Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Adobe Systems Inc is fleshing out its Flex and Flash releases. At its MAX user conference, it announced the availability of a beta version of the Flex IDE (integrated development environment) for Mac OS/X. It announced a similar pre-release of a Linux version of the popular Flash 9 player.

Disguised price rise for PC builders, Microsoft is effectively smuggling through a price hike for Windows Vista - by making the entry-level version so poor that no-one will want to use it.

Demonstrating a perhaps more aggressive path than anticipated, Sun Microsystems is set to announce the open-sourcing of the core Java platform within 30 to 60 days, Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on Wednesday morning.

Officially Firefox 3.0 but code named "Gran Paradiso," the application will pick up where Firefox 2.0 leaves off, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's director of engineering. Among the features Mozilla wants to get into 3.0 is "Places," the revamped bookmarks tool which was dropped from Firefox 2.0 in April.

VARBusiness Magazine has named Nat Friedman, Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for open source, as its first ever Technologist of the Year. Friedman was honored for innovation in Novell's most recent desktop Linux offering, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

Rob Reilly files his review of Firefox 2.0: "The two big things I liked in the edition include enhancements to tabbed browsing and an embedded spell checker. Version 2.0 also has an updated add-on manager that consolidates the add-on extension and theme functions..."

Kubuntu 6.10, codenamed Edgy Eft, is hot on the download mirrors, this release is based on the brand new KDE 3.5.5. For all your photo needs the award winning Digikam is now installed by default and renowned artwork by the beloved Oxygen artist Ken Wimer shines all over. On top of this Kubuntu makes the perfect platform for KDE 4 development and porting KDE 3 applications with all the KDE 4 development libraries available along with Qt 4.2.

French storage drive vendor LaCie is distributing a pair of Linux applications that enable CD/DVD drives equipped with HP's "LightScribe" technology to burn CD labels. Support for LightScribe technology was previously available only on Windows and Mac, according to the company.

A battle over Open Document Format (ODF) and the treatment of open standards is taking place deep in the bureaucracy of the European Commission. The information came to light during aKademy, the KDE world summit, in Dublin last month.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), sponsor of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has announced that the Network File System v4 (NFSv4) for Linux is available in SUSE Enterprise Linux from Novell.

Hasso Plattner, the billionaire cofounder of business software maker SAP, has teamed with IBM and Deutsche Telekom to host a forum aimed at giving open-source software entrepreneurs an opportunity to present their business ideas to venture capitalists and other IT experts.

Writing software is a complex business - not only do you have to get the enterprise logic of the application correct, typically you also have to deal with multiple other concerns at the same time, such as "what should happen if something goes wrong", "how should I make sure we know what is happening during execution", "how to enforce security throughout my application" and in some languages "how do I handle memory" or "when should I free up memory", etc.

Hosted ERP provider NetSuite has announced an open source developer platform to attract new partners and increase its uptake in vertical sectors. NetSuite chief executive Zach Nelson unveiled SuiteFlex across the road from Oracle's OpenWorld in San Francisco, California, where thousands of Oracle partners had been getting the worldview from Oracle for three days.

With the largest technology service and software companies — IBM, Oracle, SAP — now offering two parallel streams of application platform: proprietary and open, corporations around the world now have a real choice.

In This Issue: Ubuntu 6.10 release candidate out, Mark Shuttleworth's announcement naming Ubuntu 7.04, A feel-good"Thank You!" for Edubuntu, Edgy Changes, Oracle relationship speculation and much more.

Book review: This pair of books brings together a variety of small but annoying puzzles mediated byHerb Sutter through thenews:comp.lang.c++.moderated newsgroup. However, any irritation is in a good cause. Each puzzle illustrates an important point in C++ that many of us still get wrong. An early example is exception safe programming, which most of us (OK, yes, me), have struggled against. Fortunately for my self esteem, these puzzles are given a difficulty score of between 7 and 9 out of 10.

In the highly competitive consumer-electronics industry, product life cycles are notoriously short, and downward price pressures are constant. As a result, electronics manufacturers must produce consumer devices faster than ever and reduce overall costs and time to market.

The IBM Linux Competency Centre was launched yesterday at the Johannesburg Centre for Software Engineering. Boasting a powerful sever set up, the centre is available free of charge for corporates wanting to test systems as well as for academic research.

Managing your address book and appending new addresses can get tiresome. If your email client is KMail, KBBDB can help with part of the job. This Perl-based filter sits idle waiting for messages to show up, then extracts any new sender's email address into KAddressBook.

An institute that aims to promote the use of open source software in the UK is being set up in Birmingham. The National Open Centre (NOC) will aim to help set national policy on use of open source software.