Showing headlines posted by vainrveenr

Personally, I'm feeling more and more torn within the Ubuntu ecosystem. As a developer, I'm thrilled to see the company focus more on growing the business and making Ubuntu more suitable for business (though I'm convinced Unity will derail this effort). But as a user, I'm saddened to see that my voice is no more heard by Canonical than it is by Microsoft or Apple. I am, to them, just a user. They know what's best for us.

The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved landmark legislation to overhaul the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a reform effort more than half a decade in the making that aims to improve the quality of patents and curb frivolous litigation.

The broad Nokia-Microsoft partnership announced Friday in which the Windows Phone operating system would run on Nokia smartphones sounds like good news for both companies because of their struggles in the smartphone arena.

But many analysts wonder what the companies will make of the relationship in the coming year. Can Nokia come up with smartphones, tablets and related services and applications that outdistance Google's Android, Apple's iPhone and others?

DebianSqueeze is not released yet but it is scheduled to be released the weekend of the 5th-6th of February. So it is a good time to plan squeeze release party in your country. Feel free to add your squeeze release party to this list to let others know about your local ReleaseParty to celebrate the event.

Honeycomb, or Android 3.0, is a big, impressive step toward the unified, mobile world that Google is trying to bring to us. But rest assured that Apple will give Google some stiff competition with its own upgrades. With images of blue and black-striped bees leading the way through its Mountainview, Calif. headquarters, on Wednesday Google gave a deep-dive into Honeycomb, a tablet-ready version of the Android operating sysem it hopes can beat back Apple's iOS and the iPad.

Saline OS 1.0 has been released. Saline is a new Linux distribution based on Debian Squeeze with the main purpose of bringing some of the things users' might want that doesn't fit in with Debian Open Source philosophy. It uses Xfce for the desktop, making it light weight enough for some older machines and netbooks while still bringing modern amenities.

I experienced a strong sense of deja vu and began to wonder if this was going to be a reprise of Sun’s sale to Oracle and the forking of OpenOffice, one of the crown jewels of GNU/Linux. The premise of this article, to paraphrase an American general, is that old software never dies, it just gets forked. The question therefore is: is OpenSUSE safe and what is Microsoft up to?

If you are going to create a new browser from scratch and go up against the Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple, you might as well make it really different. RockMelt, a company backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen which has been under wraps until today, is trying to build a new browsing experience from the ground up. Are they crazy? “The big thing,” says Andreessen, “is that the browser world is very much in flux right now.”

Ever since Microsoft’s horrible 2009 fiscal year, which saw its first-ever revenue decline and layoffs of more than 5,000 employees, the company has been much more rigorous about shutting down failing products... With that in mind, here are the next 10 Microsoft products with targets on their backs.

[Another article confirming their 'end of life' cycle. - Scott]

China has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, at a high-performance computing conference in Beijing. The Tianhe-1A has a Linpack benchmark performance of 2.507 petaflops, according to Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA), whose Tesla M2050 graphics processing units (GPUs) were used in the supercomputer.

Billionaire Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, has sued 11 major Web-based companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube and eBay, alleging they infringed internet patents he owns.

Gnash 0.8.8 was released yesterday and it comes with an interesting set of features. This GNU GPLv3 open-source SWF/Flash player for Linux and BSD systems on multiple architectures now claims 100% compatibility with Flash-based YouTube videos, run-time rendering switching, run-time media handler switching, VA-API video acceleration, reduced internal dependencies, script-able plug-in support so JavaScript within the browser can work with ActionScript in Gnash, and improved input device handling.

Whenever a service rises to popularity, an “open” alternative is usually close behind. The problem is that most of these alternatives never go anywhere, let along get close to the service they’re trying to supplant. But the rate at which Diaspora*, the open project hoping to be the new Facebook, is gaining funding is getting too big to ignore.

You probably have a Facebook account--well over 400 million people do. You've probably noticed that the look and feel of your profile have recently changed (again). And you've probably heard a lot recently about Facebook changing its privacy policies (again). Maybe you've even seen something about a rumor that Facebook employees say offhand that CEO Mark Zuckerberg "doesn't believe in" privacy--and how some people very high up in Washington are starting to take notice. Will government intervention in Facebook be saving you from unwanted snooping or just interfering in your Mafia Wars games? A lot's still unanswered, but here's what you need to know now.

Last month Mozilla Labs announced a new concept series on online identity. As part of this exploration, we developed the Account Manager. The Account Manager makes it incredibly easy for users to create new accounts with optional randomly generated passwords, and log into and out of them with just a click. As a web developer, adding support for this feature could take as little as fifteen minutes of hacking (in fact, we’ll mention the first 5 people to add support – read below to learn more.). We want to make signing into websites easier for all Firefox users, and are looking to ship this feature as soon as possible in Firefox.

As companies like Facebook and Google continue to prove, the benefits of using open source software go well beyond cost-cutting. Open source has evolved into an exceptional way to boost productivity and foster innovation. In fact, open source is quickly becoming an essential element of next-generation Web applications. Whether you run a development team for a Fortune 500 company or a software startup, attending OSBC 2010 will help you leverage open source for your greatest competitive advantage.

The unintended consequence of a surveillance state is the creation of a surveillance society. The nuance of the legal system provides anyone willing to spend the money on lawyers, litigation and the discovery process to effectively get all the information on anyone they want. Bottom line: Most general counsels' offices in most companies will NOT decline to give information requested by a court order, approved subpoena or discovery request, whether it is a criminal or civil matter. These are some reasons why Cryptome (a site that is run by John Young, a long time privacy, crypto and security activist) needs to continue and provide critical privacy-related information to the public. This is why the attempts of Microsoft and others to obfuscate the information they gather and provide on demand to court subpoenas is misguided.

The more details that leak out about the cyber-attack that hit Google, Adobe Systems and roughly 30 other companies, the more complex the picture gets. According to a Jan. 14 analysis by McAfee, which has dubbed the situation "Operation Aurora," one of the malware samples involved in the attack exploited a new zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer. McAfee revealed little about the flaw, stating only that its investigation showed IE is vulnerable on all of Microsoft's operating systems, including Windows 7.

Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch have joined forces against a common enemy. For months Mr Murdoch has been railing against the search engine Google and Microsoft wants to transform its own puny search engine Bing into a true competitor to Google. The impetus for the discussions between Microsoft and News Corporation came from News Corp. The talks have arrived at a proposed deal that will likely attract the attention of anti-trust lawyers. Under the agreement Microsoft, with its available huge war chest to fight Google, would pay News Corporation to remove its content from the Google search index.

Google's slow, steady march into the OS realm has begun to pay off. It's time for the Linux world to rally. I used to think Ubuntu was destined to lead Linux into the mainstream, but now it's looking much more like Google--not Canonical--will be the first Linux vendor to truly challenge Microsoft.