Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Second acts are rare in the computer industry but Jean Ichbiah, who died this week, managed it. Not only did he revolutionise software development for military computer systems with the Ada programming language, but he also devised a widely-used fast text-entry system for handheld computers.

Running a basic, truly minimal window manager can save significant CPU cycles and memory. This becomes important if you’re running old, limited hardware or when designing a desktop environment for an embedded Linux device. Even the oldest, most primitive window managers (think TWM or MWM) can support a pretty desktop background image. The ability is almost as old as X itself.

French authorities will give out 175,000 USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software to Parisian high school students at the start of the next school year. The sticks will give the students, ages 15 and 16, the freedom to access their e-mail, browser bookmarks and other documents on computers at school, home, a friend's house or in an Internet cafe -- but at a much lower cost than providing notebook computers for all, a spokesman for the Greater Paris Regional Council said Friday.

Ticket broker In Ticketing is going head to head with Ticketmaster. It's able to offer lower fees for the same services because of open source software, says co-founder and CTO Marc Urbaitel.

As written, GPLv3 threatens to fork GNU projects and marginalize the Free Software Foundation, writes Linux observer Bill Weinberg in this well-written essay. Drawing on long experience evangelizing open source licensing to business users, Weinberg suggests that the FSF's GPLv3 high road could be a lonesome one.

The Fedora team has announced that the first test spin of Fedora 7 is available for download via BitTorrent or from Fedora Project mirrors. Fedora 7, also available on live CD, mixes both Core (the complete operating system) and Extras (add-ons that complement the OS) into one package in anticipation of the merger between the two for Fedora 7's final release. Aside from the newly abbreviated name, the release also departs from Fedora Core 6 in that it no longer ships with the entire Core collection as an ISO set, because the team is planning to produce targeted spins for specific uses.

It services provider Unisys Corp is expecting rapid growth from its recently launched open source services businesses as it looks to improve innovation with open source software, rather than simply cutting costs.

Vista is finally here but Microsoft’s journey to this point has been infamously painful. Does the company really want to do that again? Some industry watchers, such as Gartner Group, are arguing that operating systems are now so complex that the cycle of major releases...are at an end.

The BBC has announced its Web TV plan will provisionally go ahead, despite concern from media watchdog Ofcom over how the launch would affect the U.K's commercial telly.

Masatsugu Koketsu, former Sun executive, to expand structure to answer demand for Red Hat solutions in Japan.

AKCP enhances their visual monitoring capabilities by adding recording to their camera interface, all video captured by any of the camera's attached to an AKCP Linux-based product can now be recorded to time-stamped, rotating AVI files on a remote PC by a simple click on the Record button. WiFi capability has now been built into of all AKCP Linux-based products allowing you unlimited freedom in placing the device, without the need to lay any additional cabling.

The Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell Inc.'s right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft Corp. "The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft," Eben Moglen, the Foundation's general counsel, said on Friday.

Linux management and data virtualization provider Levanta (formerly LinuxCare) recently introduced the Intrepid X Linux management appliance. The Intrepid X caters to large Linux departments and data centers with high scalability and mission criticality requirements, the company says.

GRAMPS is the Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System -- free extensible personal genealogical software. Its numerous reviews cover the basics of what it does. In this article, I'll reveal some lesser-known features and tips from the developers' hideout.

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel to France to meet a developer who likes polishing, someone who loves to create images only to filter them out -- tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Cyrille Berger.

South Africa-based Bika Labs have released version 1.2.2 of the open source laboratory information management system, Bika Lims, has been released by Bika Labs.

We need to understand sprints — you do, we do, all of us. For several years now, we've had the intention to explain computing sprints in "Regular Expressions". It's become apparent, though, that we're not currently making the time to compose the definitive ethnography of the subject. Rather than try to keep up in an encyclopedic way with a subject that keeps expanding, therefore, we'll lightly sketch its outline and advise you to be on the lookout for more news.

The company completes its work on the open-source Word add-on, which translates files from the Open Document Format, and is set to start work on translators for Excel and PowerPoint.

Blackboard, one of the major providers of educational content management systems, has pledged not to assert its patents against open source elearning projects and companies. The pledge also covers so-called "home-grown" learning systems -- ones developed in-house by educational institutions. However, the pledge includes open source solutions only so long as they are not bundled with proprietary software, which has received mixed reactions, with many open source projects acknowledging the spirit of the gesture while expressing skepticism about the results.

Mozilla.org, which makes Firefox, the most popular Web browser alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, is setting up a China office to do battle in the world's second-largest Web market. California-based Mozilla already has a presence in China via a not-for-profit Foundation supporting open-source software projects, but the Beijing office will be its first real corporate presence, Mozilla Chief Operating Officer John Lilly said on Friday.