Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

While companies from Google to Apple to Microsoft voice their ardent support for HTML5 and developers rush to show off the fun tricks it can do, those who actually oversee HTML5 are telling the world to cool their britches.

For the third time in a row, Worldforge participated in Google Summer of Code, with three students completing the program this year. Worldforge is the original open-source Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) project, so it’s great at getting students who are interested in games into open source.

As the chairman and CEO of America Online, Steve Case helped connect mainstream America to the Internet for the first time. He orchestrated AOL’s $165 billion acquisition of Time Warner in 2001, which remains the largest merger in U.S. history, and he led the since-regretted combined company — which included Warner Bros. Studios, Time Inc. and CNN — for two years before stepping down as chairman in 2003. He left the board altogether in 2005, but with his private holding company Revolution and his philanthropic venture, the Case Foundation, he has remained active in shaping the way businesses and people use the Internet.

[Not FOSS related but I thought would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Ok, I recognize and greatly appreciate the tremendous contributions of open source software. I really do. I use it every day, and have done so for many years. I’m a Linux person from the word go. But, I work for a Windows Shop. All Windows, All The Time. So, to fill out my time sheet in order to get paid, or to follow all the Track Changes in a Microsoft 2007 proposal document, I have to run Windows, because the company I work for uses 100% Windows software to run their business.

Gaming on the Linux platform is alive and well, thank you very much. In fact, there are more quality games available for Linux today than ever before. If you're using a recently released version of a distro, like Ubuntu, you'll find a wide range of game categories available right from the install menu. The options increase if you're not opposed to spending a little coin.

Besides Linux drivers for gaming peripherals (like mice and other things) being an area where Linux tends to struggle compared to the level of support and functionality offered under Windows, enthusiast-oriented programs for being able to overclock your CPU and RAM is another area where Linux really provides no suitable alternatives to the plethora of Windows utilities. There is though a new open-source program for manipulating certain AMD CPUs under Linux.

People forget that the central purpose of patents is to encourage real innovation, not simply reward people for being the first to file for even obvious ideas with over-stretched patent offices that set incredibly low bars. The world of patents has become perverted in recent years: patents are seen as valuable things in themselves – the more the merrier – irrespective of whether they do, truly, promote innovation. Worse: in the world of software, they are actually brakes on that innovation, particularly as they begin to interact and form impenetrable patent thickets.

When reviewing a lightweight distribution, the term Swiss Army knife is sometimes employed to indicate that it's packed with features despite a diminutive size. However, at 11MB for the ISO, Tiny Core is more of a blank-slate distribution, as when booted from a CDROM or a USB stick, it presents the user with a simple desktop consisting merely of a task launcher and a package manager. It contains some good ideas and it's already perfectly usable, but I think it needs a few more refinements in order to become great.

The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in the city center of Berlin at the Humboldt University, Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events.

Microsoft released an early developer version of an open source package manager, dubbed NuPack, for its .NET platform yesterday. Independent coders on the Nublar (NU) project worked with Microsoft on NuPack, and on Wednesday it was handed over to MS-sponsored Outercurve Foundation.

The openSUSE Goblin Team, which was originally formed to bring the latest Moblin innovations into the openSUSE world and now are focusing upon pulling in MeeGo innovations after Moblin and Maemo merged, has a new announcement. This openSUSE team is now announcing the first public release of Smeegol, which combines MeeGo with openSUSE into one netbook-designed Linux distribution.

Reactions to Ubuntu are rarely balanced. Too often, people love or hate it so extravagantly that the opinions negate themselves. Often, the reactions are so extreme that a fair assessment of the popular distribution is difficult. Add some genuine mis-steps, and the assessment seems almost impossible. So exactly what does Ubuntu contribute to free software? The answer, I think, is different from what those in either extreme seem to believe.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has received a $5.6 million grant from hardware component maker Marvell to fund the development of an Android-powered mobile tablet based on a Marvell reference design. The product, which is expected to be ready for a public demonstration at CES next year, is intended for the developed world.

While Razer and Logitech manufacturer some terrific mice for computer gamers along with other gaming peripherals, they unfortunately do not provide any official Linux support. There have been community projects like Lomoco for supporting Logitech's extra mouse features under Linux and RazerTool for supporting some Razer mice, but without any full-featured support from the vendor. The smaller gaming peripheral vendors like Mionix are also no better at providing Linux support, but there is now at least one new vendor supporting such efforts.

Google has filed its Answer with Counterclaims to Oracle's patent and copyright infringement complaint, and how! It's a very aggressive and confident response to Oracle's complaint. Google asks that Oracle's complaint be dismissed, for a judgment in favor of all its counterclaims, for a declaratory judgment that Google has not infringed or contributed to any infringement of any of the patents, a declaration of the invalidity of all the Oracle patents, and a declaration that all Oracle's claims are barred by laches, equitable estoppel and/or waiver, and unclean hands. It wants Oracle to have to pays its costs and expenses of this litigation, including Google's attorneys' fees and expert witness fees, asking for a judgment that this is an exceptional case warranting it.

Google announced some major content partners for its Google TV platform and revealed some more information on the Android-and Intel Atom-based IPTV platform. New Google TV content partners include Turner Broadcasting, NBC Universal, HBO, Twitter, and Amazon.com, says the company.

Google has responded to Oracle's lawsuit over the use of Java in Android, claiming that the mobile OS does not violate Oracle's patents – while accusing Ellison and company of a certain Java open source hypocrisy. In August, Oracle filed a complaint in federal court alleging that Google deliberately infringed various Java-related patents and copyrights that Oracle acquired in purchasing Sun Microsystems. The suit claimed infringement of seven patents by the Android OS, specifically pointing to Android's Dalvik virtual machine and the Android software development kit.

Keeping the insides of our computers clean is a good practice, but canned air is expensive and wasteful. One alternative is portable air compressor. My home computers live in a dirty environment; out here in the country we have real dirt and lots of it. So I take them outside a couple of times a year and blow out all the accumulated dirt and bugs. Sometimes it's enough to plant potatoes.

Drivers in 2.6.36 include considerably improved support for infra-red receivers and remotes, optimised USB drivers, and a solution for a much discussed problem that Android developers, in one way or another, had solved long ago.

Microsoft is taking Motorola to court with allegations that its Android smartphones violate a number of Microsoft patents. It is hard to tell if the real target is Motorola, or Android itself, but one thing seems certain--patent suits as a product strategy are getting old, and ultimately it seems that all parties lose in the long run.