Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Renoise Team is pleased to announce the first ever public Renoise demo for Linux. As a Linux user you may come to appreciate Renoise’s hands-on and fundamental approach to music production. For those on other platforms, now is the chance to experience Renoise on the operating system that has become famous for its flexibility and stability.

Red Hat has revamped its strategy here to work more closely with partners, both local and global, putting more resources to focus on Thailand. Thailand is one of the ASEAN countries with the highest potential for Red Hat which, along with its partners, will develop more applications on top of both Linux and its JBoss enterprise middleware suite, according to Teong Eng Guan, Red Hat's general manager for ASEAN countries.

Competitors should keep a weary eye on newly minted Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, whose fresh face masks a certified executioner who has a plan to grow the open source leader into a billion-dollar juggernaut supplying data center infrastructure software. The 40-year-old Whitehurst left his position as COO of Delta Airlines to replace Matt Szulik and brings with him a business savvy he intends to soak into the corporate culture of Red Hat.

If you haven't heard, Linux is taking a leap forward. It's becoming available at many stores as the primary operating system on several computers. Just recently I was shopping online at best buy and saw they have a $400 laptop that comes completely suited with Linux as its ONLY operating system. What caught my attention was the 4GB SSD. This technology is becoming more and more available. I know what everyone's firsts thoughts are when they scan over the 4GB Hard Drive. That's ridiculously small. I can't even fit all my operating system programs on that amount of space. But you can with Linux.

I’m in Geneva this week because I’m taking part in the Open Forum Europe conference “Standards and the Future of the Internet.” In addition, of course, the ISO/IEC OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting is taking place this week. To be clear, I’m not participating in the BRM but there is a tremendous buzz and a lot of murmurs about it. I hope that people who are taking part in the meeting will be blogging throughout the week.

[The OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting is this week, so expect a lot of coverage on it during the next two weeks - Sander]

Sean Daly was at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium this weekend. While there, he interviewed Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe about Firefox 3, the Thunderbird spin-off, FOSS in general and the future of web browsing and web standards.

Microsoft's decision last week to let everyone snoop through its software secrets means vulnerabilities and exploits will almost certainly climb in the short term, security researchers said today. But the move to open the communications protocols and APIs for Microsoft Corp.'s newest and highest-profile products, including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Office 2007 and others, should translate into better security for everyone in the long run, said those same researchers.

[There's what you get from Microsoft's new "openness". Just more zombies. - Sander]

A federal judge recently got so infuriated by the conduct of two highly regarded trial attorneys that he overturned a jury's $51 million verdict, then ordered the lawyers to pay the fees and costs of the opposing lawyers. He ruled that the entire trial was "frivolous" and the case filed solely to stifle competition rather than to protect a patent. Now the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed Matsch's decision to overturn the verdict.

[A bit off topic, but very interesting for anyone following the SCO saga. I'd love to see this happen to Boies Schiller & Flexner - Sander]

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 3 was released for testing on February 12, 2008. The third beta of the next major Firefox version offers around 1300 bug fixes over Beta 2, including improvements in malware protection, bookmarking capabilities and download manager. The latest beta also boasts of improved performance, including fixes for over 350 memory leaks.

Canonical chief executive, Mark Shuttleworth, today announced plans for the October release of Ubuntu Linux. The release, due out in October this year, is to be called Intrepid Ibex and will focus heavily on mobile computing. Ubuntu 8.10, or Intrepid Ibex, will be the ninth releas of Ubuntu since 4.10 released in October 2004.

Metropolitan Bank Group is a large conglomerate in Illinois, comprising 10 banks and $3 billion in assets. As Metropolitan acquired more banking interests, IT Director Tom Johnson needed to find a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the face of the company's rapid growth. The solution was a migration from Windows to Linux.

Seven years ago, Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar School, which is situated in a suburb of Melbourne, took a step that made it stand out from other educational institutions. The school decided to adopt Linux on the desktop on a fairly large scale, with about 350 workstations being installed with the free operating system. The Linux era ended in December 2007. Today all the Linux machines are back to running Windows.

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime for delivering rich Internet applications on the desktop. Developers using Flex, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax can easily build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR. As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux. The Adobe AIR team is now in the phase of development where they need a handful of additional testers to begin testing initial builds of AIR on Linux.

Embrace the standards, nicely, or get out of browsers. If there was a functioning market for web browsers and operating systems, the past few weeks would have seen two announcements from Microsoft. After a firestorm of criticism from the web design community about Internet Explorer 8's misguided mode switching proposal, Redmond would have publicly backed down. Second, Microsoft would have bowed to 90,000 users demanding that Windows XP continue to be sold.

You're probably familiar with the live CD concept -- a fully functional operating system on a CD that can be run on any computer that boots from its optical drive, without affecting the one(s) already installed. In a similar vein, you can set up Linux to run from a USB hard drive drive on any computer that can boot from USB. The live system offers automatic detection and configuration of the display adapter and screen, storage devices, and other peripherals. A bootable USB drive can run a mainstream Linux distribution such as Debian GNU/Linux, and can be secured, personalised, upgraded, and otherwise modified to suit your needs.

South African Linux and open source specialists, Obsidian, will from March be offering official training for the Ubuntu Certified Professional programme. In terms of the deal with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, Obsidian will start offering the training from March 2008. Obsidian will be provide both Ubuntu Professional Courses 1 and 2 for system administrators wanting to pass the required Linux Professional Institute 101 and 102 and Ubuntu 199 exams to achieve the Ubuntu Certified Professional certification.

AMD has today launched their new open GPU documentation website for register-level documents covering their ATI Radeon products. In addition, they are now providing an email address for any open-source developers who may have questions concerning these documents.

Presens Technologies is the newest "Advanced Business Partner" to Red Hat, and will provide software, hardware and application services using Red Hat's open-source platforms to clients, according to an announcement. he Winston-Salem-based Presens serves more than 1,500 clients and will continue to support other software platforms besides Red Hat, the company said.

The Ministry of Justice has added an extra policy covering total cost of ownership to its Open Source Adoption Paper, a paper described by New Zealand Open Source society President Don Christie as “groundbreaking”. The new policy says the ministry should make systems adoption and replacement decisions based on full lifecycle costs. The paper suggests TCOtool (www.tcotool.org), an open-source toolset, as a useful way to compare real costs.

Retired Air Force pilot John Wojnaroski can’t seem to get away from flying and he’s been constructing the “ultimate” flight simulator with authentic screens, switches and even throttle controls. Using scavenged passenger jet parts and the “FlightGear” open source simulator platform, Wojnaroski’s simulator can emulate most jumbo jets and can even perform instrument approaches along with around the world flights.