Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When the market wipes a quarter of your company's share price because a powerful competitor declares its intention to enter your market space, one would think tough measures are called for. Unfortunately Red Hat, which now has to contend with Oracle competing for support of its Linux distribution, appears to have confused tough measures with talking tough.

One of the biggest turn offs people have when trying to build their own PVR is that things can get complicated quickly, especially if you use a Linux based software solution. Heck, even for the seasoned PVR builders amongst us, we know that configuring everything just right can be a huge hassle and time sink.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on Decibel and the KDE-based NEPOMUK components accelerates. The Unity web rendering engine experiment is removed from KDE SVN, due to a change in the circumstances that prompted its creation. KTabEdit, a guitar tablature editor is imported into the KDE SVN playground. A branch of kde-pim for improvements in future 3.5 releases shows promise with the introduction of several new features. QMA, an experimental email client, continues to mature and is renamed Mailody. Usability and file format support refinements in Amarok. Speed optimisations in KViewShell and KFTPGrabber. More improvements in the state of games in KDE 4.

Looking for a way to add stock quotes to your web site? With a little Perl scripting and the Finance::Quote module you can script this up in no time.

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been a great success – in that it's a new buying signal for lots of customers who were seemingly getting a bit fed up with paying money to IT vendors for more of the same.

It's Autumn in St. Louis, my favorite time of year in Missouri. Coats are getting progressively thicker as the temperature drops, trees are changing their leaves in a final show of brilliant color before their skeletons show, and darkness is starting to scare away the sun a bit earlier every day.

Eagle-eyed Ubuntu 6.10 users may have noticed that their favorite new version of this popular Linux distribution has an old friend: Firefox.

The origins of LDAP begin with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based in Geneva. ITU began setting email standards which required a directory of names (and other information) that could be accessed across networks in a hierarchical fashion not dissimilar to DNS. The result of their work resulted in the X.500 series of standards which defined DAP (Directory Access Protocol), the protocol for accessing a networked directory service.

Somebody recently noted that, what with all the bombing and killing and tyrannical madness going on in the world, how can we waste all this time talking about free software? Surely there's more important stuff to worry about? Well, they’re absolutely right that there are bigger problems in the world. When I get a chance to do something more direct about it, I plan to. So far, it looks like voting is about it, though.

While most operating system vendors struggle to meet their target delivery dates, Canonical is working hard at keeping its promises. Ubuntu this week released the latest version of its latest Linux distribution, code-named the Edgy Eft, and officially called Ubuntu 6.10. The release follows the last Ubuntu release, Dapper Drake, by only four months.

Suppose there was a software category so ubiquitous that virtually everyone used it and anyone could get the software for free. Suppose, also, that the software was highly standards-based, so much so that it did not require any patented or proprietary technologies to work. That software would be a perfect candidate for open source, right?

Sure, you can use the plain vanilla Firefox, but even though Firefox is already a gazillion times easier to use than IE, not to mention more reliable, adding selected extensions increases its power and adds functionality that you didn't even realize you wanted. In my opinion, Firefox extensions are awesome.

The database giant has yet to prove its Linux credibility, and may not even be such an attractive choice for support, according to customers and observers

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plans to make chips integrating its x86 with a graphics processor on a single piece of silicon by early 2009. The announcement came as AMD completed its $5.4 billion merger with graphics chip manufacturer ATI Technologies Inc. on Wednesday. 

If you rely on free virus protection programs to protect that stuff, you could end up with a false sense of security.

[She has to talking about 'Freeware', she has to be.., Local FUD. - Scott]

It is very easy to install OpenBSD/vax on the SIMH VAX simulator. All you need is a reasonably fast machine, enough disk space for a 1.5GB disk image and the floppy39.fs from your CD-ROM set. Assuming you're going to run SIMH on an OpenBSD system, install the emulators/simh package from ports.

Another step towards the 1.0 release of Wine has been done. Wine 0.9.24 has been released today. Wine is a compatibility layer to run Windows programs on GNU/Linux.

The Xubuntu community is happy to announce the release of Xubuntu 6.10, codenamed "Edgy Eft". This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures.

We talk about 10 million One Laptop Per-Child units, the next version of Beagle Desktop search is out, and it has some cool features, Adobe releases a beta of Flash 9, LaCie hooks us up with LightScribe support for our burners, and Yellow Dog Linux is going to rock the PS3.

SourceLabs announced that it has secured a $7 million Series B investment from Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, and Index Ventures. The company will use the additional funds to fuel the growth of its core business of providing enterprises with solutions that realize the tremendous cost savings and flexibility of open source infrastructure software in a low-risk manner.