Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Close scrutiny of the Steam port for Mac OS X led to the discovery of evidence which suggested that a Linux version might be coming soon. Sadly, Valve marketing vice president Doug Lombardi dispelled these suspicions in a recent interview during which he confirmed that the company is not actively working on Steam for Linux.

Everyone in the Linux world remembers Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's famous comment that Linux is a "cancer" that threatened Microsoft's intellectual property. Ballmer is still CEO of Microsoft, but that comment occurred in 2001, a lifetime ago in the technology market. While Microsoft hasn't formally rescinded its declaration that Linux violates its patents, at least one Microsoft executive admits that the company’s earlier battle stance was a mistake. Microsoft wants the world to understand, whatever its issues with Linux, it no longer has any gripe toward open source.

Last month we reported that the OpenSolaris Governing Board may kill itself if Oracle would not appoint a liaison to the OpenSolaris community to interact with and communicate their future plans. After that OGB death threat was announced, the Illumos project was announced, which is basically a fork of OpenSolaris. Less than two weeks ago, however, Oracle finally announced it would be killing off OpenSolaris and making other changes to how Oracle Solaris is developed and delivered. With that said, the OpenSolaris Governing Board approved the decision this morning to end itself and return control of the OpenSolaris community to Oracle.

Look what I just found, SCO's Partners page from 2002, on Internet Archive, and lo and behold, it provides proof positive that SCO, then calling itself Caldera, knew that IBM was involved with Linux as far back as 1998. That's the year Santa Cruz and IBM signed the agreement regarding Project Monterey, executed in October of 1998. No one, therefore, Santa Cruz or Caldera, had any reason to be in the dark about IBM's Linux activities while IBM was also working on Project Monterey.

Bruce Steinberg was the best Linux Journal reader I ever had, qualifying on the grounds of correspondence volume alone. His letters to this one editor were always long, and always thick with good humor, good advice, and rich history. Bruce was a Unix/Linux geek of the first water, and worked for many years at SCO, long before that "brand" was shamed at the end of its life. He was also a veteran of the rock & roll world, and knew more about the band Tower of Power than most people know about life. (It mattered to us both that the band, at the time traveling under another name but using the same horn section and singer Hubert Tubbs, played at our wedding.)

Rumors continue to swirl around Google's efforts to challenge the Apple iPad. Last week, the AOL-owned Download Squad told the world that Google, Taiwanese hardware manufacturer HTC, and US wireless carrier Verizon will launch a Chrome OS tablet on November 26, and now, the Israel-based Haaretz claims that the so-called "gPad" will include multitouch technology from Israeli outfit N-trig, whose tech is currently used in Windows tablets from HP.

After more than a year of research and development, the Opencast project under the patronage of the University of California Berkeley has presented the Matterhorn 1.0 lecture recording system. The German (virtUOS) Centre for Information Management and Virtual Teaching at the University of Osnabrück was a major contributor to this undertaking.

Hewlett-Packard confirmed during its Aug. 19 earnings call that a device running its recently acquired Palm WebOS operating system will ship sometime in early 2011. Although the company executive who confirmed the "product" offered no other details, the general assumption is that HP will load WebOS onto a tablet-like device.

As a matter of fact, what IS the right market for Linux? The mythical Average User? No way. The average user wants a computer that performs the tasks set for it. Those people are in the market for a computer, a real, physical machine, a tangible object with a keyboard (real or imaged), a mouse (or trackpad/trackball/touchscreen), and a display screen. The Average User scarcely notices, and certainly cares less, what sequence of binary commands course through the CPU to translate input into action. It is not HOW the system works that is the issue for the vast majority of users, but simply WHETHER it does. No, the Average User is looking for an actual object – hardware, not methodology.

How often do you hear people lumping together Linux and any of the BSDs? I've done it on occasion, and I hear it all the time. Of course, there are plenty of similarities between Linux and BSD: They are both based on UNIX. For the most part, both systems are developed by noncommercial organizations. And I must say that both the Linux and BSD variants have one common goal--to create the most useful, reliable operating system available. Still, there are significant differences as well. And when people overlook them, the whole BSD community shivers with anger. So I thought I would do my best to help my BSD brethren out and explain some of the ways Linux differs from BSD.

Back in the good old physical server days, you bought a server system, added disks to it and, after a time, when you came close to filling those disks, either you added more disks or replaced them with larger ones. Times have changed in the virtual world. You can still provision a static disk (Thick provisioning), which is typically much too large for the workload and any reasonable amount of growth. But, you do it to prevent that middle-of-the-night ‘disk is full’ call. With thin provisioning, you don’t have to worry about that call anymore. Or, do you?

We have at last Novell's appeal brief [PDF] in the private antitrust case Novell brought against Microsoft regarding WordPerfect. The brief was filed with the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. It begins: "This case has been here before." Indeed. Here's the decision from the US District Court in Maryland that Novell is appealing, as text. But there's more. Microsoft is fighting to keep certain documents it alleges the judge in the district court didn't base his ruling on from being considered by the court of appeals. Here's the Microsoft Motion to Strike [PDF]. The full title is Motion to Strike Certain Exhibits from the Joint Appendix and Any References to Such Documents in Novell's Brief.

Copyright laws are designed to ensure that authors and performers receive compensation for their labors without fear of theft and to encourage them to continue their work. The laws are not intended to provide income for generations of an author’s heirs, particularly at the cost of keeping works of art out of the public’s reach. The Savory collection, like other sound recordings made before 1972, is covered by a patchwork of state copyright and piracy laws that in some cases allow copyrights to remain until the year 2067. Congress needs to bring all these recordings under the purview of federal copyright law, which generally applies during the lifetime of the author or musician plus 70 years. That time period has been criticized as too long, but is unlikely to be changed because it is part of a global trade treaty.

LXer Feature: 22-Aug-2010

In this week's Roundup we have more on the Oracle - Google lawsuit, how corporate America went open source, games that transmit GPS coordinates, converting eBooks, a space elevator and a Happy 17th Birthday to Debian. Enjoy!

The staff behind the Free Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) have just announced that the 2011 conference will take place on the 5th and 6th of February. This is the first weekend of February, which is right around the time that the other FOSDEMs have taken place. Like always, this event will be taking place in Brussels, Belgium.

Since the last article on downloading photos from facebook, I have received several requests to come up with an article on uploading photos to Facebook from Ubuntu. Well, there are plenty of Windows apps that allow the users to upload photos to Facebook, but when it comes to Linux Ubuntu, there are not really too many choices. Below, I have come up with several ways that you can use to upload photos to Facebook.

In reality, Oracle is a major proponent of open software, pushing Linux and taking a stand against the notion of software patents themselves. Yes, that's right, the company filing the year's biggest software patent infringement case is also a major critic of the idea of software patents in general. When somebody points a gun at you, you point one back even if you don't like the idea of guns. You might even shoot first. Oracle likes Linux so much that it funds Btrfs, a GPL licensed, futuristic and advanced new file system that supports pooling, snapshots, checksums, and other features that sound a lot like Sun's ZFS, which Oracle now also owns. The difference is that Oracle didn't mire Btrfs in legal quandary the way Sun did with ZFS before Oracle bought them.

The tech industry loves a good vendor slugfest, and the upcoming legal battle between Google and Oracle has all the makings of a truly spectacular one. At issue is Dalvik, the unique, Java-based runtime at the heart of Google's Android smartphone OS. Oracle, which gained stewardship of the Java platform when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2009, claims Dalvik knowingly, willfully, and deliberately infringes on Java intellectual property. According to a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week, Oracle is seeking a halt to any further Android development, destruction of all infringing Android software, and for Google to pay damages, both actual and statutory.

French robotics specialist Gostai has announced that its advanced Urbi robotics operating system is now available as open source. The robotics platform is compatible with Linux, Windows and several real-time operating systems and uses a new orchestration script language called urbiscript that natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Note: The Urbi community portal is located here.

System Administrators are always in need of applications to remotely monitor their networks, administer the servers, and get stats. The Android smart phone comes to the rescue with an enormous number of such remote apps to help the administrator remotely access his system. Seven of the best android apps for system administrators follow.