Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Per an announcement to the vim developers, Diego Viola who's interested in Neovim explains it as "to refactor and modernize the [vim] codebase." This was already criticized by vim's Bram Moolenaar who was quick to say, "It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain for the end user exactly? Total refactoring is not a solution. It's much better to improve what we have. Perhaps with some small refactorings specifically aimed at making Vim work better for users."

The company, which is famed mostly for its Firefox browser, has partnered with Chinese low-cost chip maker Spreadtrum. While not as powerful as more expensive models, the device will run apps and make use of mobile internet. It would appeal to the sorts of people who currently buy cheap "feature" phones, analysts said.

Open source software in healthcare has been instrumental for sharing common tools and increasing adoption of emerging medical information technology (IT) standards. By leading the effort to digitize health data, imaging informatics has set the precedent for the adoption of the technology industry's best practices and subsequently open source software.

This past week saw a number of interesting events on the Linux Planet, including a quickly resolved incident between Red Hat and Piston Computing.

3 Laws of Hospital Health Information Technology (HIT) Implementation. 1) Implementers and salespeople who don't know what they are doing will always get a binding, multi-year contract first. 2) Hospital management and owners will always do the wrong thing. 3) Everyone will grossly underestimate the time, difficulty, and expense it takes to fully implement Health IT in a hospital.

It's always "somewhat interesting and entertaining to see the ebb and flow of the top Linux distributions," said 451 Research's Jay Lyman. "One of the highlights is typically the Linux operating systems with staying power. After years of jockeying, we've seen Ubuntu in the top few distributions consistently for some time, which speaks to its desktop and developer popularity."

After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.

The Aaeon “RTC-900R” rugged tablet is designed for service workforces in applications including field service, law enforcement, defense, public sector, utilities, logistics, healthcare, restaurants, and retail management, says Aaeon. The tablet’s 2.4-pound heft 1-inch profile may be plus-size by commercial Android tablet standards, but the device is thinner and lighter than typical field service tablets, says the company.

Project Tango was announced yesterday by Google and Motorola’s Advanced Research and Projects” (ATAP) group, which Google will retain when it sells Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. The 5-inch Project Tango smartphone prototype augments a basic Android phone with a pair of Myriad 1 vision co-processors from Movidius. It also integrates a variety of sensors, including a compass, gyros, and Kinect-like 3D visual sensors for integrated depth sensing and motion tracking.

The GNOME team has released the first beta of GNOME 3.12, the next major release for the popular desktop and UI environment. Unlike the past few releases, there's a ton of new stuff in GNOME 3.12. The highlights include a slew of new apps, a major makeover for the long-standing video player, better privacy controls, support for jump lists and quite a few other interface tweaks that make GNOME 3.12 more pleasant to use.

Jolla unveiled Sailfish OS 1.0, plus a Sailfish UI launcher app for Android devices, and tipped partnerships, including one for a custom Angry Birds phone. Jolla announced the completion of version 1.0 of its MeeGo Linux based Sailfish OS, which runs on its Jolla smartphone, now shipping throughout Europe. The Finnish company also announced a Sailfish user interface launcher for Android, “which can be used to simulate the Sailfish OS experience on Android devices.”

Fans of Linux gaming are having a great year. Steam has dramatically increased the number of games with Linux support available through their service. Though there is some disagreement about the exact number of games now available for Linux (some say 530, while others were only able to find 333 games when searching the catalog), there is no doubt that either figure is a huge improvement over the 60 available on the service this time last year. With many people listing PC gaming as the top obstacle keeping them from switching to an open source operating system, this is certainly welcome news. And Linux users have already shown that they're willing to support gaming with their wallets; just look at the most recent Humble Bundle, where Linux users continue to be the top-dollar contributors.

Google hasn’t just kept Motorola's patents in its deal with Lenovo, it's also keeping the mobile manufacturer's skunkworkish Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group. And that team has just unveiled a new smartphone dubbed Project Tango, which is aimed at developers.

Etm, an acronym for "Event and Task Manager," is a very useful calendar and planning tool. However, it is a bit cumbersome to learn and far less convenient to use than alternatives. It has an intuitive task-entry format, once you learn its plain text shorthand. Etm stores events, tasks and other user-generated notes and data in text files. You can create, modify and view entries using two primary methods.

My introduction to open source software began when I was sitting on a server room floor, with my head in my hands, completely frustrated with a Windows 2000 server. Every night there were some services that would crash. Every morning I would get yelled at by my over-bearing boss. I was new to the company, it was my first IT job fresh out of Network Admin college, where I graduated at the top of my class, but I couldn't fix this problem because it was a "known Microsoft issue," and I just had to wait for the update.

Swedish telecom software firm Enea has spun a free and open source version of its commercial Enea Linux embedded distribution and development platform. LOike most major embedded Linux distros these days, Enea Linux is billed as being compatible with Yocto Project code. Yet, Open Enea Linux (OEL) appears to be more fully dependent on Yocto code.

Those who want to prototype using the latest Qseven 2.0 computer-on-modules, including the new Intel Atom E3800-based MSC Q7-BT or i.MX6-based MSC Q7-IMX6 modules from MSC Technologies, have been limited by older Qseven 1.1 baseboards. Such boards often don’t support new and improved Qseven 2.0 signals including USB 3.0, HDMI, DisplayPort, serial, and I2S audio interfaces, says MSC. Now, MSC has built an MSC Q7-MB-EP6 board that supports both of these Linux-ready modules, as well as any Qseven 2.0 compliant COM.

The open source business model has an inherent ability to bring software rivals together. This approach to developing and distributing software keeps expanding the usefulness and success of the Linux operating system as well. Linux has not yet come close to replacing Windows on the desktop, but open source is much more than Linux. Its "co-opetive" nature is spreading through the enterprise.

Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we're now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.

I came to work with open source after an experience in college. We used a system called Usenet,a world wide distributed discussion forum. At the university, there wasn't an email client I liked, so I wrote one and just gave it (including the source code) to whoever wanted it. This experience introduced me to a community of people who made things and shared them; it also introduced me to a job at my alma mater as a Usenet administrator.