Showing headlines posted by grouch

Interoperability has been a sore subject for Microsoft, and the company has formed a council of customers to identify areas to improve interoperability within its products.

By day, 27-year-old Sander Jensen -- originally from Holland -- works for ESI Group in Alabama, a company that produces sophisticated software for the aircraft and automotive industries. In his personal time, he scratches his own itches by creating free software. I discovered Jensen's Goggles Music Manager recently and decided to try it out, and pick Jensen's brain to see what motivates him to write free software. Here's what I found.

Finally, after months of small alpha version bumps, Flock, the social web browser based on Firefox, has unleashed a 0.7 beta with a whole slew of updates, improvements and bug fixes.

IBM is contributing more code to the open-source community based on the Web services distributed management (WSDM) standard, the vendor said Wednesday.

Here’s almost a textbook example of where FOSS triumphs over proprietary ware. If ME and 98 were FOSS, then other programmers could patch the flaw (assuming there was sufficient demand). However, it’s not in Microsoft’s interests to do so, so they leave their users with little choice: Buy or die.

Sometimes, when a fun toy becomes available, your editor has no alternative but to go off and play with it. Later on, when LWN deadlines loom, the next step is obvious: justify all that playing by writing an article. One of those moments came when Google finally made its Google Earth application available for Linux under a free-beer license.

[Corbet provides some free-speech alternatives, too. -- grouch]

Nexvision has produced a prototype IP network video security camera targeting large area surveillance applications such as public transportation, utility plants, and medical centers. The "Nexdome Dragonfly" prototype is based on a Texas Instruments (TI) "DaVinci" processor, measures 5.1 inches (13cm) square, and runs embedded Linux.

Obsidian Systems joins with high-availability server builder Stratus to launch a range of Linux-based fault-tolerant servers for the South African market.

There isn't much to salvage from the sunken hulls of proprietary design.

[That's Jon 'maddog' Hall. -- grouch]

On the 12th of this month Google released version 4 of the Google Earth software with support for Linux. It can now be downloaded from here: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, SUSE, and Linspire are making headway in the desktop market, but if you want to try something really different, you can find other, less-well-known alternative operating systems. While these OSes may not be the most stable, or have the greatest hardware support, they offer some unique ideas.

On upgrading my webserver recently (from RHEL3 to Debian stable, fwiw), I discovered an issue with renamed/old versions of index.html in the new version of Apache (2.0.54).

Setting up enterprise groupware is usually associated with huge costs, both in money and staffing, and immense complexity, requiring professionals to keep everything running smoothly. The benefits are worth the costs, though, even for smaller organizations. If done correctly, your staff will be up-to-date and able to quickly and easily share essential information. With Open-Xchange Server, you can get those benefits from an open source application.

Tiger Communications, XOU Solutions & Anam Mobile Join Growing List of Telecom Companies Adopting Open Source Database

Sun Microsystems has appointed a new Sun Fellow, Tim Marsland (pictured). The award signifies a rare event at Sun, with only twelve other individuals having had the honor throughout the company's history.

A few months ago, VMware released a free version of its desktop virtualization software, VMware Player. It's a great application for running a second operating system on your desktop; the only problem is you can't create new virtual images using VMware Player. With a little work, however, you can use VMware Player to create guest operating systems.

Here, to kick off our new Groklaw feature of book reviews, is Carla Schroder's review of "The Debian System, Concepts and Techniques," by Martin Krafft. No Starch published it (you can buy it as a book or as a PDF from them), and of course Amazon has it, and the author's page provides a link to a list of places around the world where the book is available.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. announced that it received YES Certification from Novell Inc. for its Opteron, Athlon 64 processor-based systems and Turion 64 mobile technology.

A month after its release at Interop 2006, Project Lasso, a viable open source alternative to Microsoft's more proprietary Windows event collection infrastructure, is experiencing growing support from the global log management and intelligence community, including an official repository on SourceForge and support for EMC Celerra File Servers.

Apple Computer Inc. extended the courtesy of meeting with me one day after my column on the closing of the OS X x86 kernel source code was published online.

To sum up Apple's objections, they felt I had given a year-old story a fresh coat of paint and sensationalized it for an audience that wasn't affected by it. Yet no story is more timely, or more broadly relevant, than this one.