Showing headlines posted by dcparris

An agency created by the US and Canadian governments to validate security software has spent about two years reviewing the OpenSSL project -- and continues to search for a way to validate that the software will always do what it is expected to do.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- WCC Services U.S. Inc., a software company dedicated to delivering faster, more meaningful match results, today unveiled an important upgrade of its high-performance search and match system -- ELISE. Now available for the Linux environment, ELISE 5.2 enables businesses to perform complex searches and find the most meaningful information. The product is used primarily in the staffing, e-commerce and security industries to find the people, products, or services that best match the user's requirements.

Unix vendor SCO Group Inc has begun shipping MySQL AB's Network database update service with its OpenServer 6 Unix operating system, following up on an agreement struck between the two companies in September 2005.

Effort is under way to get virtualization into the Linux kernel, so it can catch up with rival OSes in server efficiency.

PLEASANTON, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/17/2006 -- Wright Williams & Kelly, Inc. (WWK), a cost & productivity management software and consulting services company, announced today the availability of COOLSoft™ v2.0, its latest generation software development cost estimating tool. COOLSoft™ utilizes a hybrid approach of intermediate and detailed versions of the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO). This allows for the reuse of existing code, development of new code, the purchase and integration of third party code, and hardware integration. The output is then displayed as man-months of programming effort, calendar schedule, support costs, and hardware costs.

[Ed: Sadly, this software appears to be proprietary. - dcparris]

Your business application project turned out to be less successful than it should have been, and you're not sure why. The project had a seasoned project manger and a strong, carefully developed project plan. The project team used a good methodology and adhered to it rigorously. Senior management was solidly behind the project. There was adequate funding for the effort. Yet the project did not deliver all it should have delivered. Is it possible that the project failed because someone wanted it to fail?

[Ed: Considering my personal experience with a supervisor who kept my partner and I at odds with our subordinates, and literally cut my feet out from under me, I agree that this is an issue that people need to take into consideration. - dcparris]

What happens when you cannot find a search engine? South Africa's newest search engine, Jonga, disappeared from Google's index last week without a trace. Jonga's owner, Alistair Carruthers, is wondering why.

Novell is Committed to Open Standards, Putting Customer Needs First, Ahead of Proprietary Agendas

Europe's Internal Markets Commissioner Charlie McCreevy on Monday launched an initiative that could re-open the controversial software patents debate. As part of the initiative McCreevy has unveiled a public consultation on how future action in patent policy to create an EU-wide patent system can take account of "stakeholders' needs." The Commissioner is also looking for feedback as to how to improve the patent system in Europe.

[Ed: O.k. folks, wake up! Time to get rolling! If we don't speak, we cannot be heard! - dcparris]

One of the things that I love about Linux is that it has tools for everyone, including writers. Linux distributions come with word processors, text editors, spell checkers, typesetting, and publishing tools galore. Normally, you're using these tools with a standard desktop distribution in an environment like KDE or GNOME. Billy-Bob Ming, however, has taken a different tack and rolled his own Linux distro specifically aimed at writers.

Fifteen years since the release of the GNU Public Licence version 2, FSF founder Richard Stallman has updated the licence to deal with new threats to the free software movement such as software patents and digital rights management. The new GPL also looks to make the licence more applicable to countries around the world, although there are some potential problems. Tectonic spoke to local legal expert Pria Chetty to get some intitial thoughts in the draft.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is due to release the initial draft of the GNU general public license (GPL) version 3 Monday. Software vendors and lawyers expect the draft to include a number of clarifications in the license's wording so it can better recognize global copyright.

Progress Real Time Division, an operating unit of Progress Software Corporation today released Progress ObjectStore Enterprise Version 6.3, the latest version of the industry’s most popular object database, featuring dramatic performance improvements across all environments and support for 64-bit Linux.

The Free Standards Group, a non-profit group that promotes standards for open-source software, last week opened a lab in Beijing to certify that Linux distributions and applications developed in China meet the Linux Standard Base (LSB) standards, the group said in a statement.

User level: Advanced When it comes to slicing and dicing text, few tools are as powerful, or as underutilized, as awk. The name "awk" was coined from the initials of its authors, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan -- yes, the same Kernighan of the famous Kernighan and Ritchie "C Programming Language" book. In the Linux world, every distribution includes the GNU version, gawk (/bin/awk is usually a symbolic link to /bin/gawk). The GNU version has a few more features than the original. Let's play with some of the core features common among POSIX-compliant awks.

I've been steadily working on my free wavelet image compression library for the past few weeks, and in the process have improved it in many ways. These are largely not technical improvements, but rather a huge code refactoring, the creation of decent documentation, reducing memory usage an so on. You can read the freshly pressed documentation or simply download the source.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to work with the open-source community to ensure that patent examiners have access to prior inventions related to software code. The open-source community has long criticized USPTO for not reviewing software in the public domain before issuing software patents.

One of the arguments in Massachusetts against OpenDocument centered on the needs of the visually impaired. In this guest column, a visually impaired PC user explains that not only is using an exclusively Windows solution a crash-prone option, it is also far more expensive than equivalent technologies in OS X and, eventually, Linux. Scott Seder makes the case for more open source development in the Assistive Technology arena.

[Ed: I wish this argument had appeared during the original debate! Still, it is an excellent argument for Massachusetts - and other states - to consider. - dcparris]

  LXer Feature: 05-Jan-06

In light of Tom Adelstein's recent article, "Time to Cull Proprietary Software from Open Source Branding", LXer Editor, Don Parris, reminds users that the GPL exists for a reason.

Digg Story

Mirus Bets on Linspire Linux for New Line of "Koobox" Desktop Computers

[Ed: Not to knock the Koobox, but who the heck is Mirus? How are they major? They have a one-page website with zilch for information, other than to say that Mirus recommends Windows. That said, at least Linspire is the exclusive OS, not just an option. - dcparris]