Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This week a friend posted on her blog that she was marking all of her Flickr images “all rights reserved” (instead of with a Creative Commons license) and “friends and family only” (instead of publicly viewable) because of this story. A person uploaded photos of her daughter to Flickr. One was used without permission by Nerve Media’s Babble.com on an article about children and lead poisoning. The photo had been marked “all rights reserved,” and Nerve/Babble blamed the error on an ill-informed intern.

Do you find open source licenses a puzzle? Does reading stories about the legal side of open source give you the heebie-jeebies? If so, then we have the document for you. A couple of years ago, I was bemoaning the fact that I'd gone from writing about technology to the law. Lord knows I hadn't planned on it. I'd come into technology journalism by being able to translate from techno-babble to English.

Nokia plans to ship WiMAX-enabled Internet tablets next year. The as-yet unnamed model or models in Nokia's Linux-powered "N-series" Internet Tablet line will use Intel "Baxter Peak" WiMAX chips and will support Sprint's "Xohm" WiMAX service, the top phone-maker has revealed.

The annual KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2008 in the heart of Europe, Belgium. The event is the most important conference for the contributors of the KDE project and will be held from Saturday August 9th to Saturday 16th at the De Nayer Institute, an associated campus of the University of Leuven. There are three sub-events: a contributors conference, the KDE e.V. annual general assembly and a week long hacking session. Akademy offers a great opportunity to the community to discuss all issues face-to-face. We also look forward to the chance to mingle with all KDE enthusiasts who want to drop by.

Slate has acautionary tale for public/private initiatives or 'how municipal Wi-Fi is such a flop'. This may shed some light on the failings of RHIO's:Today, the limited success stories come from towns that have actually treated Wi-Fi as a public calling. St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. The network has its problems, such as dead spots, but also claims a 77 percent use rate among its citizens. Cities like St. Cloud understand the concept of a public service: something that's free, or near-free, like the local swimming pool. Most cities have been too busy dreaming of free pipes to notice that their approach is hopelessly flawed. The lesson here is an old one about the function of government. When it comes to communications, the United States relies on a privateer system: We depend on private companies to perform public callings. That works up to a point, but private industry will build only so much. Real public infrastructure costs real public money. We already know that, in the real world, if you're not willing to invest in infrastructure, you get what we have: crumbling airports, collapsing bridges, and broken levees. Why did we think that the wireless Internet would be any different?

Well, from the start of October, we hand over Reg Developer to Gavin Clarke, who's a Register employee (we were freelance) and works from California, where he sits at the development tools coalface and gets first crack at the news. Be kind to him.

When Fedora 7 was released, one of the big features that we talked about was the idea of customized spins of the distribution. Now that Fedora 8 is on the way, it’s useful to look and see how we have done, and what sort of custom spins have been created.

The most recent release of StartCom Enterprise Linux is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0 and provides all the base functionality you'll find in that distribution. That begs the question "why bother?" Freely available might be one good reason to start with

The idea is floating around again: Let's make a special Linux distribution for women! We're smarter than that, aren't we? I say, let's spare ourselves and the world yet another pointless and less-than-useful version of Linux.

On various women's mailing lists, a subscriber has raised the idea of a distribution developed "for and by women." So far, the idea has met with a cool reception. It might even be a troll. However, if such a distro ever gets underway, it would be very much in the spirit of the community, and might give more women the background and confidence to reduce the gender gap in free software.

Neutrino Consulting provides IT services for small companies that don't want or need an in-house technology departments. Michael Wacht, Neutrino's founder and principal, says because he offers open source software alternatives to his clients, they get to choose the "best of the best," avoiding big license fees and vendor lock in. That, he says, makes Neutrino more competitive.

A privately held German company with offices in the U.K., U.S., Cyprus, and Malta is touting its Linux-based thin-client technology as a climate change remediant. "2X Ltd" says businesses can halve computer-related electrical consumption by replacing PCs with Linux-based thin clients and its centralized management software.

Well Ubuntu 7.10 final release is just around the corner. Hopefully in October we will see it released. Today we have done a short quick look at the beta release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Various screenshot images of the new desktop plus a short flash video highlight this article. Hurry up October!

Linspire, the troubled Linux distribution vendor, has recently lost a top executive and a lead developer to the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu, has hired former Linspire staffers Randy Linnell and Brian Thomason.

The same way tabbed browsing revolutionized the web experience, GNU Screen can do the same for your experience in the command line. GNU Screen allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same “window.” By using different keyboard shortcuts, you are able to shuffle through the shell instances, access any of them directly, create new ones, kill old ones, attach and detach existing ones.

Long-time Tectonic supporter and contributor Ian Gilfillan is heading up a group of Cape Town free content advocates that have launched a bid to host Wikimania 2008, the annual conference of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation behind Wikipedia. Give them your support.

According to the all-knowing (or pretty darn close) Tim at HIS talk "Frank Pecaitis and Medsphere have parted ways". Apparently Pecaitis now works for GE. From what I can tell. Frank Pecaitis was the last of the old-guard leadership still active at Medsphere. Modern Healthcare already broke the story that Ken Kizer is leaving Medsphere"when a successor is found" which apparently has not happened yet. Who is left at Medsphere? This is exactly what I had hoped to prevent: An ongoing pointless lawsuit, leaving the two brother founders twiddling their thumbs, and a company that is tearing itself apart.

One of the most welcome additions to OpenOffice.org 2.3 is a new export filter that allows you to save Writer documents as MediaWiki-formatted pages. That's all fine and dandy if you are using MediaWiki, but what about other wiki systems? The answer to this question comes in the form of the OpenOffice2UniWakka export filter. While it's designed to work with the UniWakka wiki, with a bit of hacking you can adapt it to other wiki systems as well, even if you are not familiar with XML and XSLT.

Linspire, the company behind the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems and CNR.com, a free Linux software delivery service, has announced the immediate availability of its first commercial paid support offerings for Freespire 2.0 users.

Most of the core virtual memory subsystem developers met for a mini-summit just before the 2007 Kernel Summit in Cambridge. They came away feeling that they had resolved a number of VM scalability problems. Subsequent discussions have made it clear that, perhaps, this conclusion was a bit premature. They may well have resolved things, but it is not clear that everybody came to the same resolution.