Showing headlines posted by henke54

Linux is pretty good at harnessing processor speed, and Chastain Motorsports is hoping to snare some of that effect to propel their Panoz/Honda to victory. The distinctive Penguin logo, "Tux," has been affixed to the nose of the 200+ MPH car in anticipation of meeting a donation goal.

An open-source engineering project is currently under development in Canada. The project aims to create a new power plant design that will use a combination of solar and geothermal energy for use in more distant locations without polluting the environment. Comprehensive coverage appears here for the first time.

Brussels, 15 March 2007 – Leading European, Brazilian and Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) players announced today that they have joined forces to launch QualiPSo, a quality platform to foster the development and use of open source software to help their industries in the global race for growth.

Written in Java and released under the GPL, iDART (intelligent Dispensing of Antiretroviral Treatment) is a pharmacy system designed for use at antiretroviral (ARV) pharmacies in the public health sector. Initially distributed only as software, it was generally implemented on machines using Windows. Due to issues of reliability and security, Cell-Life have created iDART-in-a-box, which is a complete system running on Ubuntu Linux.

The idea of switching to Linux has become an increasingly active topic of consideration over the past few years in Japan. Starting in late 2004, a trial study conducted at a handful of schools across the country, comprising a total of roughly a thousand students, experimented with using Linux-based systems in the classroom environment. Three hundred Linux-installed computers were distributed to these schools and subsequently used in a variety of classroom activities such as science experiments, report-writing, and internet-based research. While certain issues arose in the context of these activities related to dependencies on Windows-based software such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, the project on the whole was largely successful and students are reported to have enjoyed and benefited from working in the Linux environment.

The 3,000 document archive from the Comes antitrust trial, which disappeared from the web abruptly when Microsoft settled the case last week, is beginning to trickle back into view. A week ago the site was placed under password protection, Microsoft withdrew its own account of events, and so-called internet "archive" archive.org apparently also pulled its mirror. Now author Andrew Schulman, who provided the most interesting testimony (report to follow) in the epic trial, has begun to host some material on his personal server.

Just a few days ago, Dell launched a site to solicit feedback from customers regarding what they most want to see coming from newer systems. Some of the various feature requests include stock multi-boot systems, an option to have no additional software installed aside from the OS, OpenOffice installations and – topping the list by a margin of 2 to 1 – pre-installed Linux. Whether it be with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, OpenSUSE or others, there are more than 20,000 requests for Dell to begin offering systems with Linux pre-installed by default. Clearly, demand for such systems are rising.

How a school created a new computer lab without buying computers, software, or books

[A fantastic example of the power of Open Source. - Scott]

The Open Source Consortium (OSC) has slammed the BBC over plans to lock online TV viewers into Microsoft products. The accusations come after the BBC announced that its new on-demand services will be limited to Microsoft Windows. A report from the BBC Trust said that services will be unavailable to consumers who do not use Microsoft software or have an up-to-date version of Windows.

PARIS (Solutions Linux 2007)—30 Jan 2007—PSA Peugeot Citroën, the second-largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, and Novell just signed a multiyear contract allowing the deployment of up to 20,000 Linux* desktops plus 2,500 Linux servers from Novell.

Microsoft launches its new operating system Vista on 30 January to consumers, promising the "wow starts now". As part of our launch coverage we are looking for a committed Vista user - you are probably someone who has been trialling Vista in beta or using it for your business - as well as a passionate Mac OS X user and a devotee of Linux. Tell us in 100 words or less, why you are such a supporter of your chosen operating system and what features you love about it. We will select three of you to go head-to-head-to-head on the subject of your favourite operating system and will be contacting you with further instructions - so don't forget to include your e-mail address in the form below.

A series of patents have been filed by the well-known Linux kernel developer, Alan Cox, asserting ownership of any DRM technology employed in software to modify the behavior of a system if certain conditions are not met. Since Red Hat and Cox himself are staunch open-source proponents, if this patent is granted it is likely that they will choose not to license this technology, and instead, sue for any use of it as a defense of OSS. Red Hat's patent policy (http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html) states that any patents they own will be used to defend FOSS developers if attacked. It also states that their patents may be used freely in OSS under gpl. I certainly hope this is granted. Is it defendable though??

Vienna, Austria – Royal Philips Electronics today announced the commercial availability of a new Linux software development kit (SDK) for its new generation of Philips SpeechMike products. Systemwide integration of the new SDK enables users at large legal firms and healthcare organizations to control SpeechMike functions – such as the 4-position slide switch, function buttons, trackball, LED, power mode, scroll wheel and barcode information – within the Linux operating system. The SDK also allows the Philips Foot Control 210 to operate with the Linux system. Philips is believed to be the first vendor to support professional dictation applications in the Linux environment.

If you could ask Bill Gates one question, what would you ask? I spent an hour today with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on the company's Redmond campus. I chose to ask Bill about Microsoft's intellectual property stance against Linux and its open source developers, from the SCO Group's litigation against IBM to Steve Ballmer's recent claim Linux infringes on Microsoft patents after signing a patent indemnity with Novell. Bill Gates claimed he had never heard of BayStar Capital, an investor in SCO Group and their litigation against large corporate supporters of Linux.

"It's always an interesting day when you get to write a kernel patch, at the urging of Andrew Morton, that notifies the world that non-GPL Linux kernel modules will not work after January 2008 and write some poetry all in the same message." More here. Hopefully, many closed-source drivers will be opened during the next year if this patch goes through. Update: Linus responds.

Large Dutch cities supporting open source Arthur Buijs from the Dutch OpenOffice.org community just pointed me to this Dutch article. According to the article, a number of large Dutch cities including Almere, Assen, Eindhoven, Enschede, Groningen, Haarlem, Leeuwarden and Nijmegen have decided to support open source. The article says that the cities are interested in open source because Microsoft software is being perceived as expensive and the software does not not work well together with competitive products on other platforms. Here it is in dutch language..

I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week. To my happy surprise (where "happy" is the freude in schadenfreude), Joel Spolsky wrote an article about my feature. I would like to try to explain how this happened.

Deputies elected to the French National Assembly in the next legislative session will find open-source software on the desktop PCs provided for their use. The use of free software will result in substantial cost savings, despite the cost of migration and training, the Assembly said in a statement Wednesday. Free and open source software now offers all the functions the deputies need, according to a study conducted at the request of the president of the assembly, Jean-Louis Debre. The software on the deputies' computers will include the Linux operating system, the Open Office productivity suite, the Firefox Web browser and an open-source e-mail application. A number of deputies had asked the president of the Assembly to consider the use of open source software, the statement said.

In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property.

But what would a Direct3D presentation be without some eye candy? Stefan showed off screenshots of some games. There was also a small contingent of DirectX folks in attendance with some really high-powered laptops that could show off the games. It's quite impressive to see the latest and greatest games running on Linux. Jon Parshall extensively, um, "tested" World of Warcraft throughout the conference (did you finally make it to level 48, Jon?) Tom Wickline had 3DMark2000, 3DMark2001SE and 3DMark2003 running all of there test. There is still some artifacts in the rendering of a couple of the test, but the DirectX guys knew what was to blame for it. Stefan showed off the Microsoft DirectX logo "proving" DirectX is being properly detected.