Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

fter a short delay due to a heavy dosage of Real Life(tm), I return to bring you more on the technologies behind KDE 4. This week I am featuring Strigi, an information extraction subsystem that is being fully deployed for KDE 4.0. KDE has previously had the ability to extract information about files of various types, and has used them in a variety of functional contexts, such as the Properties Dialog. Strigi promises many improvements over the existing versions.

Foreword: This article describes the products and product design philosophies of a small Utah-based company offering high-quality, intelligent, network-enabled cameras based on open source hardware and software. Elphel hopes its newest modular camera design will attract Linux software and FPGA engineers interested in exploring high-definition videography, among other innovative applications.

Have you considered setting up a server on your home LAN, but shied away from the idea because you didn't want to dedicate a machine to the task, or want to spend a lot of time setting it up and managing it? If so, you might be interested in Excito's Bubba, a cute little Linux-based server appliance from Sweden that makes running and managing a server easy and fun.

A South African start-up, Yiego Communications, aims at becoming the Skype of the mobile VoIP arena by drastically driving down mobile communications costs.

We all know about the rampant spam email problem. Nearly all of the potential solutions offered for it are based on the idea of the mail server receiving messages, classifying them as either spam or legitimate, and then processing further (deleting or forwarding messages) as appropriate. The problem with this strategy is that you end up using extra resources on the mail server. Here's a way to get the same result while minimizing resource usage by preventing the spam from reaching the mail server.

The findings are summarized from an IMS Research market research report entitled "The Impacts of Cellular Linux." The study found that Linux can help some companies bring products to market faster, at lower cost, while other companies experience delays and cost overruns.

Acclaimed software freedom activist Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS) will discuss “Copyright VS. Community” in Marlboro College’s Ragle Hall on Thursday, April 12 at 7:00 p.m. Stallman is a political and software warrior. He campaigns for the free software movement which advocates that users should not have to pay to run, copy, distribute and adapt software.

The Linux desktop architects behind the Portland Project, which seeks to bring rhyme and reason to the Linux desktop (among other benefits), will be meeting again June 15-16 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif.

In an open letter to Sun Microsystems' CEO, the Apache Software Foundation accuses Sun of restricting its access to a critical test kit to protect Sun's commercial interests.

Vim's flexibility and countless features are a major asset for experienced users, but a challenge for newbies. If you've always wanted to try Vim but were put off by your first attempts, you can start off gradually by getting to know Vim's GUI and easy mode. This article is a primer for those who haven't used Vim much and want to wade in gradually.

Sure, Red Hat's most recent financial results, announced March 29, didn't blow away investors. But the future looks bright. The reason: Open source application developers continue to gain serious momentum. And many of those developers are firmly committed to Red Hat.

Open source luminary Bruce Perens has come out fighting in defence of the latest draft of GPLv3. The draft, which seeks to prevent patent protection deals like that struck late last year by Microsoft and Novell, has come under heavy fire from proprietary software advocates such as the ACT (Association for Competitive Technology).

Popularity shouldn't be the acid test to determine if you should install an extension. The important question is whether it enhances your browsing experience without any nasty side effects. The good news is that the extension community is actually pretty adept at self-policing. Most extensions that are truly "broken" (for instance, they crash your browser or suck up all your CPU power) either get fixed quickly or simply vanish.

Confusion and controversy about Open Source licensing did not start with current Free Software Foundation efforts to revise the GNU General Public License (GPL). Nor will emergence of an acceptable GPL V3 – or of a revised Lesser GPL or Affero GPL (thanks Dana Blankenhorn) – make OS licensing much less problematical for enterprise users. Concerns are both alleviated and complicated by a profusion of options that range from GPL's communitarianism to the Common Public License's collaborative focus to BSD's laissez-faire liberality.

Last May, commercial Debian Linux distributor Xandros jumped into the server fray with its Xandros Server. In the next few weeks, the company will be releasing a new version of its server stack, including support for server virtualization and two distributions, one keyed to SMB shops and the other for larger enterprises. Xandros will also break away its Xandros Management Console from its Linux distro and offer it as a separate product that runs on Windows workstations and can manage other Linuxes. The company will also partner to offer email messaging and groupware bundles.

t has been almost 16 years since Linux version 0.01 was released, and since then the open source OS, and many other open source products, have proven themselves invaluable productivity tools and platforms.

GAIM, the popular open-source instant messaging (IM) application, last week changed its name to Pidgin, in order to settle a longstanding legal dispute with AOL. GAIM originally got its name as the acronym from "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger," the Pidgin website says.

Last fall, Berkeley Data Systems ran a "Programmer Deathmatch", offering a $10,000 prize to the one programmer who successfully navigated 3 timed rounds of programming competition.

Mozilla this week made available the first release candidate of Thunderbird 2, the next generation of the organization's popular open-source email client. The team asks that users report any bugs or problems that they encounter.

Collaboration Highlights Trend Toward Search-Driven Development