Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week's 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile, we talk to Alan Cox. We learn how he originally got involved in Linux and why it remains important to him. He also gives us a bit of music education.

System administrators at the USENIX LISA 2011 conference (LISA is a great system administration conference, by the way) in Boston in December got to hear Michael Perrone's presentation "What Is Watson?" Michael Perrone is the Manager of Multicore Computing from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The entire presentation (slides, video and MP3) is available on the USENIX Web site, and if you really want to understand how Watson works under the hood, take an hour to listen to Michael's talk (and the sysadmin Q&A at the end).

Hitting OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend are some interesting benchmarks comparing performance of AHCI vs. IDE modes under Linux from an AMD Fusion system.

LXer Feature: 29-Jul-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Money can't buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community. Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it "will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings."

Google has released a new software framework that aims to give programmers the ability to create interactive experiences in physical spaces. It could potentially be used to build interactive art installations or games that involve physical interaction.

Keeping an eye on your disk is always very important, especially today when dealing with huge quantity of data. Take a look at your personal files and programs, and you will be surprised by how much disk space you consume. Baobab is a Graphical User Interface software to analyze a disk usage. Hopefully, Baobab can help you manage that, straight out of the box, and with very little installation required.

First it was Gartner, now Gabe Newell, the former Microsoft executive and billionaire computer games baron behind Half-Life, has laid into Windows 8. Newell, who oversaw the first three versions of Windows under Bill Gates among other roles during his 13 years at the software giant, has reportedly called Windows 8 a “catastrophe for everyone in the PC space”.

The weather outside may be frightful, to adapt a phrase for the scorched and overheated world here in the Northern hemisphere, but there's no denying that July is turning out to be delightful for our favorite operating system. The latest news now is the apparent return of none other than Dell to the desktop Linux world.

Hot on the heels of its Xfce build, the final release of Linux Mint 13 KDE is now available for download. This is an iteration that a lot of people have been anxiously awaiting, because it combines a lot of good things in a single package.

A survey of more than 3,600 Appcelerator Titanium developers has revealed that they would rather develop mobile apps for iOS than for Android. iOS led Android by 16 percent in the Appcelerator/IDC Q2 2012 Mobile Developer Report. Fifty-three percent of the respondents believed that iOS was winning in enterprise app development, whereas only 37 percent believed Android was.

Mathias Klang opened this year's Akademy with a keynote look at freedom and the internet. It was something of a cautionary tale that outlined the promises that technology brings, while noting that the dangers are often being overlooked. Klang comes from an academic and legal background—he is currently a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Göteborg in Sweden—which gives him something of a different perspective on technology issues.

As with many of the challenges we tackle, the latest project has sprawled across more articles than I ever expected when I first received the query from a reader. The question seems reasonably simple: given a month, day number and day of the week, calculate the most recent year that matches those criteria.

HP brought Enyo -- the open source object-oriented JavaScript framework for webOS -- out of beta this week, six months after the ill-fated operating system was contributed to the open source community. Enyo 2.0 now has a community of developers, a broad set of cross-platform user interface widgets, and a layout library for building apps that work across all form factors.

One of the great things about free software is that it's free in both senses. But it's also a problem for the people who write it, since it makes earning a living from doing so hard. How people have managed to do that has gradually evolved over time.

Background Project Neon provides daily builds of KDE modules for Kubuntu. It is an easy way to get the latest code without having to build the entire KDE-SVN tree and maintain the checkout. Project Neon is unstable, but it installs alongside stable packages. It is suitable for contributors such as new developers, translators, usability designers, documenters, promoters, and bug triagers. With Project Neon, people can experiment freely without risk to a working KDE environment.

Claiming that Linux users are different reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's comment that "the rich are different from you and I" and Ernest Hemingway's alleged reply, "Yes, they have more money." After all, computer users are computer users. A few geeks may argue over the differences in operating systems, but aren't average users more interested in simply getting work done?

Once the Power Pwn is deployed, if it engages network access control and runs in stealth mode, it is essentially undetectable, "but we would hope that people would be able to walk around, look around, and question things in the environment," said M. Anthony Hughes, customer development manager at Pwnie Express. That difficulty of detection has raised fears about its being a useful tool for hackers.

Oracle will not pursue any further development of the object-oriented programming language Fortress. The database maker had acquired the research project when it took over Sun in 2010. The announcement was made in a blog post by Guy L. Steele, a member of Oracle's Programming Language Research Group, which has been largely responsible for designing, developing and implementing Fortress. Steele stresses that ten years is a long time for a research project, most of which last for just three years, according to him.

There are a few things that keep the Linux Planet spinning, one of them is the Linux kernel itself. This week, we saw a new kernel debut, providing another incremental step forward for performance and stability.