Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The man who invented the internet's most popular email routing system says he would never have done it had he known how much trouble it was going to be. Eric Allman, who founded email routing system Sendmail, tells this week's edition of technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that he would "never have agreed" to the project had he known how much work it was going to be.

A patent dispute pitting open source advocates for online learning technologies against Blackboard, the industry giant, became more bitter Thursday with the announcement that a formal request had been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to revoke 44 of Blackboard’s patent claims.

[I know this is a re-post but it is nice to see this coming from a 'non' FOSS source. - Scott]

Discover how to use Eclipse, DB2 Express-C, and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition -- all free to download, use, and deploy -- to create cutting-edge lightweight applications with relative ease. This tutorial shows you how to move an application from a conventional design, using JavaServer Pages (JSP), to one based on Ajax technology.

On November 23, the OpenSUSE project announced the first 10.2 release candidate. In its usual way, LWN posted that announcement; we tend to have a relatively large number of readers who are interested in software of great novelty and questionable stability. This time, however, a recent LWN subscriber took exception to our having posted the announcement:

"If I had know that LWN is going to support Novell's betrayal of the FOSS community by helping disseminate SuSE I wouldn't have spent the money."

The Damn Small Linux project team released an update to its aptly named operating system today. DSL v3.1 sports a 2.4.26 kernel and the Fluxbox window manager in a -- shall we say -- relatively tiny package. Despite its minuscule size (50 MB), DSL crams a lot of functionality into an easy-to-use desktop.

[DSL is one of my favorites, it brought an old P-II system of mine back from the dead. - Scott]

The Mozilla Developer News Weblog is reporting that the trunk will be closed for Gecko 1.9 Alpha. This would be the first of many trunk alphas, which would be released every six to eight weeks. The Mozilla Quality Weblog has announced a community test day, on Friday, December 1, 2006 running from 7:00am to 5:00pm Pacific Standard Time. This equates to 5:00pm Friday to 1:00am Saturday UTC/GMT.

In a perfect world, you could compile a brand-new Linux kernel without the need for much configuration and without error. According to Linus Torvalds, the new 2.6.19 Linux kernel is such an entity. "It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels," Torvalds wrote in a Linux kernel mailing list posting announcing the new kernel. "So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own d*mn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways."

For all the efficiency and continued evolution of Debian's APT tools, some gaps in package management functionality remain. One of the largest ones is that, when a package is removed, any other packages that depend on it are not removed. The result is a growing number of orphans on the system -- that is, packages that serve no purpose for the system as a whole, although in some cases they continue to be useful individually. Similarly, while you can keep track of security announcements for Debian or distributions derived from it, the basic package system has no way of telling you which vulnerabilities might affect your system.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced today that it is asking the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to re-examine Blackboard's patent on a technology used for Internet-based education support systems, in an attempt to invalidate the patent. SFLC's action comes on behalf of the Sakai Foundation, Moodle, and ATutor.

A lot has been said about the hows of the Novell-Microsoft deal, but what about the whys? What motivated Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian to initiate a deal with Linux's No. 1 Enemy? In this interview, Hovsepian reveals the business realities behind the move, and that when it comes to Microsoft, Novell knows full well who it's dealing with.

Until now, there hasn't been a really good Linux distribution for digital content creation. Debian-based 64 Studio, which has just achieved its 1.0 release, is described by some as "the best distribution ever created for multimedia workstations, such as digital audio recording and video editing."

A standard Java scripting engine API to play withOver the years there have been several times where I've had to implement a mini-language and language processor for some specific requirement or another.

Memory is a precious commodity in computers. Generally the more you have, the better. Yet your application has to run alongside other applications, and each wants its own area of memory. What happens when there's not enough to go around? Mulyadi Santosa explores the memory management principles in the Linux kernel to explain how the Out of Memory killer works--and how to avoid it.

3DLabs is sampling a unique mobile applications processor supported initially under Linux 2.6. The DMS-02 combines a pair of ARM9-EJ cores with 24 FPUs (floating-point units). It targets portable digital entertainment, portable navigation, video conferencing, automotive infotainment, video surveillance, and high-end mobile handsets.

You may have noticed that I don't cover news about the never-ending SCO vs. IBM, Linux, Novell, et al much anymore. There's a reason for that: SCO doesn't matter anymore.

Adobe skipped a version of Flash for Linux and released stable versions of the Flash 9 player for Windows and Mac OS X long before the beta of Flash 9 to Linux users. Paul Betlem, senior director of engineering for Adobe, explained why the process is taking so long.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.19 Linux kernel, following the previous stable kernel release by two months [story]. "It's one of those rare 'perfect' kernels," Linus joked, "so if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own d*mn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways."

UK-based Canonical Ltd, parent of the popular Ubuntu Linux family, is currently hosting Ubuntu Open Week, which began Monday and continues through Saturday. Open Week consists of a series of free workshops and discussions being held via Internet relay chat (IRC) with Ubuntu developers and managers.

Alfresco Software Inc., the first and leading provider of an open source enterprise content management solution, today announced results for the first open source JSR-170 benchmark. The results were based on a 10 million document repository and validated by 3rd party open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) experts Optaros to assure compliance with pre-determined benchmark rules.

Novell has abandoned an open source project hyped as challenging Microsoft Outlook and Exchange by becoming the "Apache" of email and collaboration software. The company has pulled full-time engineers off project Hula following lacklustre demand. Engineers are "moving to other roles", according to the Hula mailing list.