Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last week at CES, Microsoft announced their answer to the iPad with their tablet strategy. Computerworld says, “Microsoft has decided not to follow the Apple and Google route of putting its mobile operating system on tablets. Instead, Microsoft has chosen a more deliberate method where it will migrate its client OS onto tablets.” Microsoft also announced it will wait until its port of Windows 7 to ARM chips is complete. Pundits have criticized this strategy as being out-dated in today’s fast moving tablet market.

Back in October there was the very controversial news that Canonical would be replacing the GNOME Shell with their own Unity project as the default desktop shell for Ubuntu 11.04 and going forward. The original version and specification for Ubuntu Unity (and as found in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook) required 3D acceleration and would use Compiz as its compositing window manager. For those without the necessary graphics drivers to support the functionality, Canonical's plan for Ubuntu was to have it fall-back to the traditional GNOME desktop and inform the user of their sad graphics support. However, now Canonical's developing a 2D version of Unity for such scenarios.

IBM showed off its Linux-based Watson supercomputer in an exhibition "Human vs. Machine" game of Jeopardy, while discussing potential practical uses of its natural-language AI in the IT industry, especially in health care and tech support. Watson beat two human challengers in this practice round, but the real winner will be proven in a televised competition in February.

The official features that Red Hat has added to the revised Enterprise Linux 5.6 include the Ext4 file system. Other innovations include fresher versions of Bind and PHP, along with a number of revised drivers to improve support for current hardware.

While it seems every Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in recent memory has some theme that never really panned out (see 3-D TV), you might want to rethink the trend when it comes to Android. Google's Android attack was in full force at this year's edition with a vengeance. From smart phones to tablet devices of all sizes to Google TV, you couldn't travel the exhibit floor very far without bumping into something Android. For some companies, like Motorola, Android has fueled impressive comebacks. For others, like Sony, it's new territory.

As pundits predict resurgent iPhone sales with Verizon's iPhone 4 launch this week, Canalys projects Android will shrug it off and continue to grow at more than twice the rate of the iPhone in 2011. Meanwhile, Android claimed 46 percent of U.S. ad impression share in December compared to 32 percent for Apple iOS, says Millennial Media....

In testing of OpenBenchmarking.org and preparations for the release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland at the end of February from SCALE, a lot of benchmarks have been happening to test the various analytical features and other new capabilities of this open benchmarking platform. In fact, it is really an overwhelming amount of benchmarks; the power capacity in my office is maxed out as benchmark after benchmark and system after system there is all sorts of test scenarios being looked upon. The benchmarks coming out on Phoronix.com over the past two months have just been barely scratching the surface of what has been going into the OpenBenchmarking.org system. Recently a lot of OpenCL compute benchmarks were pumped in, and since we have only published a few OpenCL Linux benchmarks -- OpenCL on Linux vs. Mac OS X and OpenCL NVIDIA vs. ATI on Linux -- here's some more in this article.

I recently received some mild criticism from a friend when I stated that The HeliOS Project provided a computer for a family with 3 kids ranging in age from 6 - 9 years old. He said that we had wasted a computer on kids that were far too young to either appreciate the technology or use it efficiently. I don't only think he is wrong... I know he is.

As the first of several opinion pieces exploring current issues in KDE, we offer you a video of Aaron Seigo explaining how KDE's success as a community producing all kinds of software led to outgrowing our old name, the "K Desktop Environment", what KDE means now and why it matters.

Open...and Shut By Silicon Valley standards, Red Hat is a loser. It doesn't have an app store (though it once tried to create one). Its chief executive isn't a fresh-faced kid (though Jim Whitehurst doesn't look much older than 20). And its headquarters isn't in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, but rather in the comparative backwoods of North Carolina.…

Some people love Facebook, others hate it, and many have a little of both. It can be a great way to keep in contact with old friends and relatives, but it’s also a great way for third parties to harvest loads of free data that may not be used the way you want. Plenty of social sites have popped up over the years in the hopes of dethroning Facebook, but not many have had the goods, or really provided much that would entice a user to switch.

The promise of HTML5's <video> tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora.

Seems like everybody's running Ubuntu these days. It's become the default Linux distribution. I run it myself on several machines. But it's not perfect for everything. Linux is all about choice, and if you want something besides a standard system bogged down with all the bells and whistles, there are lots of choices.

You love tinkering with your computer. You've tried Ubuntu and Fedora, and they're good, but you feel something is not quite right. Maybe you don't like all those daemons loading on boot, or maybe you want to build your Linux desktop stack just how you want it? Perhaps you're completely new to Linux and want to learn exactly what makes a Linux workstation tick? It's time for you to try Arch Linux. Arch Linux is often called the binary Gentoo&emdash;an appropriate description. Arch gives you a full but simple command-line base to build on, but unlike Gentoo, Arch uses i686 or x86_64 optimized binary packages instead of source code.

Microsoft is embracing open-source on the web, offering a development kit that targets non-techie programmers. The company has released WebMatrix, a set for tools and templates for use with open-source PHP apps like WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, and Umbraco in addition to open-sourced .NET code. Nearly 40 open-source application partners are supporting WebMatrix, Microsoft said, with templates stored in an online Web Applications Gallery from Microsoft. The Gallery also provides links to more than 30 hosting partners for your finished sites.

We first looked at Linux Mint Debian Edition when it was released in September of last year. Just before Christmas, the Mint team released a new spin of the Debian Edition with features from Linux Mint 10 that’s better than ever.

From the user's side, that is. From the side of a whole world full of people who will eventually determine whether Linux has a future as a viable home/office alternative to Windows. If they don't, it may be destined never to rise above the magical 1% of do-it-yourselfers adventurous and persistent enough to study it, work at it, and ultimately learn to use it. Blessed are they who labor at Linux, for they shall be called geeks.

NCR announced two all-in-one POS (point of sale) systems that run Novell's SUSE Linux for Point of Service. The RealPOS 25 and RealPOS 50 include integral touchscreen displays and can be placed on a counter, pole, bracket, or wall.

Google has announced that it will be removing the support for H.264 video from the Chrome browser's <video> tag. "Our goal is to enable open innovation" said Google of the planned removal which will allow the company to focus exclusively on royalty free and open source based codecs. WebM and Theora video codecs will be left as the only HTML5 video codecs supported by Chrome, both of which Google consider consistent with "open web principles" because they are believed to be unencumbered by patents and require no licensing fees.

Like many people, I get almost all of my news online. To get it quickly and efficiently, I use a newsreader to skim the RSS or Atom feeds from sites (like LWN) that I find useful. Until recently, I'd been using Google Reader as the best option to manage and read my feeds — but after hearing about the Mutt of newsreaders, I decided to skim the open source options for news reading to see if I could make the switch.