Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I've been using the XChat IRC client for many years. The only thing I find lacking in it is a list of favorite channels. The Uberscript plugin, written in Perl, adds a favorites list to XChat, and also allows you to do things like auto greet users when they join a channel and hide nick changes, quit, and join messages.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 107 for the week of October 22nd.

"Born last millenium", KDE and openSUSE's very own Stephan Binner gets interviewed for this week's People of openSUSE. Stephan talks about his beginnings starting with a Commodore 64 with Ghostbusters, to today's hacking on KDE and openSUSE. "During my studies I maintained the KDE installation on the faculty’s Solaris network (most played day-time game then was XBlast) and started in 2001 to directly contribute to KDE (C++ programming and other stuff)."

An Italian user asked for a refund after buying a Compaq computer that came with Windows XP and Works 8 pre-installed. HP tried to avoid the EULA agreement which states, approximately: '[I]f the end user is not willing to abide by this EULA... he shall immediately contact the producer to get info for giving back the product and obtaining refunds.' The court ruled in favor of the user who received back €90 for XP and €50 for Works.

LXer Feature: 28-Oct-2007

It looks like it was a busy week in Open Source News. Carla Schroder continues her series on digital photography with part 5, Microsoft concedes in European antitrust case, Where are the American Linux desktop users?, GIMP 2.4.0 is released, a NY investment company offers to buy SCO for $36M, a Battle For Wesnoth game review and ripping and encoding audio files in Linux. In our funny article of the week we have, The World's toughest jobs: Microsoft's interoperability chief, funny stuff.

Andrew Morton responded favorably to Evgeniy Polyakov's most recent release of his distributed storage subsystem, "I went back and re-read last month's discussion and I'm not seeing any reason why we shouldn't start thinking about merging this."

The Neo1973 is the first physical manifestation of a grand idea -- a new breed of wireless handheld built for the open-source age. It is the first release from the OpenMoko project, a group working to create a fully open source software platform for smartphones, a community-driven alternative to, say, the iPhone. Using Linux as a starting point, the OpenMoko developers have built a system which, although not everyday-usable yet, can be successfully installed and run on a variety of ordinary smartphone hardware: Treos, Motorolas, JasJars and so forth.

Numark is shipping the iDJ2, a Linux-based DJ mixing console built around the Apple iPod. The iDJ2 allows users to play two songs simultaneously from a single iPod, and offers music control with real-time scratching, pitch control, seamless loop, and full cueing.

There's a scene in the 2004 movie Mean Girls in which the most popular girl in the film's fictional high school finds out that a friend who now is a fast-rising social rival plans to throw a party without inviting her. "Who does she think she is?" sniffs the suddenly-threatened clique leader - or "Queen Bee," in the movie's parlance. "I, like, 'invented' her, you know what I mean?"

Jon "maddog" Hall has made a featured guest appearance on a podcast series devoted to embedded Linux development. The veteran Linux promoter discusses binary kernel drivers, mixing proprietary and GPL software, and his "secret" retirement plan in the latest episode of TimeSys's Linux Radio podcast.

Virtualization player SWsoft hopes to continue its Chinese invasion via a new deal with local hardware heavyweight Inspur. While the likes of IBM, HP and Dell sell more servers in China, Inspur ranks as the top homegrown seller of corporate hardware. The company has now agreed to add a virtualization software component to its arsenal by pre-installing and/or reselling SWsoft's Virtuozzo package. Such a deal could be a win for SWsoft as it looks to gain ground in a market where VMware has yet to establish a dominant presence.

AMD and ATI weren't fibbing. The graphics company, now part of Advanced Micro Devices, has released high-end Catalyst 7.10 graphics drivers for the Linux desktop. ATI, once AMD bought it, promised to be more friendly to Linux desktop users. While this release still contains some proprietary bits, it does offer advanced 3D features for Linux users who are willing to use proprietary drivers.

The New York Times likes open source -- so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, it is nurturing a Web development team that has released two of its own open source projects. XSL Cache is a PHP extension the Times is using to cache stylesheets on its Web site. DBSlayer is a tool the team developed to overcome LAMP scaling limitations that caused database replication processes to overwhelm the DB connection limits.

When I attended my first ToorCon this month, I spoke with David "h1kari" Hulton, founder and chairman of the event, to learn more about its history and intent. Among other things, I learned that his nick "h1kari" is not l33t-sp34k for hickory, as I first thought, but rather for a Japanese word meaning "divine light." I also learned that he and a friend started the San Diego 2600 group when they were 14, and ToorCon followed a year later.

Vixta is a new Linux distribution, first released only last month, based on the not-yet-released Fedora 8. Its main objective is to emulate the visual aspects of Microsoft Vista. Version 095 contains the newest, and sometimes unstable, versions of software. The project's goals include being free in every sense, requiring absolutely no configuration, and being user-friendly, eye-catching, and familiar. Too bad the goals don't include feature-complete and stable.

Here's the key fact: Facebook's users are not its customers. They're the targets to which Facebook's customers aim advertising. In old media this was no big deal. But Facebook isn't just a "medium". It's a vast walled garden where the social activity of members and visitors constantly improves the ability of advertisers to"target" both.This is a Good Thing only if it works for everybody— including both those targeted as well as those doing the targeting. And if users are actually involved, they have some important questions:What happens to my identity-related information?How is it used, and by whom?How much control do I have over my data (or data about myself)— including what Facebook"partners" do with that data?read more

Should we be ready, as Kent Brockman might put it, to "welcome our new Microsoft overlords," or are the IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures not really reflecting the reality of how servers are used in businesses? I, for one, think that what IDC is measuring and what server operating systems people are really using are two entirely different things.

According to Wikipedia, Texas Hold'em is "the most popular poker variant played in casinos in the United States." With the GPL-licensed multiplatform (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X) PokerTH, you can play Texas Hold'em against up to six computer opponents on your desktop, or you can join an Internet server and play against other real players.

This past Sunday we started our first-ever Linux Graphics Survey that looked at the usage of X.Org display drivers, hardware, and the display features being sought after by Linux desktop users. In less than four days, we received over 10,000 survey submissions! This survey will be going on until November 21, so if you haven't yet participated you still have plenty of time to do so. But for those of you that have already taken the survey, what are the results so far? Well, below are the percentages from all of the responses collected before 10:00AM PST today.

He's faced with the unenviable task of convincing the world that Microsoft wants to play nicely with competitors - and also convincing the troops and top management that it's worth it. "It's a mixed bag," said Tom Robertson, general manager of interoperability and standards at Microsoft, when asked after his keynote at Interop 2007 in New York how company employees feel about his mission. "Everyone has to recognize … that there is a cultural shift going on."