Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Pop quiz. You’re a $7bn software company that has all the sex appeal of a shy potato. What do you do? Buy XenSource, of course. In August, Citrix dug deep and found $500m to acquire XenSource – a company expected to bring in all of $8m this year, according to our sources. In an instant, this deal transformed Citrix from a very competent, well-paid, niche application streamer to a major player in the most-hyped part of the server and management software markets. People who had no idea what Citrix actually does took notice and wondered how this company will fair against an upstart like VMware and a lumbering giant like Microsoft.

There's a wealth of information stored in online collaborative services like YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, but are these Web 2.0 services built to facilitate sharing their content across their individual boundaries? A group of academicians at Cornell University argue that this new wave of applications should be constructed with interoperability in mind. The result of their research, funded by DARPA and NSF, is Fedora, the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. The project was recently awarded a $4.9M grant by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to expand the functionality of its software platform.

IHOP's VP of IT discusses the principles guiding its technology transformation. When Patrick Piccininno stepped up to the counter of IHOP in 2003, it wasn't for a short stack—it was for Linux, with a side of cost savings.

Google isannouncing plans for Personal Health Record (PHR) software. Microsoft announced a similar butcontroversial effort less than two weeks ago. Google's offering is said to be available in 2008 so no analysis is possible yet."Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, said Wednesday here at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google plans to support the"storage and movement" of people's health records...Although she provided only scant details on the effort, she noted that Google became interested in the personal health record market as it watched Hurricane Katrina take aim at the Gulf Coast and all the paper-based records stored in various medical offices and hospitals in the region..."

Synergy is an open source project that allows you to share a keyboard and a mouse among several different computers, each connected to some sort of monitor, without any extra hardware (i.e. KVM switches). Synergy runs over the network and can be used with several different operating systems.

If you want to experiment with tags on your WordPress site, there's never been a better time. The newest WordPress version, 2.3, offers native tagging support. Working with tags in WordPress 2.3 is not a totally intuitive process, and ubiquitous tag management plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior is not supported in 2.3, so coders have been busy writing new plugins to help you take advantage of every ounce of tag functionality in WordPress. Here are five tag management plugins for 2.3 you might want to try.

Some thoughts about the current crop of PHRs in the wake of theAHIMA PHR campaign launch as reported by Digital HealthCare& Productivity.

Fonts in Linux are crazy. Most Linux distributions ship with a big blob of serif, sans serif, and monospaced fonts, and there's barely a pixel's worth of difference between them. In this article, we'll demonstrate how to better manage fonts in Linux, no matter what distribution you're using.

Novell Suse Linux is positioning itself to be the corporate Linux of choice for today's multi-OS corporation thanks to a series of agreements with companies such as SAP and Microsoft.

Last week's announcement of a patent infringement suit against Red Hat and Novell set in motion speculation about motives, theories, agendas, and behind-the-scenes players. If you've been feeling like you need a scorecard to keep up, then you're in luck.

I’m sitting in a session at Adobe Max Europe listening to Senior Product Manager Laurel Reitman talking about what a great open platform Adobe is creating. She refers to the open sourcing of the Flex SDK; the open bug database for Flex; the ISO standardization programme for PDF; the donation of source code to Tamarin, the Mozilla Foundation ECMAScript 4.0 runtime project, and the use of open source projects such as SQLite and Webkit within AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime which lets you run Flash applications on the desktop, and the fact that AIR will run in due course on Linux, though the initial release will be Mac and Windows only.

The KDE Community is happy to release the third beta for KDE 4.0. This beta, aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase, also marks the freeze of the KDE Development Platform. We are joined in this release by the KOffice project which releases its 4th alpha release, bringing many improvements in OpenDocument support, a KChart Flake shape and much more to those willing to test.

By the end of this month Sun Microsystems will release the first developer version of OpenSolaris in its "Project Indiana" incarnation.

"It contains lots of scheduler updates from lots of people - hopefully the last big one for quite some time," began Ingo Molnar,describing his merge request for thelinux-2.6-sched git tree. He continued,"most of the focus was on performance (both micro-performance and scalability/balancing), but there's the fair-scheduling feature now Kconfig selectable too. Find the shortlog below." Ingo noted,"code that is touched outside of the scheduler: the KVM bits were acked by Avi, the net/unix change is trivial and only affects sync wakeups, ditto the fs/pipe.c changes - but i can push those separately if it needs an ack from David first."

In this week’s Creative Commons Artist Spotlight, we interview French artist Philippe Mangold about his CC-licensed work available at Jamendo.com.

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has shown all the loyalty of a free agent athlete. Just a few months after resigning from Linspire, Carmony has traded in his old company's Linux operating system for Ubuntu.

The concept of a Electronic Medical Record (EMR) 'source code escrow' had to be dreamed up by proprietary EMR marketing departments. Source code escrows give a false sense of security and confuse buyers from getting the real thing: Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) licensed EMR software. Source code escrows sound good on the surface but even a cursory examination reveals many practical flaws. A source code escrow is defined by Wikipedia as a:"...deposit of the source code of the software into an account held by a third party escrow agent. Escrow is typically requested by a party licensing software (the licensee), to ensure maintenance of the software. The software source code is released to the licensee if the licensor files for bankruptcy or otherwise fails to maintain and update the software as promised in the software license agreement."

I've been pacing the chumby maternity ward for nearly a year, waiting for this unique wireless device to see the light of day. I recently took delivery of my own little bundle of chumby joy and, at first look, I think it will make a great addition to my growing gadget family.

For those who are tired of cleaning out an inbox full of junk, Roaring Penguin's latest anti-spam software has been released. Although it isn't open source, as the Penguin-based company name might suggest, there is a version for small enterprises which can be used free of charge.

Ubuntu 7.10 arrives Oct. 18, and not long after that Dell will start shipping that version of the Ubuntu Linux desktop on its laptops and desktops. "We will offer Ubuntu 7.10 preinstalled on our systems soon," said Anne Camden of Dell corporate communications, in an e-mail interview. "For customers who are interested in updating their existing Ubuntu systems, we advise them to visit the Ubuntu 7.10 page on our wiki, which will go live [Oct. 18] after the official launch."