Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When I talk to organization X (fill in your favorite health care entity, government or medical society) they never fail to utter the dreaded statement:"We are vendor neutral." followed by a dramatic long pause.

At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner. In his opening keynote at the third annual Gartner Open Source Summit here Sept. 19, titled "The Gartner Open Source Scenario for 2007: The risks and rewards for mainstream IT," Driver said the research firm believes "open source is defined by the license, period. Almost all of our customers are scrambling to create an open-source policy, as almost none of them have one as yet."

Congratulations to the successful students and their FreeBSD Project mentors for participating in another productive Google Summer of Code. This program encourages students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break with generous funding from Google. We have had a total of over 50 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program in 2005, 2006, and 2007. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, filesystems work, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We have gained many new FreeBSD committers from previous summer of code projects already, and more are in the process.

This year, Amarok had two summer of code projects under the KDE umbrella. Both of these projects have finished while remaining in continued development and were extremely successful. Read on to learn about two innovative additions to the Amarok project.

It's been a good week for anyone praying for the demise of Microsoft Office. Google unveiled its long-awaited, web-based PowerPoint competitor. IBM took the wraps off the free Lotus Symphony, a complete suite of MS-battling tools. And now we have a new version OpenOffice.org. Version 2.3 popped up on the OpenOffice website while no one was looking.

"Ahoy me laddies (and beauties)," Linux creator Linus Torvalds began,announcing the seventh release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel,"time for the traditional'Talk Like a Pirate Day' kernel release!" He noted,"now, last year we had a full release (2.6.18 was immortalized on TLAP-2006), but this year I'm chickening out, and we're just doing what is hopefully going to be the last -rc release for the 2.6.23 series." Full source changes can be viewed via thegitweb interface. Linus also offered a brief summary of the changes:"I'm not including the diffstat, because it got blown up by the resurrection of the sk98lin driver - because skge that is supposed to supplant it doesn't handle some of the hardware. Oh well."Apart from that, we had some mips, powerpc and xtense updates, and various driver tweaks. Things like the USB autosuspend revert should make people happier, and some more clockevents fixes should help suspend/restore on i386."read more |rsync.net - Secure Offsite Data

BinHost, a Web hosting and Internet services company, launched in 2000, "a time when discussion and email lists were not particularly easy to find a home for," says Justin Newman, BinHost's founder. Even back then, Newman built all of his infrastructure and services on open source software. As Newman has expanded his venture into telephony services, he still believes that open source saves business owners time, energy, and money.

The August print edition of Advance for Health Information Executives has a tour-de-force article by Bruce Wilder, MD, MPH, JD page 49 entitled 'Getting Beyond Economics' that is simply pure champagne. In addition to espousing the virtues of FOSS and WorldVistA EHR it contains such gems as: 'The move toward a universal EHR is much more than the introduction of a new technology in medical care. Universal implementation of proprietary EHR systems has the potential to wrest control of the doctor-patient relationship from doctors and their patients. Unfortunately, most doctors and their patients don't have a clue that this could happen -- and already is happening -- right under their noses. And, they will be paying for it!

Mozilla, on Sept. 19, ditched the ability to run arbitrary script from the Firefox command line, a quick fix for a year-old QuickTime bug that could be used to take over user systems. Security researcher Petko D. Petkov on Sept. 12 posted proof-of-concept code showing that the low-risk, year-old QuickTime bug could easily be turned into a high-risk attack on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Skype and other programs.

KDE's window-specific settings feature gives you a fine level of control over the way windows behave. It lets you change settings such as minimum/maximum size, position, overlay, and transparency. The GIMP uses multiple windows to select tools, tool options, and other items used in the process of image editing. By changing the default behavior of the various windows used by GIMP with KDE's window-specific settings, you can improve the GIMP interface.

A few weeks ago the APress title Foundations of Qt Development left the printing presses. The book introduces Qt in a step by step fashion, but also delves into most areas of the toolkit. The highlights include an in-depth look at the model/view classes, as well as introductions to all the tools and widgets needed to get started.

The petard filesystem is designed to produce only errors -- but you can stipulate what conditions generate the errors and what those errors should be. That makes petardfs useful for system and unit testing -- for example, making sure that an application gives a sane error message if it fails to open a file, or if there is a read error at byte 5000 of a file.

There has been growing talk of Linux's adoption on cellphone platforms. Yesterday Trolltech announced the release of its application platform under the GPL as well as a partnership with OpenMoko to do development on the Neo1973, the potential iPhone killer. A the same time Broadcom joined the Linux Mobile Foundation.

Computer giant IBM yesterday released a free office suite for Windows and Linux machines called Lotus Symphony. Symphony is available from the Symphony website which requires users to register and be logged on to download the software.

Nine hundred Swedish Pharmacies are switching to Redhat Linux on Intel according to this article: '...When you are dealing with people's health, you really do need an IT system that both the pharmacy and patients can rely on, said Anders Persson, IT manager at Apoteket. We put high demands on the quality of applications, availability and cost efficiency. The switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is part of a strategy to offer our customers the best possible access and service, while cutting costs and modernizing our IT infrastructure...'

The One Laptop per Child's XO, better known as the $100 laptop, gets most of the headlines but NComputing is showing in Macedonia, with its Ubuntu Linux based servers and virtual PC terminals, that there's more than one way to get inexpensive Linux desktops into students' hands.

LXer Feature: 19-Sept-2007

I interview one of the lead developers of the Xfce desktop environment, in The LXer Interview of Benedikt Meurer.

During the last weekend, the KDE on Windows developers conducted their second real life meeting in the Trolltech offices in Berlin Adlershof, incorporating new developers and improving infrastructure. On Friday evening, the participants were welcomed by the Berlin Trolls and introduced to the office. After a nice meal at a local restaurant, the the group evaluated the main working areas of the participants and created a meeting roadmap.

Mandriva Linux today announced the signature of a broad technical co-operation and training agreement with Angola.

A musical notation system for KOffice, a cross-platform kiosk browser, a help system editor for GNOME -- these are just a few of the projects completed in this year's Google Summer of Code (SOC) event, during which Google paid students to work on free and open source software projects. The innovations in this third year appear to have enriched the experience for participants, but not affected the project completion rate.