Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Recent Microsoft partner Novell today distanced itself from the Redmond giant's claim that free and open source software violated more than 200 of the company's patents.

Mike Connor has written a weblog post proposing raising the runtime requirements for Mozilla applications on Linux. Historically, Mozilla on Linux has had fairly conservative requirements, employing runtime checks and workarounds to support older libraries or work around known bugs. While this means that Mozilla applications will run on older Linux distributions, it has led to some compromises and ugly hacks in the Mozilla code, making it harder to maintain.

Nokia has released the first software update for its N800 Internet tablets. Officially dubbed Internet Tablet OS 2007 Edition version 3.2007.10-7, it corresponds to the maemo 3.1 platform. The update fixes several performance and stability problems in the 3.0 release that shipped with the tablet at launch, and offers a few improved features.

orway on May 11 became the latest European country to gravitate toward mandatory government use of the Open Document Format (ODF). According to a press release from Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, Norway joins Belgium, Finland, and France to move another step toward a final decision to require ODF.

A call for papers for OpenOffice.org's annual conference, OOoCon 2007, has been issued, and people are invited to submit proposals by June 1. OOoCon this year will take place in Barcelona from Sept. 19 through 21.

"As I understand, fair_clock is a monotonously increasing clock which advances at a pace inversely proportional to the load on the run queue," Srivatsa Vaddagiri explained in a review of Ingo Molnar's CFS CPU scheduler, "if load = 1 (task), it will advance at same pace as wall clock, as load increases it advances slower than wall clock."

Looking for yet another reason to hold off buying Vista? Seven weeks ago, when we first reported Vista was causing many machines to stall indefinitely while deleting, copying and moving files, we were sure the problem was caused by a bug that would be fixed relatively quickly. After all, Vista is Microsoft's flagship product. It's also an operating system. And everyone knows deleting, copying and moving files are among the most basic tasks any operating system can set out to do.

[I have run across this already with the one vista host machine I installed and service. - Scott]

Column After just a couple years of practice, Google can claim to produce the best computer-generated language translations in the world - in languages their boffin creators don't even understand.

"What's eating the battery life of my laptop?" Arjan van de Ven rhetorically asked in an announcement about a new PowerTOP utility released by Intel for detecting what Linux programs and kernel tunables are resulting in the most power consumption. "Why isn't it many more hours? Which software component causes the most power to be burned? These are important questions without a good answer... until now."

The FSFLA, the Latin American branch of the Free Software Foundation, is claiming a last-minute victory in Brazil in its struggle to remove the requirement to use non-free software for filing taxes online. Having reversed-engineered a free command-line program for filing taxes, the FSFLA is jubilantly announcing that it has "freed the lion" -- "lion" being a colloquial term in Brazil for taxes.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 87 for the week of May 6th through May 12th, 2007.

The two days of the KOffice ODF sprint were very productive. Most time was spent on group discussions, and designing specific parts of KOffice in smaller groups. Of course, code was written as well, and for an overview of what happened, read on!

The question was asked on the lkml whether or not memory allocated by kmalloc and vmalloc is swappable. Rik van Reil offered a clear explanation as to why it is not, "unswappable kernel memory is simpler and faster," adding, "there really is no good reason for swapping kernel memory nowadays." He went on to explain..

The third annual Red Hat Summit in San Diego concluded on Friday with a half-day schedule of sessions capped off by the presentation of the first annual Innovation Awards. I missed the awards ceremony in favor of a one-on-one interview with Professor Eben Moglen, during which I learned the secret of how to change the world.

So, Mr. Small- and Medium-Businessman, what's holding you up? Don't you need to run a Web site, be able to transfer files around your office, or automate some processes so they run 24/7? Wouldn't you like to put the worry of a virus wiping out your valuable data out of your mind? Have you ever thought about how nice it would be to buy one DVD and be able to load it on all the machines in your company?

So, the shape of the Great Battle begins to emerge. As reported by Fortune magazine, Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, reckons free software infringes on no less than 235 of the company's patents...

eBay is a great way to acquire hard-to-find collectibles. Trouble is, the best deals are often found in auctions that end in the middle of the night. When that happens, the Biet-O-Zilla (BOZ) extension for Firefox can help you, by tracking auctions and scheduling bids in advance.

A week in sunny Spain and the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded team have opened the way for developers to join the new mobile Linux project.

As part of its sustained campaign to dominate the emerging world of on-demand applications, salesforce.com has announced a version of the Skype Internet-based telephone software to work with its Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) package.

Switching off your computer at the end of day saves about 75 percent of the electricity it uses which could reduce the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by more than 500kg.

[This advice is obviously for people and businesses that do not have mission critical software running and I am not sold on his statistics either. - Scott]