Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Kira 100 was a decent Eee PC knockoff, but at just north of $475, there was literally no purpose in picking it over the genuine product. The Jointech JL7100, however, really makes ASUS' darling look mighty unnecessary. Okay, so maybe the fact that this thing relies on WinCE 5.0 rather than, you know, a bona fide laptop operating system is a bit disappointing, but there are sacrifices to be expected here.

[The FOSS angle? A Dutch news site states that this "laptop" will also be available with some unspecified Linux OS - Sander]

We got a nice helping of slides dropped on our virtual doorstep this evening, fleshing out Dell's upcoming netbook -- which they seem to be calling the "Dell E." Um, Eeenteresting name choice, but that doesn't seem set in stone, and there's plenty else going on here to ponder over. Dell's breaking the Dell E into two device types, a 8.9-inch model clearly meant to take on the Eee 900, and the 12.1-inch "E Slim" which actually looks positioned to take on the MacBook Air and X300. Perhaps most interesting is that all of these run Linux and Windows XP, and while it's not clear if there's a full-featured Linux OS onboard, there does seem to be an instant-on, Foleo-esque Linux included on all of them called BlackTop.

Don't complain about your situation, do something about it. That's the gist of what Danese Cooper, senior director of open source strategies at Intel, said in her keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention here. Cooper said her talk, entitled "Why Whinging Doesn't Work," was initially written for women, and she gave a version of it at a women's conference recently. Cooper said she came up with the idea for the talk after receiving an email from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ltd., saying 'Can you girls please stop whinging about this?'"

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. BecauseCuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don't need to know your search history and habits. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don't need to keep logs of our users' search activity, so we don't. - Cuil

[And to top it off, it's actually a pretty nifty search engine too - Sander]

WordPress, one of the most popular blog applications, suffers the same fate as many other open source projects: Users often delay upgrades despite a steady release cycle. That's because upgrading WordPress carries the risk of losing your virtual personality in the case of a botched upgrade. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin (WPAU) makes the upgrade process much simpler, quicker, and safer by taking care of all the intricate steps.

Results of a recent poll show that the stagnant economy may be leading more and more organizations to adopt open source software to save on licensing fees. - In the first annual survey of its membership and other open source software and services companies, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) found that the stagnant economy may be helping to push the growth in open source adoption. In a survey of more than 100 of its member organizations, the OSA found that 83 percent said that expect to see a year-over-year increase in revenue in 2008 from open source related software and services.

For the past few days I have been looking for a proper i18n (internationalisation) and l10n (localisation) method for PHP. PHP has quite a few locale aware functions such as strftime and sprintf. In combination with gettext this can work quite well. The major downside is that you need to install all the locales that you want to support on your server. PHP6 is promising to solve that problem with the intl functions. Even better, the intl functions are also available as a PECL extension and works on PHP 5.2.4 and newer. There is no package (yet) for php5-intl in Debian Lenny but building and installing the extension yourself is really easy. Here's a short tutorial.

Channel Intelligence, a company based in Florida, filed a lawsuit for patent infringement in Delaware on Tuesday against a long list of startups and other companies and individuals who have one thing in common - they offer wish lists for products people may want others to buy for them. Notable in their absence is Amazon, Ebay and most other large etailers, all of which maintain wish lists for users.

Yahoo! Inc. announced today that it has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn to settle their pending proxy contest related to the Company's 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, eight members of Yahoo!'s current Board of Directors will stand for re-election at the 2008 annual meeting. Following the 2008 annual meeting, the Yahoo! Board will be expanded to 11 members. Carl Icahn will be appointed to the Board and the remaining two seats will be filled by the Board upon the recommendation of the Board's Nominating and Governance Committee from a list of nine candidates recommended by Mr. Icahn, which includes the eight remaining members of the Icahn slate of nominees and Jonathan Miller, currently a partner in Velocity Interactive Group and former Chairman and CEO of AOL. As part of the settlement agreement, Mr. Icahn, who owns an aggregate of 68,786,320 shares, or 4.98% of Yahoo! common stock, has agreed to withdraw his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting and to vote his Yahoo! shares in support of the Board's nominees.

Microsoft was set to announce Thursday that it would make the interchangeable document format of a competitor available in its own market-leading Office 2007 software during the first half of 2009. The company, under pressure from European regulators, national standards organizations and its own government clients, said it planned to give customers the ability to open, edit and save documents in Open Document Format - the main competitor to Word - through a free update. By downloading the update, consumers will be able to save text documents in ODF format and adjust Office 2007 settings to automatically save documents in the rival format.

[Score one for open standards! - Sander]

You’ve always dreamt of making panoramas of your holidays pictures. You’ve never done it cause you’ve never found the good software into Ubuntu or it was too complicated to set up? Me too. Until recently and the discovery of Hugin. Let see how to achieve this.

The best storage engine for MySQL is by far InnoDB (and yes some applications can live with MyISAM only, but that's not the point). InnoDB (now part of Oracle) is also dual-licensed and has had an agreement with MySQL for several years now. On the surface everything is looking smooth. n practice it doesn't work quite that way: First because InnoDB hot-backup feature for instance has never been open source released. So contrary to the recent brouhaha, MySQL has fostered proprietary components for a long time. Second because even so SUN at large has a good relationship with Oracle when it comes to selling Oracle DB on SUN servers, it is unlikely that SUN will let its pricey acquisition be driven (through InnoDB/Oracle) by an outsider. Conversely, the day Oracle perceives MySQL+InnoDB as a threat, the existing agreement won't be renewed.

GNOME 2.22.0 was only released last month, but being released tomorrow is the first development release in the path towards GNOME 2.24.0. This first development release will be dubbed GNOME 2.23.1, with GNOME 2.23 being the unstable branch. The tarballs for this first release were due last night, with new versions of gnome-applets, mousetweaks, gnome-control-center, cheese, and other packages already being checked-in. All of the checked-in packages can be found on the gnome-announce-list.

Microsoft published 30,000 pages of protocol documentation, and added another 14,000 pages in the beginning of April 2008. After the publication of these documents, the Gartner Group made a advisory to the effect that Open Source developers should avoid accessing this information unless they had “rigorous processes to keep track of applicable patents”. The big question, at the end of the day: How exactly was a developer to know which protocols and functionality were patented and which were not? A few weeks ago, during my own investigation into these issues, I contacted Centrify Corp’s CEO, Tom Kemp.

Sun Microsystems is stepping up efforts to boost Java usage in Linux shops by working to remove some final encumbrances in the open-source Java platform. By freeing these up, Java can be fully open-source and thus be packaged more easily with Linux distributions. In conjunction with this activity, Sun is talking with Linux distributors, including OpenSuse, Ubuntu and Fedora to have them offer an updated version of OpenJDK, which constitutes the open-source Java platform. Sun plans to offer the updated OpenJDK soon and clear the last few encumbrances later.

Yoggie, the company that just loves to take those pesky security duties off of your computer's plate, is offering up yet another Linux-based mini-computer designed specifically to safeguard your laptop (and keep it focused on more important duties).

Lately I’ve noticed an emerging trend of Ubuntu bashing. It seems that the Linux community has now included Ubuntu bashing as a extension of the Microsoft bashing fringe. It’s actually pretty sad because the Microsoft bashers, are at least being loyal to the concept of GNU/Linux even though they are a lot like our crazy uncle Freddie the everyone nods and whispers about at family reunion time. Microsoft bashing though enjoyed as a sport by many Linux enthusiasts is not productive behavior and most of us get a naughty twinge of pleasure from it. Most of us also realize that its not behavior that is conducive to the spread of GNU/Linux and refrain from being obsessive compulsive in the behavior. After all no one wants to be like uncle Freddy… they just want to tell Uncle Freddy stories.

rPath has entered a pact with Novell that makes creating a virtual appliance easier for developers – and corporate lawyers. As part of the deal, which was announced yesterday, rPath will OEM Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server beginning in August, said Bill Marshall, the company’s CEO, and former Red Hatter. rPath’s Appliance Builder has been running its own Linux since the company’s inception but it doesn’t come with the legal peace-of-mind guarantee offered by Novell, he said. Despite Linux’s widespread acceptance, potential legal issues still keep customers up at night, the former Red Hat sales exec said.

A new release of Ubuntu Server, version 8.04, is scheduled to be available for free download Thursday with more enterprise qualities than previous releases. The move puts Canonical's Ubuntu, heretofore a consumer-oriented, desktop version of Linux, on more of a collision course with Red Hat Enterprise andNovell Suse Linux Enterprise. Ubuntu Server 8.04 will be supported for five years, only the second version of Ubuntu to be guaranteed Long Term Support, with the previous 6.06 version also receiving the LTS designation.

I'm very pleased to report that with the post-Fedora 9 election, the Board composition will be a better reflection of the strides our community has made in self-organization and self-governance, and of our healthy partnership with Red Hat. Starting with this election, the Board will move to a composition of five (5) community-elected seats and four (4) Red Hat-appointed seats. This is an issue I've been advocating over the past couple of weeks, and I'm delighted to be able to make this change following my first release as Fedora Project Leader.