondering: what exactly is SCO UnixWare? Well. Have I got a treat for you. Thanks to this wonderful thing called the Internet, you too, can experience SCO UnixWare in it’s full glory.

The third and final day of the PWN to OWN contest at the CanSecWest security conference begins today, March 28th at 12:30pm local time (PST) in Vancouver. Yesterday, on day two of the contest, the MacBook Air was successfully compromised first and won by a team from Independent Security Evaluators, also winning $10,000 from us (the Zero Day Initiative).

The Debian project is known for its public brawls, but the truth of the matter is that the Debian developers have not lived up to that reputation in recent years. The recent outburst over the attempted "semi-hijacking" of the dpkg maintainership shows that Debian still knows how to run a flame war, though. It also raises some interesting issues on how packages should be maintained, how derivative distributions work with their upstream versions, and what moral rights, if any, a program's initial author retains years later.

Another week and another bag-full of Linux releases. Over the past week Damn Small Linux has edged closer to a 4.3 release with a release candidate, Astaro is showing off its security appliance distro, Knoppix makes big changes in 5.3.1 and Fedora issues a beta release of the forthcoming Fedora 9 release.

The New York Times has a great write-up of the continued rapid growth of Red Hat. Despite the looming recession, Red Hat is predicting 30 percent revenue growth in the coming year, to more than half a billion dollars. For a few years, Mike has been talking about how to make money while giving away infinite goods, and Red Hat could probably be the poster child for his argument. Despite the fact that virtually all of its "products" are available for free on the Internet, Red Hat is still convincing companies to pay it hundreds of millions of dollars.

Love it or hate it, anyone who runs Ubuntu has at least heard of Automatix. This program made it possible for any Ubuntu user to easily add a host of new programs and media codices to a desktop. Now, however, Automatix's developers are being pulled away to other projects, so they have announced that they will no longer be working on their popular software installation program.

Photo buffs who are fond of open source software would do well to look at blueMarine. Right now, the free, cross-platform application's strength is image management, but it is on its way to becoming a complete workflow tool. Its cataloging features are robust, its architecture is extensible, and it takes some intriguing new approaches. Java consultant Fabrizio Giudici started the project in 2003, but it languished as he grew frustrated with the limitations of the Swing toolkit. In 2006, he rebuilt the code using the newly released NetBeans platform, and hasn't looked back since.