Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Real-time Linux specialist FSMLabs is shipping software that may help financial services companies retrofit their electronic trading systems for compliance with new time synchronization requirements in the U.S. and Europe. The company claims that the RTTimeSync add-on for its RTLinuxPro OS can keep nodes synchronized, whether running Linux or Windows.

I can still remember the wow factor when first seeing a copy of Knoppix booting up on a Windows machine. It was many moons again and the idea of a bootable Linux CD seemed strangely miraculous.

Hines Corp. is a management company that oversees a conglomerate of manufacturers in the Midwest and Texas, and a distributorship in New York. It has a diverse IT infrastructure that requires attention around the clock. When Hines CIO Ed Harper decided it was time to consolidate and streamline aging legacy systems, he turned from Microsoft to Linux.

The One Laptop Per Child project is considering an arrangement whereby anyone can buy one of the group's self-powered, low-cost Linux laptops for themselves -- provided they buy a second one for delivery to a child in a developing country.

The age of the all-browser based Electronic Medical Record/Electronic Health Record (EMR/EHR) is upon us. Local area network (LAN) based EMR's upon which older generation EMR's companies have built their products is dead. This paradigm shift is occurring now. This development threatens Free and Open Source medical software, practitioners and patients as they have never been threatened before.

A thread on the lkml began with a query about using O_DIRECT when opening a file. An earlywhite paper written by Andrea Arcangeli [interview] to describe the O_DIRECT patch before it was merged into the 2.4 kernel explains,"with O_DIRECT the kernel will do DMA directly from/to the physical memory pointed [to] by the userspace buffer passed as [a] parameter to the read/write syscalls. So there will be no CPU and memory bandwidth spent in the copies between userspace memory and kernel cache, and there will be no CPU time spent in kernel in the management of the cache (like cache lookups, per-page locks etc..)."

PHP has become the most popular application language on the web, but common security mistakes by developers are giving PHP a bad name. Here's how PHP coding errors have become the new low-hanging fruit for attackers, contributing to the phishing problems on the web.

In a court filing reported this week by legal Web site Groklaw, Novell claimed that SCO should pay it almost all of the Unix licensing revenue it has received from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. This revenue amounts to almost $26 million, and was earned by SCO when it sold Unix licenses to Sun and Microsoft in 2003.

If you want to share your knowledge and ideas with others, you set up a blog. If you want to collaboratively edit Web pages and keep track of changes, you use a wiki. If you need a tool that allows you to quickly set up a page that combines blog and wiki features, with some content versioning capabilities thrown in, you need something like EditThisPagePHP, a PHP script that allows you to create Web pages and do some clever things with them.

Apple's iPhone is undoubtedly beautiful and compelling, but it is wrapped in a cocoon of patents and proprietary software, writes Anthony Taylor. The very similar looking OpenMoko Neo phone, on the other hand is almost entirely open and free of proprietary components.

Most PC users have collections of .mp3 and .ogg files on their PC which is fine for MP3 players and PC listening. But what if you have a standalone CD player that doesn't play .mp3 files and you would like to make your own CD compilations? Here is a simple five step process to convert .mp3 and .ogg files and burn audio CDs that will play anywhere.

Opera Software is calling accusations made by Mozilla staffer Asa Dotzler regarding Opera's security disclosure policies, "dangerous and irresponsible." The issue at hand revolves around a pair of security vulnerabilities that were recently discovered by Verisign's iDefense division. Dotzler alleged that since Opera did not immediately alert users that there was an update available to fix critical flaws that Opera was in some way negligent.

A software company in Lithuania is shipping face recognition and fingerprint recognition SDKs (software development kits) for embedded and mobile Linux devices. Neurotechnologija's FaceCell and FingerCell 2.0 SDKs can be used separately, or combined, for "multi-biometrical applications," the company says.

Enterprises will spend too much this year creating monolithic apps—the sort of server-side efforts that involve formal requirements and tie up dozens (or hundreds) of architects, coders, and testers. Most would be better off using scripting languages, Web services, and SOA (service-oriented architecture) to weave together browser-based apps that leverage existing assets.

The Sun Microsystems marketing machine has been hard at work promoting its Solaris 10 operating system as of late, with special events for the press and analyst community. But market data suggests that it's Linux -- not Solaris -- that Sun customers want.

Open-source systems integrator Optaros Inc. today released a guide listing and reviewing what it considers the 262 best open-source applications for companies. The catalog, available on Optaros' Web site, rates software on a scale of 1 to 5 on factors such as functionality, the vibrancy of the developer community behind it, the software's maturity and stability, and its projected trajectory. Those factors are then used to calculate the software's readiness for use by midsize and large corporations.

Adobe has extended its support to open source community. The company has contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe Flash Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Using the source code, Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin.

Still seething over that bad book publishing deal you entered into in 1981? Good news: you might be able to rescue your manuscript and do something lucrative with it, thanks to Creative Commons (CC) and obscure portions of US copyright law. CC is beta testing a Web-based tool on its ccLabs site that helps authors through the tricky legal maze required to terminate a copyright transfer.

The old stable release Debian GNU/Linux (codename 'woody') has been archived. The official source for this distribution is the dedicated archive host called archive.debian.org. It is no longer available on regular Debian mirror servers.

We can’t all afford four-figure priced twelve megapixel digital cameras with wide angle lenses. We can, however, all use free software to embellish the photographs taken by our modest equipment and belie their resolution and viewing angle. Set the GIMP aside for a moment and launch Hugin, a powerful cross-platform GTK frontend that will help you quickly and easily stitch individual photographs into one, large, seamless panorama.