Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz published Scrooge and intellectual property rights in the British Medical Journal. In it he attacks the fundamental justification for drug patents, the supposed encouragement of private investment in high risk drugs. It is enough to say that his arguments go double for medical software patents which have all of the drawbacks of drug patents, except that they do not require a significant investment at all, so there is no justification whatsoever. The next time you hear a medical software company talk about an "innovation" they have patented you should cringe at the theft of a simple idea from the FOSS world.

Users of BasKet Note Pads, an advanced notepad application for the KDE desktop, are called to participate in a usability survey. The survey is carried out by the recently launched BasKet Usability Project, a sponsored student project in the "Season of Usability" of OpenUsability.org.

A physician and medical imaging specialistspeaks out on VistA content protection or digital rights management in a medical environment:'...the field of medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy compression because artifacts introduced by the compression process can cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening. Consider a medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there's any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista's content protection, potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to avoid.

The perpetual debate over the legality, practicality, and wisdom of using, distributing, producing, and supporting binary-only drivers flared up again recently, with a recent debate on the Linux Kernel Mailing List over the legality of binary-only drivers simmering down and Ubuntu company Canonical considering enabling binary drivers by default in the next release.

Many religions have some sort of holiday during this season, and many companies close down or work short hours until the current year ends and the next one begins. We, too, will be taking time off to spend with our families and friends, so NewsForge will be on a reduced posting schedule between now and January 1. We'll still cover breaking news, and you'll see a trickle of feature articles and NewsVac links, but not as many as you're used to.

Red Hat got back in the good graces of investors with a strong third-quarter financial report that featured a 2-cent-a-share upside surprise and a 45% jump in revenue. The news gave shares of the open source software provider a much-needed boost: In after-hours trading Thursday, the stock was up $2.54, or 14%, to $20.50.

Vista's content protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history, claims a new and detailed report from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

LXer Feature: 24-Dec-2006

With Christmas around the corner, you'll be glad to know that you can check out over 100 vendors around the globe who offer desktop and notebook computers with GNU/Linux pre-installed. Put another way, LXer's Pre-Installed Linux Vendor database is now available!

Dear Propeller Heads: One of my New Year's resolutions is keep up with technology. What's going to happen in 2007 that I should be aware of? A: That's amazing! Your timing is perfect for the 3rd annual Propeller Head Predictions! Nostradamus, Jeane Dixon, Miss Cleo and the Propeller Heads we're in good company. So here goes.

Firefox users have been urged to update their browser immediately after Mozilla, the organisation behind the popular browser, said it had fixed eight vulnerabilities in Firefox 2.0.

'Twas the Saturday before Christmas and throughout Ruby-land hackers were working, refact'ring by hand. Their programs were written with the greatest of care in hopes that a new VM soon would be there. The newsgroup was still, the irc channels too In light of the quiet, what's a blogger to do? When up on the mail list, there arose such a clatter I sprang to my laptop to see what was the matter. When what to my wondering eyes should appear but a great bunch of news before the New Year.

I couldn't make this up if I tried. A friend pinged me and said he'd gotten a call from a Microsoft recruiter trying to fill a position she described as "open source evangelist." My friend, who does not want his name associated with this story, is without question an open source evangelist, and quite a successful one at that. But he is not interested in going to work for Microsoft. Are you?

Can a game company make a profit producing commercial offerings for Linux? Two cross-platform offerings that run on Linux are hoping to show that it can be done.

What does an anti-slavery pamphlet, a graph of French losses during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and a PowerPoint slide presentation have in common? The answer, according to Edward Tufte's latest collection of essays, Beautiful Evidence , is that all of them combine words and graphics to convey information -- although not with the same success. This is a subject with which readers of Tufte's previous books will be already familiar, and some of the essays in the book have been available online in slightly different forms for several years. Yet, for all this familiarity, in Beautiful Evidence, Tufte still manages to offer readers a combination of practical advice and theory in a style that manages to be both leisurely and challenging at the same time.

Open-source software in schools will be the driving force for Gordon Brown’s proposed ‘Knowledge Economy’, it was claimed today. The claim comes from Bluefountain, after massive cross-party backbench support for a change in government policy for IT in education. Nearly one in five backbenchers from all parties questioned the exclusion of open-source software from UK schools.

I recently read a story that asked, "Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?" Burst!? No, I don't think so. Actually, it still isn't even half as big as it will be when it's full.

For the ninth year in a row, the editors at LWN.net have put together a timeline highlighting the most important events of the last twelve months.

Bug stamp-out list for December 22, 2006

The development of vital computer systems to be used and maintained for decades in aerospace and automobile construction is preconditioned on development tools the specifications of which elude most classical software products. Therefore a consortium of companies centered on the aircraft manufacturer Airbus has decided to make sure -- by launching a project dubbed TOPCASED (Toolkit in Open source for Critical Applications & Systems Development) -- that it gets its hands on such tools.

We are pleased to announce that the third Beta release of Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5 is now available. Thanks to many reports and suggestions, this release contains some critical fixes and improvements in the installer and other software.