Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This IDC study explores the issues raised by the open source software phenomenon and comes to some surprisingly different conclusions. We first look at the evidence of the growing role of open source among global software developers and find that the phenomenon has spread way beyond Linux, the poster child of the open source movement, and is gaining momentum. We then provide the first estimate of the economic impact of open source on the industry — how much is open source "taxing" the industry anyway?

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

While huge progress has been made toward"user-centric" identity, I still have problems with"user-centric" anything. The point-of-view is still outside the user. It's still organizational, corporate. If you're"centric" about users, where are you? Right, outside the user. And inside something that's, well, not quite human. Or worse, that's super-human. Not a peer, but a superior.Think about it: Areyou"user-centric"?

The resignation of Matthew Garrett, one of the most active developers in Debian, has drawn attention to some ongoing issues about how the project operates. Specifically, Garrett's announcement on his blog cites a lack of civility and a slowness in decision-making, and compares Debian unfavorably to Ubuntu, the Debian-derived distribution which is increasingly attracting the efforts of many Debian maintainers.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to run multiple instances of the same application, with different input data each time, in sequence, because the job was too computation-intensive and your machine not powerful enough to run all the instances simultaneously? The solution to that problem could be to harness the machines that are already connected to your local network and apply their unused CPU cycles to your projects. Condor, a specialized batch system for managing compute-intensive jobs, may be your answer.

Sony Ericsson announced that it is joining the Eclipse community as Add-in Provider Member. By becoming an Add-in Provider, Sony Ericsson aims to contribute to the Eclipse ecosystem through creating Eclipse plug-ins of benefit to the global mobile application developer community.

Bergen City Council in Norway has hit back at reports that it has abandoned its flagship Linux migration project, branding them "exaggerated" and insisting it has completed plans to move many of its servers over to Linux. However, the council did admit that it was postponing plans to migrate 12,000 desktops to Linux claiming it had other investment priorities.

Software is ultimately composed of congealed ideas, so ideas are very important in the minds of software developers. The key to market power in the software industry lies in the minds of developers. Fashion plays a role too; some ideas are fashionable and some are not. The idea, or philosophy, of open source is powerful, frictionless, and seductive.

In broad terms there are three key elements to consider in the development of any new application – or any new product, for that matter. The obvious one, certainly from a software point of view, is the technology to be used – the language, the target platform and operating system, and the rest.

Of course, there are a variety of different types of integration and there are a range of different things that you can do with data integration. I am not here to suggest that there is another way of tackling data integration in general. However, there are specific aspects of data integration (and in this context I am talking specifically about the data movement aspects of integration) where there may be an alternative that is worth considering.

The Indian IT industry has started scouring the provinces for graduates to fill the burgeoning number of vacancies in the sector. The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), India's IT trade association, this month begins testing graduates in "tier-two cities" to vet them for employment in multinational services firms.

Trolltech has released a second preview of Qt Jambi - a prototype version of Qt that allows Java programmers to use the popular cross-platform development framework. This release incorporates the feedback of over 1700 beta testers, and features new additions like Web Start functionality, improved integration with Eclipse and single JAR file deployment for Qt Jambi-based applications.

Sun Microsystems hopes to whet the appetite of developers for its tools with a preview program providing early access to its next Sun Studio suite. The Sun Studio Express Program is giving C, C++ and Fortran developers early access to features in future releases of Sun Studio while also taking feedback from partners and customers.

Until now, security-conscious email users could employ encryption with traditional email clients, but were out of luck with webmail services. Freenigma, a service to add encryption to third-party webmail services via a Firefox plugin, aims to add security to the convenience of webmail. My trial of the service indicates that it's making a good start, but has room to improve.

Skype on Aug. 31 introduced a pair of cordless VoIP phones that work without being connected to a computer, via a DECT basestation that attaches directly to broadband and POTS lines. One of the two -- the Philips VOIP841 -- uses Linux as its embedded OS.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been the dominant Web browser (almost) since the birth of the Web. It runs on Microsoft's Windows and on Apple's Mac, but it has never been officially supported on Linux. A nascent open source effort called IEs 4 Linux is trying to change that. This week, the group released its latest version of IEs 4 Linux 2.01, which is more stable than its predecessors and fixes some bugs.

[This is mainly for testing websites. I have seen a number of comments from web developers who keep IE around for that purpose. - dcparris]

Any chance of an alpha look at the in-development, forthcoming, early 2007 release of Flash 9 for Linux turned to a very extinct omega, according to Adobe's Mike Melanson.

Wikis are growing in popularity and recognition-factor, and two recent releases from MindTouch -- DekiWiki and MindTouch Dream -- bring open source and development flexibility to small to medium-size business.

SPECviewperf measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL application programming interface.