Showing headlines posted by dcparris

In this UpFront podcast, Red Hat Chairman, president and CEO Matthew Szulik talks with eWeek Editorial Director Eric Lundquist about Red Hat's purchase of JBoss, the future of open source and Szulik's interest in reviving the U.S. education system.

Organizing disparate pieces of data on the hard disk and from the Web is a tricky proposition. For example, as I am learning Japanese, I have hundreds of text notes, images, loose Web pages, scanned articles, and other small pieces of data, which I refer to as "stuff." Desktop search applications can locate files and find text in them, but they cannot organize anything. Putting things into separate folders doesn't really solve the problem. Fortunately, two utilities, ScrapBook and BasKet, help me collect and organize "stuff" in a structured fashion.

Scalix, which makes email and collaboration software for Linux desktops and servers, announced June 15 that it has deployed more than 1 million mailboxes using its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) based software. Scalix's Linux email client software offers full-featured desktop and web-based email and calendaring, the company said.

Atomicity is a property of an operation either to succeed or fail completely. Disks assure atomicity at the sector level. This means that a write to a sector either goes through completely or not at all. But when an operation spans over multiple sectors of the disk, a higher-level mechanism is needed. This mechanism should ensure that modifications to the entire set of sectors are handled atomically. Failure to do so leads to inconsistencies. This document talks about the implementation of the Journaling Block Device in Linux.

Silver anniversaries are normally joyous occasions, but not this one. June 5, 2005 marked the 25th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS. Amid the calls for greater awareness and increased funding was recognition that, from a medical viewpoint, billions of dollars spent on research had produced little progress in recent years. Find out how Linux is part of the fight to cure this disease once and for all.

Greg KH posted an updated patchset for removing devfs from the mainline Linux kernel as was already done in the -mm kernel, "they are the same 'delete devfs' patches that I submitted for 2.6.12 and 2.6.13 and 2.6.14 and 2.6.15 and 2.6.16. It rips out all of devfs from the kernel and ends up saving a lot of space." The idea of removing the unmaintained devfs whose functionality has been replaced by udev has been discussed since late 2003 [story], gaining momentum in 2005 [story] and leading to lengthy debates [story]. In his latest email Greg went on to explain, "since 2.6.13 came out, I have seen no complaints about the fact that devfs was not able to be enabled anymore, and in fact, a lot of different subsystems have already been deleting devfs support for a while now, with apparently no complaints (due to the lack of users.)" Greg continues to make the case for removing devfs:

"This patchset has also been in the -mm tree, with no complaints or issues for the past few months. It's also been almost a full year past the date when we said we would delete devfs from the kernel tree in the file, Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt, almost two years since we publicly announced to the world that devfs would be removed from the kernel tree. So I think people have had plenty of advance notice that this was going to happen by now :)"

INDIANAPOLIS, IN -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 06/21/2006 -- ANGEL® Learning, recognized innovator of enterprise e-learning software and services, today announced it is contributing substantial intellectual property to the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The contribution of ANGEL Learning source code to the IMS/GLC common cartridge digital content standards development serves the greater good of the education community and represents the first reference implementation offering by an LMS provider.

A blogger's claim that one rogue operator tricked Google into indexing over 5 billion bogus pages serving Pay-Per-Click ads has helped solidify the claims of the legal teams chasing the search giants: PPC advertisers may, in fact, be getting screwed through faked clickery. At the same time, it helps explain the increasing irrelevance of search results. This, for many, is a deal killer. Searchers and advertisers alike need a better model. But who can deliver it?

Plugging a new PC into your network, going out for a healthy walk, and returning to a completed operating system installation is one of life's little pleasures. Remember, laziness is a virtue in network administration. Hamsters spend their lives running the same circles. Network administrators automate repetitive tasks.

Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distribution for new Linux users. It's easy to install, easy to use, and usually "just works." But moving to a different operating system can be confusing, no matter how well-designed it is. Here's a list of tips that might save you some time while you're getting used to Ubuntu.

Don't know your creative commons from your GPL licenses? Tony Curzon Price gives the essential, non-geek guide to cyberspace culture.

Martin Taylor, who led the software maker's anti-Linux "Get the Facts" campaign, is no longer with Microsoft.

[They should have parted ways with him as soon as they saw how lame his campaign was - dcparris]

I attended Korea's first LinuxWorld Conference and Expo last week in Seoul. The three-day event included keynotes from industry leaders, training sessions, and a show floor featuring roughly 50 vendors.

Slamming is a popular spammer tactic in which the spammer quickly fires off SMTP messages without waiting for responses from the receiving server. A poorly behaved MTA will then accept traffic from the spammer, instead of rejecting it as it should. But even well-behaved MTAs are affected because of the sheer volume of traffic with which they are forced to deal. The venerable sendmail, as of version 8.13, has a nifty feature called "greet_pause" that not only rejects incorrect SMTP transactions, but also discourages re-sends.

Welcome to this year's 25th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Matt Brown [1]created a couple of wrapper scripts around sbuild and debarchiver to automatically build uploaded packages. Isaac Clerencia [2]reported that the [3]Zaragoza City Hall has deployed a thin-client solution based on Debian in six elderly centres.

After a few delays, Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) is now fully supporting the open source PostgreSQL database on its Solaris 10 operating system.

Little Red Riding Penguin: The Cyber Cynic tells the story of when Tux, with his basket of goodies, met the big, bad Microsoft wolf one day on his way to grandma's house.

It's almost inconceivable to find a web server without PHP installed these days, and MySQL is the fastest growing database server in the market with an installed base, surpassed only by Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. Together these two open source applications form the underpinnings of a myriad web packages including popular blogging tools such as Wordpress and content management systems such as Midgard.

Gentoo has issued an update for mozilla-thunderbird. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions, conduct cross-site scripting and HTTP response smuggling attacks, and potentially compromise a user's system.

Hewlett-Packard has no plans to preload versions of the upcoming Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 on its PCs, but HP aims to support the operating and sees opportunities for it, an HP spokeswoman said.

[Are we inching toward greater support from a major vendor? - dcparris]