Showing headlines posted by henke54

It's time to do a little prior art searching, don't you think? Can you help? Nokia just disclosed a list of patents that it claims VP8, the video compression format used by the WebM Project, infringes, and the way they filled in the form, the list looks as long and scary as it could possibly look, and just as the IETF was trying to reach consensus on VP8. But when you break the Nokia list down, country by country and then by patent, it's not so impressive after all. As it turns out, there are just a few patents repeated over and over. I think it's short enough that we can sensibly try to find prior art.

Okech says he feels open source is superior because of the support and updates from community. This he contrasts with proprietary software which has a team solely focusing on development."From my perspective, I would have initiated this move. The problem with such moves is that management usually resists but here it is management that started the process," he says.

Because of the differences between traditional systems and Linux, there exists a certain amount of anxiety in most people when considering switching. For these problems there are groups that are created to assist those wanting to install Linux as a trial or as a permanent replacement. In my area of the country we have initiated a group called Linux Neighbors for that purpose. The group has as its mission to help those thinking about using Linux to make a smooth transition.

The governmental IT supplier for schools in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg has committed to stop development of its in-house Linux-based school server software paedML in favour of a new solutionGerman language link based on Univention's UCS@schoolGerman language link product. This move was originally announced by the government organisation at the end of 2012; the intention was to reduce the workload on the teachers developing and supporting the software by outsourcing this work to a commercial company. UCS@school is based on version 3.1 of the open source Univention Corporate Server.

The latest release of Chakra Linux brings the recently released KDE 4.10 to the users of the Arch Linux based distribution. Chakra Linux 2013.02, code-named "Benz", also includes updates to the distribution's own tools such as its installation assistant and its theme. Chakra was originally aimed at providing a live CD that allowed for easy uptake by new users but still maintained the powerful roots and extensive package selection of Arch. The distribution can be installed and provides a modern Linux desktop; although it is still based on Arch Linux, it now uses its own repositories.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris accused two foreign apparel makers in lawsuits of gaining an unfair competitive advantage over American companies by using pirated software in clothing production. Harris, in a state court complaint filed yesterday in Los Angeles, said Pratibha Syntex Ltd. of India and Ningbo Beyond Home Textile Co. Ltd. of China violated California’s unfair competition law by failing to pay licensing fees for software manufactured by companies including Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and Symantec Corp. The unpaid fees gave Pratibha Syntex and Ningbo Beyond Home Textile a “significant cost advantage in the low-margin business of apparel manufacturing,” Harris said in an e-mailed statement. The suits target companies whose “unlawful actions are eroding California’s garment industry and placing California companies who legally pay for computer software at a disadvantage.”

For me it comes down to this: Apple has great design, but it restricts your choice in all kinds of ways. I have been seeing those restrictive bars more and more, despite all the beautiful flowers. Android offers a kind of “tyranny of choice.” But in the end, I think choice and openness are better, even if they seem less attractive at first glance. That’s why I’m thinking of making the switch permanent. Forgive me, Steve.

Over €10 million (approximately £8 million or $12.8 million) has been saved by the city of Munich, thanks to its development and use of the city's own Linux platform. The calculation of savings follows a question by the city council's independent Free Voters (Freie Wähler) group, which led to Munich's municipal LiMux project presenting a comparative budget calculation at the meeting of the city council's IT committee on Wednesday. The calculation compares the current overall cost of the LiMux migration with that of two technologically equivalent Windows scenarios: Windows with Microsoft Office and Windows with OpenOffice. Reportedly, savings amount to over €10 million.

With the much-ballyhooed launches of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 behind it, Microsoft has now announced its product road map for the less consumer-centric version of its OS platform: Windows Embedded.

Since first being announced back in July 2011, Mozilla has slowly but steadily revealed new details of its upcoming mobile operating system, Firefox OS (formerly Boot to Gecko). Now, a few months after giving a Firefox OS introductory talk in Brazil, Mozilla has decided to share both the videos and the slides from presentations by Andreas Gal, Mozilla’s Director of Research, and Philipp von Weitershausen, one of Firefox OS’ lead engineers.

While Firefox OS isn’t here yet, it is coming soon— sometime in early 2013. If you are interested in the OS and want to give a test drive, you previously could use a nightly build and throw it onto the Raspbery Pi or even flash it to a Galaxy Nexus. These methods were both quite complicated, though. Good news, a new Firefox browser plug-in allows you to emulate FireFox OS on Mac, Linux and Windows.

The plug-in is called r2d2b2g and works pretty well.

When you consider that none of us could have much of an interest in Linux if it wasn't for the hardware it runs on, x86 hardware gets relatively little attention. This might be because Linux is now so stable, and performs well enough on older hardware, that we seldom need to think about it.

Slightly delayed but wearing a big smile, Jim Zemlin reaches the meeting. He is “delighted” to be speaking about free software, a theme that is his personal passion. The setting could not be more perfect. The lobby of the Barcelona hotel where LinuxCon takes place is overflowing with developers from around the world. All of them came here with one goal: to exchange ideas. The agenda is full of interesting activities for software engineers and open source enthusiasts. Everyone is eager to hear about the state of the industry from the mouth of the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, and Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical. The two share some pretty radical opinions and rarely disappoint the crowd.

It would be difficult to overstate the popularity of the tiny Raspberry Pi computer that launched earlier this year, but it's just one example of a rapidly growing class of small, inexpensive, Linux-powered devices, as I've already noted on several occasions before. The Cubieboard and the UG802 are two of the more recent examples to appear, even as the Raspberry Pi itself has been continually improved, but since then another came to light: the A13-OLinuXino.

Assuming that the current situation continues, the future of innovation on the Linux desktop does not look promising. By their nature, the traditional desktops constrict the amount of innovation they are likely to provide. By contrast, the experimental desktops share design assumptions that inhibit their abilities to innovate in ways that benefit users. Neither alternative is desirable.

Well, as of right now more than 60,000 people have signed up to test out the beta. Not all of them have been accepted yet, but in true Linux fashion some of the ones who haven't been accepted have figured out how to get in anyway (which may or may not violate Valve's terms of service).

Zurich, Switzerland - November 9, 2012 - CloudSigma, an international, customer-centric, pure-cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, today announced that it has joined The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux.

Microsoft has added several vendors to the list of electronics manufacturers that are paying it licensing fees for using Google's Android operating system and/or Linux in their products. The company has long-claimed that Linux and Android, a Linux derivative, violates Windows patents, and in the past has threatened to sue alleged infringers that don't pay up.

The organisers of the FOSDEM 2013 conference in Brussels have published a list of the "devrooms" that will be held at the event. Devrooms are organised by conference attendees and are day-long mini-conferences on a particular topic that are allocated their own space within the larger event. FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of open source developers and users world wide and is held annually in Brussels, Belgium. This year, the conference will take place on 2 and 3 February.

At a presentation at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Denmark earlier this week, Valve Software's Drew Bliss told attendees that the open-sourced operating system Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming at this point.