Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

CodeWeavers, developer of software that makes it possible to run Windows applications on Mac and Linux operating systems, yesterday announced CrossOver Games. Crossover Games is a tool allowing users to play Windows games, including World of Warcraft, Guild Wars and many Steam games including Team Fortress 2, Counterstrike Source, Civilization 4, Peggle, and many others.

Adobe today announced an online, free, version of its popular Photoshop application. The Flash-based Photoshop Express application is a stripped down version of Photoshop allowing users to manipulate and store their images online. And because Photoshop Express is Flash-based the application will run across most operating systems including Linux, Mac and Windows.

It's the most anticipated matchup in the hacker world: Linux versus Mac OS X versus Vista. Who will get hacked first? That's what organizers of the CanSecWest security conference hope to discover this week as they give show attendees a shot at hacking into the three laptops they've put on display here in Vancouver. The catch? They have to use a brand-new 'zero day' attack that nobody has seen before. The prize? US$20,000, plus you get to keep the laptop.

Open source has gone mainstream, but now what? That’s what I asked leading open source investor Larry Augustin and Harold Goldberg, chief executive of Zend, at the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference, which just wrapped up. All the evidence suggested open source has arrived: This year, some 40 percent of the conference came from the IT departments of large, traditional tech companies. But….is that all there is? Even Goldberg, optimistic overall, conceded he was disappointed when he heard that MySQL, rather than going public, had been purchased by Sun.

Asustek's 8.9-inch second-generation Eee PC lineup will include touchscreen panels and possible GPS support, with shipments expected to begin in May or June, according to Kevin Lin, vice president of Asustek's sales department. Pricing is projected to reach NT$15,000 (US$500), Lin added. The 8.9-inch Eee PC will adopt Intel's low-cost notebook platform and the lowest memory capacity will be upgraded from 512MB to 1GB, while the SSD (solid state drive) capacity will be upgraded from 4-8GB to 8-12GB, according to industry sources.

At the Mozilla "open house", Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla Corporation vice president of engineering said that beta 5 of Firefox 3 will come out next week. It will be the last beta before release candidate 1, which is due for May; Firefox 3 should ship in June or before, if possible. Schroepfer said, Microsoft’s stated support for open standards (like CSS 2.1) is "a huge win for the Web." But "I wouldn't call it 'vigorously embrace,'". Lots of old standards are still not used. Firefox will support HTML 5, which has a spec for offline access. This will make Google Gears obsolete, he said.

Jon Williams, CTO at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, gave today's opening keynote at the OSBC conference in San Francisco. But this was not the usual boring vendor keynote seen at many conferences; this presentation was absolutely on target for the audience. And more importantly, Jon's story is a good example of what's happening increasingly across the industry: open source is being used for strategic as well as tactical applications. One of the key observations Williams made was that Kaplan's use of open source software is not because it's free, but because it works.

NFS was designed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 to connect their systems, and in the process revolutionized the storage industry by allowing file systems to be connected, creating a common view of all the files within an environment. NFS has had some limited updates since then, some for performance, but most of these were minor. Well, the good news is that the future of NFS is almost here.

Sun Microsystems developers are working on a version of the Lustre global file system that can run on the company's own next-generation Zetabyte File System (ZFS), said Peter Bojanic, director of Lustre engineering at Sun Microsystems. Lustre is an open-source global file system that is heavily used in the supercomputer community. Seven out of the 10 supercomputers at the top of last November's top 500 list of the world's fastest computers use Lustre, as do 30 percent of the systems in the top 100, Bojanic said.

Jonathan, you are leading the development of a Free Software, high-quality, multi-language VM runtime with an extensive class library, called OpenJDK. Miguel, you are leading the development of a Free Software, high-quality, multi-language VM runtime with an extensive class library, called Mono. How about a merge? We'll call the new project "OpenVM", for convenience in this letter. Let's jump right in to the advantages for the projects:

News that IBM is among the new investors in EnterpriseDB has already been remarked upon by our own Matt Asay. I know it gives employees a warm feeling to know that the VC money is flowing and Big Blue believes in them. But what should this mean to the EnterpriseDB community? Does IBM’s backing for an open source company give you the same feeling, or something queasier?

The main focus of this article is to get you setup with a solid Linux server and a streaming media application called Ampache. If you follow my guide verbatim, you will have exactly that. Let's get started!

LXer Feature: 26-Mar-2008

This is a response to Patrick Durusau's recent letter Who loses if OpenXML loses?. The only one who loses if DIS 29500 fails is Microsoft, whose Office 2007 cashcow will run into trouble. Everyone else, including the OpenDocument Format, do not need an ISO stamp of approval on DIS 29500. The current Ecma 376 standard, flawed as it is, is more than enough to work with. Read more to find out why.

Updated on 26-Mar-2008 12:34 PM I emailed a copy of this article to Patrick and he responded. I have posted his response at the bottom of the article.

Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!'s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.

The editor of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard has written a letter that strongly supports recognizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) file format as a standard, arguing that if it fails, ODF will suffer. As the editor of OpenDocument, I want to promote OpenDocument, extol its features, urge the widest use of it as possible, none of which is accomplished by the anti-OpenXML position in ISO," Patrick Durusau wrote. "The bottom line is that OpenDocument, among others, will lose if OpenXML loses. ... Passage of OpenXML in ISO is going to benefit OpenDocument as much as anyone else."

[More FUD from Patrick. How did he become an ODF editor? - Sander]

By corrupting XML string values in the way that it does, DIS 29500 breaks the ability to have loosely coupled systems. Once the value space is polluted by these aberrant control characters, every application, every process that touches this data must be aware of their non-standard idiosyncrasies lest they crash or return incorrect answers.

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test; UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows. That’s a grossly oversimplified answer to a complex question and I’ll no doubt get flamed by some of the more advanced UNIX and/or Linux users out there but in the interest of keeping things simple, let’s go with the above italicized sentence.

A major global electronics distributor has announced that its U.S.-based operation has started reselling a software subscription service for embedded Linux developers. Arrow Electronics's North American Components (NAC) division says TimeSys's "LinuxLink" subscriptions can help developers streamline development of their own commercial-grade custom Linux platforms.

India recently rejected Microsoft's document format Office Open XML (OOXML). The Bureau of Indian Standards voted against making Openxml an ISO standard. Microsoft, in a statement released subsequently, expressed deep disappointment at the bureau's rejection of OOXML. There's widespread sentiment that OOXML should not be considered even if supported as a standard. This may seem like taking it a bit too far but a careful analysis of the issue would reveal that this sentiment albeit far-fetched does have some plausible explanation.

A European standards expert has defended the move to fast-track the ISO approval process for Microsoft's Open XML (OOXML) document standard, dismissing criticisms that the decision to do so is flawed and unfair. He advised governments against mandating just one document standard as it may run foul of polices set by the World Trade Organization (WTO), opening themselves to possible legal challenges. "One of the big concerns of the WTO is that you should not use standards as a barrier to trade," he said. "If a government enforces [the use of one standard], that would mean the whole country is not allowed to use OOXML. They could get into a very difficult legal situation as this could be challenged legally," noted van den Beld.

[Wow. So much FUD and it's only Tuesday morning. These are straight bald-faced lies. Expect a lot more OOXML news and FUD in the coming week. It's the last week until the ISO (re-)vote. - Sander]