Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In the past several years, I have encountered a variety of public utilities and municipalities that have fewer than 10 technical staff members. Each of these clients spoke with me about making the transition to the right enterprise GIS for their size organization. Typically, I prefer to drive requirements discussions away from technology and toward the functionality that the client needs to improve his business. However, most of my clients are decision makers who nearly always hold preconceived opinions about which would be the right technology to solve their particular problems.

Freescale is sampling an inexpensive PowerQUICC II network processor (NPU) with integrated hardware security engine (HSE), dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and USB 2.0. The MPC8313E targets residential gateways, 802.11n access points, piracy-protected media servers, line cards, intelligent NICs, and network storage devices, and an ultra-low power derivative will support printers.

This does not bode well for Linux gamers, and it's a weird coincidence that we hear about this a few days after announcing Wine on the site. It seems that Linux-using World of Warcraft players are getting banned left and right.

Everybody loves Ajax. Javaists, Rubyists, Pythonistas; even Microsofties get to play with Ajax in the form of Atlas. Book publishers love Ajax too, judging by the stack of new titles coming hot off the presses.

Richard Stallman, the president and founder of The Free software Foundation, has praised Sun Microsystems for distributing its proprietary Java platform under the GNU General Public Licence

Some months ago I started collecting the pieces I needed to build my own 64-bit computer. I'm not a complete stranger to building machines, I've put together a dozen or so during the past twenty years, but it's been quite a while since I started one from scratch, and my experience with this machine was more instructive than it was meant to be. Nevertheless, at long last Studio Dave has gone 64-bit crazy. Well, not really crazy, but certainly more than mildly enthusiastic.

A new name has joined SimplyMEPIS as one of the first Ubuntu-derived Linux distributions: Linux Mint, which features a 2.6.17 kernel and the GNOME 2.16.1 desktop. Ubuntu, itself based on Debian Linux code, has only been in production use since October of 2004.

In the first issue of the Amarok Weekly Newsletter, we talk about Magnatune.com music store integration and security, search inside lyrics, a new GStreamer-based engine, support for user-definable labels and promotional activities.

The LinuxBIOS project aims to take down the last barrier in Open Source systems by providing a free firmware (BIOS) implementation. LinuxBIOS celebrates its Sixth anniversary this year, and has an installed base of over 1 million LinuxBIOS systems. With the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that number is expected to exceed 10 million users in 2007. LinuxBIOS supports 65 mainboards from 31 vendors in v1 and another 56 mainboards from 27 vendors in v2.

Novell Inc. wants to make its PartnerNetprogram easier and more profitable for its partners. PartnerNet 2007, which launches this month, introduces several key new partner benefits, including technology specializations, an integrated partner portal, and partner tracks to ensure partners get the right attention for their specific business model.

Germany’s cash-strapped public sector will be the driving force behind the takeup of open-source software in the country as state-run organizations strive to lower their IT costs, according to a study released Wednesday by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering.

Het besturingssysteem Debian GNU/Linux is sinds kort voorzien van de eerste release candidate van versie 4.0, ook bekend onder de codenaam etch. Met etch wordt onder andere ondersteuning voor het AMD64-platform toegevoegd, GCC 4.1 de standaard compiler en X.Org de verzorger voor het X Window System X11. Zoals gewoonlijk is deze update beschikbaar voor verschillende hardwareplatformen zoals alpha, arm, i386, ia64, mips, powerpc en sparc. De meegeleverde aankondiging ziet er als volgt uit:

The company, while trying to reach a patent agreement with Red Hat, has not ruled out going it alone and providing some sort of indemnification for its customers who use Red Hat Linux.

When the Geekcorps Mali team set out to design a computer that could withstand the harsh elements of the Malian desert, their only goal was to help create a better economy in the small community through the use of technology. They never expected it would lead to an award.

First, there was Freespire; then, free CNR. Now, here comes FreeLinuxEmail, a free email and file storage system from Linspire Inc. It's not much of a name, and not a completely accurate one, either. The system was developed by Messaging Engine of Melbourne, Australia. It offers anywhere-access for Linspire 5-0 and Freespire 1.0 users. FreeLinuxEmail boasts free email and file storage, and a swift web interface. It supports SMTP for sending email and WAP for mobile phone access.

The key to getting first-rate image output on any operating system is setting up a good workflow. One piece of the workflow puzzle that used to be out of reach for Linux users is device profiling -- accurately measuring hardware devices like scanners and monitors to account for their differing capabilities. But a relatively young open source application called Lprof does a professional job at that task.

You've probably seen the many articles infesting computing publications that blather on about comparing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and ROI (Return on Investment) for Linux and Windows, and trying to figure out which one costs less to run. I'm no analyst, nor am I a Fellow at some Institute, nor am I a pundit who is paid to pontificate. I'm just an old country system and network administrator who has been running mixed Linux and Windows networks for lo these many years, and since everything works OK and my customers keep sending me checks that don't bounce, I figure I'm entitled to a punditry or two of my own. The bottom line is Linux costs way less to run and works better. That's why I prefer it.

A study commissioned by Mozilla Foundation claims that the anti-phishing filter in Mozilla's Firebox 2.0 browser has outclassed similar tools available in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. The study found that Firefox 2.0, which is said to be a more secured version than the earlier browsers, had blocked 81.5 per cent of all phishing websites, while IE7 prevented 66.35 per cent of the phishing operations.

Reg Technology Panel Not yet convinced. Following the acquisition of PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, only a short time after PeopleSoft had itself acquired JD Edwards, software giant Oracle became the proud owner of four ERP and three CRM product lines, all originally developed on different platforms and having different tooling to manage configuration and implementation.

Optimized for distributed network infrastructure applications spanning multiple processors and operating systems, version 2.0 of the Element high-availability middleware from Enea is now available for MontaVista Carrier Grade Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, and CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System). Element 2.0 also works out of the box with Kontron's XL8000 AdvancedTCA system and provides standard interfaces for AdvancedTCA and the SA Forum's Hardware Platform Interface