Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gearheads. When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.

Bill Gates once called the open source community a bunch of communists, thinking the open source ideal was against anyone owning the fruits of their programming labors. However, he has missed the real point of choosing open source. It's about not being held to ransom and having the freedom to switch suppliers with impunity -- freedom to modify, extend and supplement your technology as you see fit.

Ainkaboot's Octimod MPC7-1500 is a high density Gentoo Linux-based clustering platform based on Mini-ITX boards. Each processing module is hot-swappable, and contains a 1.5GHz C7 powered VIA EPIA EN 15000 motherboard.

With open-source ERP deployments now starting to take more hold, Spanish-based Openbravo is quickly gaining international penetration, garnering as many as 20,000 downloads a month of its Web-based software from all over the world.

"I'm not interested in the more academic aspects of computing," says Brian Aker, director of architecture at MySQL. "I'm interested in solving problems." This approach has taken Aker from being a teenage hacker to today, when he spends an increasing amount of time thinking about where IT in general and databases specifically are heading.

More signs of legitimacy of FOSS in medicine with this press release: 'McKesson has joined with Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, to introduce the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, a cost-effective open source information technology solution with services designed to meet the mission-critical demands of healthcare. “The Red Hat solution offers our customers a reliable, affordable platform for delivering safe, high-quality patient care using McKesson’s clinical applications,” said Michael J. Simpson, chief technology officer for McKesson Provider Technologies. “The introduction of a high-value, open platform designed specifically for the needs of healthcare IT represents a major step forward in encouraging the use of open source technologies instead of closed, proprietary technologies that are costly to acquire, maintain and scale.”

A duo of open-source experts from Europe will give separate workshops in a conference next week organized by advocacy group Institute of Popular Democracy.

If you listen to music on CD much, you'll notice that some CDs sound much louder than others, and I'm not talking about Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste versus Sarah McLachlan's Touch. Two CDs of the same genre, when played on the same CD player, at the same volume, can have drastically different playback volume. This difference carries over when you rip the CD to MP3, and can be really annoying when you're going from song to song on your MP3 playlists on your computer or portable music player. One way to iron out the differences is to use MP3Gain to adjust your MP3s to have the the same volume.

Runtime Revolution revives the simple development model that Bill Atkinson pioneered with Hypercard back in 1987. Fresh from his triumph of building MacPaint for the Apple Macintosh, Atkinson brought together the concepts of object-based, event-driven programming and hypermedia to create a highly popular tool for rapid application development. Atkinson insisted that Apple gave it away free with the Macintosh which helped it to spread quickly in the late 1980s. Unfortunately the lack of a decent PC implementation and commercial changes at Apple meant that Hypercard eventually withered away. Further development was stopped in 2000 and, sadly, Apple abandoned it altogether in 2004.

Madan Sheina asks whether data warehouse appliances can really transform the way in which companies analyse their growing volumes of data, without breaking the bank.

Today's networking grab-bag contains iftop, ApacheTop, and sysctl. iftop is a nice realtime bandwidth monitor, ApacheTop is an almost real-time Apache monitor, and sysctl is used to control hundreds of kernel parameters in a most elite fashion. sysctl comes with all Linux distributions, and iftop and ApacheTop are just a Yum install or apt-get install away.

Independent report from Info2 on Sun Microsystems' open source and middleware strategy says Sun's made solid advances, but must move beyond its low price services debut to demonstrate its potential as a serious, long-term partner for developers and ISVs. Info2 outlines where Sun is leading platform rivals and highlights five areas where Sun remains vulnerable to competitors.

A new UK think tank will analyse how open-source software can be used in government and the private sector. The National Open Centre, based in Birmingham, will be composed of working groups that will study issues around open source such as the use of standards and procurement guidelines, said Ed Downs, of the National Computing Centre, a professional IT membership organisation.

The Xara LX vector graphics editor took a big step forward last week. After months of gridlock between open source contributors to the project and its corporate owners, one of the contributors published his own fork of the code base -- and the company approved, offering to host it in the official Subversion repository.

Welcome to our issue number 78 of Fedora Weekly News.

African telcos have been forced to drop their international call rates by as much as 75 percent over the past year as VoIP operators start to bite into their market share, says a new report released this week.

The Faces of KDE takes a look at some of the developers working on KDE 4. "In this stage of development it’s a lot of pain for very little glory, re-designing the next generation KDE from the ground up. It’s a task that separates the core developers from the hangers on, and the architects of the new desktop are a pretty dedicated group. There are far too many developers currently active in KDE for me to introduce them all, but here’s a quick glance at what a small handful of them are working on for the next major version of KDE."

KnowledgeTree on Monday announced the release of version 3.4 of the KnowledgeTree Document Management System. This new version includes various Web 2.0 collaboration features such as tagging, tag Clouds and Really Simple Syndication.

Not sure of the line between free software and proprietary software? Then ask Richard Stallman. A virtual Richard Stallman that is, which runs on a Linux system and alerts users to software they are using that doesn't meet the strict GPL line.

At the Communications Ecosystem Conference today The Linux Foundation, the new organization formed last month from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, today announced availability of its Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 Specification. In existence since 2002 and now in its fourth version, the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) Specification consists of over 250 individual requirements that cover seven categories of Performance, Hardware, Standards, Serviceability, Availability, Security and Clustering. The primary changes to the new CGL 4.0 Specification are alignment with the SCOPE Alliance's Carrier Grade Profile and tighter requirements around compliance.