Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ray Noorda, the almost-founder of Novell, is dead at 82, following a long battle with Alzheimer's. Noorda joined Novell, Provo, Utah in 1983 when it had just 17 employees. He presided over enormous growth at the company, helped by Netware, its enormously successful network operating system. By the time he left in 1995, the company had more 12,000 staff.

Box Populi, formerly "Webcast in a box," has used Linux to create a podcast capture appliance aimed at corporations, schools, radio stations, and churches. The "Podcast in a Box" (PIAB) appliance records when a USB key is inserted, uploading to a server upon key removal.

Fabless semiconductor vendor Cavium will ship a new line of multi-core MIPS64-based network and security processors early next year. The Octeon Plus CN58xx chips will come with Linux SDKs (software development kits), and will offer full-duplex 10 Gigabit performance within tight power envelopes and size limitations, according to the company.

A former investor in the SCO Group has identified a Microsoft executive who, he said, worked to "backstop" a funding deal that ultimately helped SCO pursue its legal case against the Linux operating system.

Opinion -- I love free software. I use open-source programs and operating systems every day. But once in a while, I want to take some free software developers and shake them until their teeth rattle. At the moment, I'm ticked off because the Debian community's recent hissy-fit over the Mozilla Corp.'s trademarked Firefox logo has led them, and others, to forking the Firefox code to avoid the use of the logo.

When server and network management software from a proprietary software vendor costs ten times as much as an open source alternative, the decision to go the open source route might seem obvious.

Oracle has continued to stock up on acquisitions ahead of its developer fest this month by hovering up data integration firm Sunopsis. The database giant said it would use Sunopsis’ to add even more spice to its Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings, citing the target firm’s Extract Load Transform technology and its support for a wide variety of heterogeneous systems.

I recently received a letter from a computer pro who's nearing 80. He's disgusted by "how [Microsoft] things have developed, and how most software is put out there full of errors and omissions. Help is virtually none existent. One really has to dig to find answers."

The announcement last year that Apple was moving to Intel-based hardware might have seemed like a fatal blow to Terra Soft Solutions, a company best-known for the Yellow Dog Linux distro. However, Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft, says that the move may be a blessing in disguise. The company has moved on to bigger and better ventures -- including construction of the first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.

I don't make these things up. There really was a New New Internet conference held near Washington, DC, in September, and I went to it. (The conference organizers paid my travel expenses.) I listened dutifully to a number of keynotes and networked with some of the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, wanna-be entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists who seemed to make up the bulk of the attendees. I shot a bit of video, too, so you can get a couple of glimpses of what went on. But in the end, I was left with the question, "How much of this stuff is really all that new?"

What is the PHP scripting language? Why is it so popular? How does it work? How can I start using it? What's the latest version? These are all questions that the newbie Web professional (and others) ask, especially as PHP becomes the de facto standard rivaling ASP and JSP.

The fight for free access to information, especially educational, is an age-old battle. But with the open source software revolution, various online projects have been established to help people access free educational information.

Much is written about network security. There are many classes of product that have been developed to manage network access and to inspect traffic in order to identify anomalous behaviour.

With the job market constantly going up and down these days, a lot of IT pros have toyed with the idea of building a PC repair business, but they really loathe the idea of being at the butt-end of the stick when the next big Windows virus hits.

Translate.org.za has released a new South African keyboard that caters for all of the 11 official languages spoken in South Africa including support for previously ignored characters for languages such as Venda, Northern Sotho and Tswana.

Listen Up!...to the latest audio program on the site - What's Happening in the World of Databases.

Creative Commons South Africa, the local arm of the global alternative licensing movement, last week released an updated set of licences. Version 2.5 of the licences allow the author or rightsholder to specify with more detail how they wish their work to be attributed.

While many experts say phishers will continue to stay one step ahead of even advanced preventive measures, some security companies are developing new ways to keep the public informed about fraudulent Web sites and cut down on scams.

IPTV Firm Amino, which makes linux and Java powered set-top boxes and an interesting Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was represented at the show by one of the local distributors.

A company founded out of the Shuttleworth Foundation schools Linux project has started rolling out computer laboratories to schools in South Africa's North-West Province and plans to equip all maths and science-focused Dinaledi schools in the province with computer labs in 2007.