Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Providing a good introduction to these two popular open source languages, after working through this book a reader should be able to build their own database driven web sites and applications.

One of the world's leading advocates of the open source software movement, Brian Bahlendorf gave a talk at the Digital Freedom Expo at the University of the Western Cape on Thursday, entitled "Ten things you may not know about open source".

Sun has hitched its open source and Java developer fortunes to Ubuntu by inserting NetBeans into the latest version of the fast-growing distribution.

ScienceLogic launched three years ago with a mission to bring to market an IT appliance that could monitor every aspect of a company's network infrastructure. CEO David Link calls it "dial tone service quality," a term that has come to mean high reliability and easy accessibility. To accomplish that mission, Link knew that open source software was the key, both internally and in ScienceLogic's flagship product, the EM7.

In Beijing, Bill Gates announced this week that Microsoft's "Unlimited Potential" initiative will now include offering a software package, the Student Innovation Suite, to governments and students in emerging countries across the world at a price of just $3. This suite, available in the second half of 2007, will include Windows XP Starter Edition; Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office, and Windows Live Mail desktop. However, Microsoft has no takers for its offering yet.

Kubuntu 7.04, development codename "The Feisty Fawn", was released today. Free CDs are available through ShipIt. Kubuntu prides itself on working towards the perfect KDE GNU/Linux solution, and with this latest release the development team worked harder than ever to do just this. 7.04 includes many updates, new features, and the latest releases of your favorite applications. KDE 3.5.6 is of course the desktop of choice, with K3b up to the milestone 1.0. The development team has worked hard to incorporate the best usability and accessibility features, to tame the edginess, and to provide a stable and secure computing environment for everyone. So stand with us and congratulate the Kubuntu development team and its many users in a job well done.

The GNOME Foundation is scheduled to announce the GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative (GMAE) today at the Embedded Linux Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The initiative is aimed at bolstering GNOME usage as an embedded and mobile development platform. Founding members include open source organizations and commercial interests such as ACCESS, Canonical, Intel, Debian, Nokia, Red Hat, Fluendo, the Linux Foundation, and Maemo.

Who needs Vista, when Canonical Ltd. the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has just released the latest version of the popular Linux distribution: Ubuntu version 7.04? Despite concerns that this release might be delayed by last minute, fine tuning of ATI graphic card drivers and the network manager panel applet, Ubuntu 7.04 made its release date.

Mozilla today released the final version of Thunderbird 2, the next generation of the organization's open-source email client. Key new features include message tagging, message history, and a new function to search for content within messages, among numerous other enhancements.

Technologists must involve themselves in Internet policy making or risk losing a free Internet, Creative Commons founder says.

Emmett is impressed with the additions to the latest up.time upgrade. Find out why he's calling this the"best browser-based monitoring software".

The South African department of education will likely look at a stronger free and open source policy in light if the recently-adopted national free software strategy, department director-general Duncan Hindle said this morning.

The Getting Things Done (GTD) method of time management is one of the simplest methods I've found, but until recently I hadn't had much luck in finding any Linux-compatible applications to help me stick to using GTD. A few weeks ago I stumbled on ThinkingRock, a Java-based app for following the GTD methodology, and tried it out. I've been pleased with its simplicity and ease of use.

Computerworld reported yesterday that Microsoft and Samsung have signed a new cross-patent protection agreement which specifically provides Samsung rights to any of the unspecified patents which Microsoft claims are being violated by Linux usage. In return, Microsoft is given rights to Samsung's extensive patent portfolio.

A recent discussion on the lkml examined the possibility of a Linux implementation of Sun's ZFS. It was pointed out that the file system is released under the GPL-incompatible CDDL, and that Sun has filed numerous patents to prevent ZFS from being reverse engineered. Max Yudin pointed out, "according to Jeff Bonwick's blog Sun issued 56 patents on ZFS, but I have no idea what they patented. Sorry, binary compatible ZFS reimplementation with GPL license might not be legal." David Litwin noted that he had been told by a ZFS developer to talk to Linux developers to see about getting non-GPL'd code included with the kernel. Theodore T'so replied, "that was totally useless answer from the ZFS developers. What he should have told you is to contact Sun management, since they are the only ones who can decide whether or not to release ZFS under a GPL license, and more importantly, to give a patent license for any patents they may have filed in the course of developing ZFS."

Firefox browser usage has increased substantially -- by nearly 5 percent -- in Europe over the past year, French web analyst firm XiTi reports. During the week of March 5 through 11, 2007, the open-source browser exceeded 24 percent share of Europe's browser market, according to the market researcher.

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel over to Germany to talk to the key to your personal information storage, a highly dedicated KDE-PIM developer (though hide any small animals when visiting his apartment!) - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Volker Krause.

The first non-C++ application in KDE's SVN has been moved from the playground module to Extragear. Guidance is a number of system configuration modules and a laptop power manager. The recent 0.8 release added a kcontrol module for setting up Wine and improvements to the power manager. One of the aims of KDE 4 is to increase the use of KDE bindings, such as Ruby's Korundum and PyKDE, which will make coding KDE easier for those who do not want to worry about pointers and compilers.

Sun Microsystems has partnered with Canonical to release a complete Java stack for Ubuntu users. The stack is made up from Sun's J2EE offering GlassFish, Java SE (JDK 6), Derby-based Java DB 10.2, and the NetBeans IDE 5.5. While Java components have been around for quite some time, this will be the first time users will be able to be able to easily download and install this stack. They're all just an apt-get command away.

Microsoft has launched an effort to double its user base to 2 billion by 2015, offering students in developing countries entry level versions of Windows and Office for next to nothing. It's also an effort to keep users in poorer nations hooked on Windows and away from Linux.

[XP Starter Edition? So there going to sell software that they won't support after 2008?. Eh, for three bucks... - Scott]