Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

What's the real reason for closed, proprietary code? Embarrassment. Sure, we are drowned in tides of twaddle about precious IP, Trade Sekkrits, Sooper Original Algorithms that must not be exposed to eyes of mere mortals, and all manner of silly excuses. But that's all a smokescreen to cover up the real reason: to hide code of such poor quality that even PHBs know to be embarrassed. Exhibit A: Windows itself. Which proves it takes more than throwing billions of dollars and thousands of programmers at a software project to build something that is actually good.

Time after time we warned that with the arrival of Windows Vista comes an novel lock-in strategy. This strategy of lock-in stretches well beyond file formats. It also creates lethal and viral (as in “transferable”) integration of the server side and the desktop side. As mentioned many times before, all of this is happening quietly. It’s happening quietly for a reason. You never yell when approaching a rabbit.

Over the next week I will be starting on a new Ubuntu community project. The plan is to create a Social Network for Ubuntu users, giving users free blog space and email addresses on the ubuntu-users.org domain. Think of Facebook for Ubuntu Users by Ubuntu Users but as a non profit entity as opposed to a big business venture.

I recently discovered APTonCD, a utility that makes it easy to store Ubuntu packages on a CD or DVD so that they can be installed again later without having to download the packages again. You can download the packages you want once and then install them all on as many computers as you want. It's also a pretty useful way to get packages onto computers with slow or unreliable Internet connections.

Yochai Benkler describes Open Source as a methodology of commons based peer production. This means work made collaboratively and shared publicly by a community of equals. For Eric Raymond the virtue of Open Source is its efficiency. Open Source can create better products faster than the old closed source model. The name Open Source was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness and ideological vacuity. This was intended to make the results of a very strong ideology more palatable to large corporations by disguising its origins. That ideology is Free Software.

Engineers at the UC San Diego have constructed the highest-resolution computer display in the world - with a screen resolution up to 220 million pixels. UCSD's Linux-based OptIPortal consists of 55 Dell displays driven by 18 Dell XPS personal computers. The system at UCSD uses the San Diego Supercomputer Center's new 64-bit version of grid-computing middleware known as ROCKS released in early August and Calit2's Cluster GL for heterogeneous systems (CGLX) framework.

With all of the sturmundrang out there about Micrsoft's tentative foray into the world of open source licensing, it seems people may be missing another aspect of the discussion. In the end, the success of open source software does not depend on who has what license for their products. In the end, all that matters is the usability and the quality of the software itself.

This is a prototype of a video designed to tell the story of DRM. The life and death, the rise and fall, the here today, gone-tomorrow story of DRM. So we start with a heartbeat and a bird, and tell as much as we can. If you think there’s more to say, add to the story. We’ll be posting music tracks later, and if you need higher quality video, that can be arranged. It’s released under a CC Share Alike License, so have at it.

Some days ago Mr. Mike Melanson of Adobe Flash's Linux port fame posted in Penguin.SWF blog about the news of H.264 coded support in Flash. Nice, a new codec. But there's a question that doesn't want to be silenced: What about a nice, clear and objective answer about the availability of a 64bit version of the Flash plugin?

Sometimes you just want to see what connections your machine is making to the outside world and what ports it’s using. While wireshark and tcpdump are really nice for inspecting detailed package contents. IPTraf is really about connections and interface statistics. Because iptraf is based on ncurses the program can be run from a text-console and still have a (primitive) `gui`.

A recurring debate discussion among FLOSS-supporters and detractors is related to the estimation of the real number of active FLOSS projects. While it is easy to look at the main repository site (sourceforge.net) that boasts more than 100.000 projects, it is equally easy to look in more depth and realize that a significant number of those projects are really abandoned or have no significant development. How many active and stable projects are really out there?

openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools. Today we’ll be taking a look at the new package management and talking to Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett, one of the central libzypp developers.

With the release of Windows Vista, using your PC to watch and record TV has become a whole lot easier. Now, for the first time, Windows Media Center comes bundled with Home Premium and Ultimate versions of the standard Desktop operating system. However, Vista is pricey, and its form and function are of course dictated by Microsoft. If you want full control over your Home Theater PC (HTPC), and don’t want to have to pay Microsoft for it, then Linux is a more than capable alternative base for building a system of your own. Currently, the two dominant players on Linux are Mythtv and, to a lesser extent, Freevo. We’ll take a look at both of these applications as well as others you can use to create a fully functional Linux HTPC.

As I have blogged before, I have been evaluating Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO over the last 3 months or so. As promised, here are my findings. Vector is now my OS of choice on the machine in question, and who knows, if I didn’t still have to do a bit of VB development, it could well replace XP on my main work laptop as well.

Recently, as in last week, I learned a new Texas idiom. A senior executive at a client explained what he meant when he said that I was beating his dog. I didn't have a reference for the comment until he said that if he invited me over for a barbecue and I beat his dog that was inappropriate."How would you like it if you invited me to your house for dinner and I beat your dog?" he asked.

European Union regulators have charged Rambus Inc. with antitrust abuse, alleging the memory chip designer demanded "unreasonable" royalties for its patents that were fraudulently set as industry standards.

[May not seem like a Linux article, but think of things like OOXML and the Mono Project. The European Union is acting against Rambus for submitting standards for certification without disclosing that the standards could not be met without patented technology. - dinotrac]

This for the “how the hell have I done this job this long & not known this already?” files. Debian has a file called /etc/rc.local which runs at the end of all the multi-user boot levels, and which you can therefore put stuff in. I’ve had trouble with autofs not starting properly on certain machines (there seems to be a correlation with SCSI or SATA rather than IDE drives, although I do not know why this should be), and putting the line /etc/init.d/autofs restart in /etc/rc.local, whilst arguably a hack, does the trick just fine.

In our first article in this series, we introduced the Conga management interface. In this article we show how Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1’s Advanced Platform can be configured to automatically provide High Availability for Virtual Machine Guests. Using the Conga management interface, the reader is walked through the process of setting up a shared filesystem guest repository, enabling the failover settings, and demonstrating zero downtime failback.

Opinion: I recently took a look at Microsoft's most active open-source projects and—there's no polite way to say this—they are all junk. OK Microsoft, you want to be taken seriously by open source? I know that's a rhetorical question, I don't believe for one moment that you're ready to really embrace open source. You just want to be able to confuse the market by being able to say that you're "open source friendly." What a crock. Microsoft is open-source friendly in the same way that a butcher is friendly to a cow.

OpenEMR version 2.8.3 and its companion FreeB 0.13 release are now available fromSourceForge. This release has had a heavy focus on billing improvements, and is a major upgrade.