Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For most of us, file formats are right up there with printer drivers in terms of fun. Certainly, they're important, but not something you'd look to for excitement. And yet that is precisely what thebattle between the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft's OOXML is providing. And I'm not just talking about the dry, intellectual excitement derived from comparing well-formed XML tags: this is a no holds barred, down-and-dirtymano a manofight over the soul of document standards.

In this final section I'll present some MIDI-specific troubleshooting tips, along with a brief description of the setup here at StudioDave, a few closing remarks, and of course some links to the Linux music-maker du jour.

When I first started learning to read, my primary motivation was to gain the ability to read the comics in my local paper. I had no idea at that time that there were so many comics in the world. Now I know that there are comics all over the Web, but who has time to go to each site each day and read the latest strip? Thanks to the world of open source software, you can gather all your favorite comics on one page automatically, ready for you to read each morning.

Mozilla, responsible for Thunderbird and Firefox, this week released a campus edition of Firefox, specifically geared towards students' needs.

Thanks to a note from its creator, DesktopLinux.com learned about a new "release candidate" of Custom NimbleX 2 this week. This lesser known Slackware-derived project offers a Web-based tool that lets users concoct, and then download, their own customized live CD Linux images -- in minutes!

The Free Software Foundation released a statement on Tuesday saying that Microsoft is not exempt from the requirements of the latest version of the Gnu General Public Licence, version 3.

The Society for Sustainable Mobility, formerly known as the Open Source Green Vehicle project, is one of the official teams registered for the Automotive X-Prize competition. The X-Prize Foundation got a lot of press in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the first private team that built and launched a vehicle carrying three people 100 km above the earth. This year, the foundation has been working to get the funding for the Automotive X-Prize: another $10 million to the team that can build a marketable 100 MPG vehicle. Will open source win the prize?

Mandriva Benelux NV (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg) was launched on August 16th 2007 as the sole Benelux partner for Mandriva S.A, offering Mandriva Linux operating systems. Our target areas are corporate applications and solutions to individuals, educational institutions, public and private organizations, ISVs and OEMs all over the Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg region.

Roelof Temmingh has written a cool new application which provides individuals with the ability to do data mining of publicly available information. It's a cross-platform Java application called Evolution, currently in its second beta, and available as a free download.

ITerating, the wiki-based software guide for open source and commercial software, has announced the availability of a free service providing up-to-date information about more than 17 000 software products.

Open-source software and the licenses that govern it suffered a serious setback in a San Francisco District Court earlier this month, following a preliminary decision that could effectively deprive open source licensors from being able to get a court injunction to stop the violation of the terms of their license going forward.

The popular open source RAW converter UFRaw recently gained new functionality when it was bumped up to revision 0.12. The new release integrates new core image-processing functions and new user interface features to simplify photo editing.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) appears to be polishing up its legal sabers over possible violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Microsoft.

Software Freedom Day the worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), will take place on September 15. The South African event will take place at the department of science and technology (DST) in Pretoria.

The Free Software Foundation has defined Four Freedoms related to software. These freedoms apply to users of software, not necessarily developers. In the view of the FSF, these freedoms are ethical in nature, so much so that they argue that software which violates these freedoms is unethical.

Forty percent of German university students now have access to Linux and management solutions from Novell

An Interview with Kir Kolyshkin,Project Manager for OpenVZ.

Many in Health IT are moving to all over-the-web 'asp', software-as-service Electronic Medical Records services with total centralized control of data. John C. Dvoraksounds off a note of caution for such a trend with the recent Windows Genuine Advantage server outage which should be a wakeup call for those moving to 'online everything' applications:'What is often lost in individual analyses of how to proceed with your data-processing needs is the concept of"being at the mercy of a single company." It's something that you need to avoid at all costs. This Windows Genuine Disadvantage pothole should make all users rethink their strategies...' He further notes that this outage"happened to Microsoft, not to Alabama Joe's Server Farm and Toaster Repair." a note of caution indeed.

One of the fundamental principles of Linux kernel development is that user-space interfaces are set in stone. Once an API has been made available to user space, it must, for all practical purposes, be supported (without breaking applications) indefinitely. There have been times when this rule has been broken, but, even in the areas known for trouble (sysfs, for example), the number of times that the user-space API has been broken has remained relatively small.

With an avalanche of last-minute commits, the KOffice Google Summer of Code students finished yet another great Summer of Code. We had some very exciting projects this year, and most of them were as great a success as last year.