Showing all newswire headlines

Today's post, as the title suggests, is veering slightly off the beaten path of this blog's general content. But, in keeping with this blog's tradition (and mission) of exploring all things Linux and Unix, it's not too far of a stretch. Hopefully the "Mac" in the title didn't put anyone off (Like, say "Vista," might ;). We're actually going to be looking at their underlying Linux subsystem, which is where we come full circle and it all makes sense. Mac has been fronting their BSD'ish CLI for quite a while now and, if you can use RedHat, Suse, FreeBSD or any of the other myriad varieties of Linux on the market today, OS X's insides should be easy enough for you to figure out. I'm happy, also, that Mac has a Linuxy ( Is that a word? judges? ;) command line interface. The marrying of the fancy windows interface with the bare bones power of Linux should make it easier for the next generation of computer-savvy users to not only enjoy the pretty pictures ( and the funny sounds they make when you click on them with a pointing device), but also (by necessity) possess a rudimentary knowledge of the more powerful underpinnings of all that Window dressing.

Google has undone an earlier ban on the Mozilla Public License, an option for open source projects hosted at its Google Code site. Ostensibly as part of an effort to discourage the proliferation of open source licenses, Google dropped support for the MPL earlier in August. Now, though, the company reconsidered, restoring it and adding support for the Eclipse Public License as well.

I have interviewed Mike Card on the latest development of the OMG working group which aims at defining a new standards for Object Database Systems. Mike works with Syracuse Research Corporation (SRC) and is involved in object databases and their application to challenging problems, including pattern recognition. He chairs the ODBT group in OMG to advance object database standardization.

Why is anyone still defending Novell? Is it because Novell and Microsoft gag journalists, police coverage, hijack voices, and have it all serve as brainwash touting a treasonous relationship?

Obeler is charging that Google, the company, has made a deliberate and conscious decision to use Google Earth to promote a specific political agenda. This charge of explicit bias by Google can be substantiated today even after the Kiryat Yam correction.

Zoho, the SaaS (software as a service) alternative to Google Apps, now has 250 employees, expects to be profitable in 2009, and is embarking on an open source middleware strategy, The VAR Guy has learned. Here's the scoop.

Walter Bender's question 22: What “shoulders of giants” should we stand on? What is it that children should learn? Are there any universals? How do children decide whom and what to believe? I've been providing what I think is a good answer to these questions for some time now but often the response is muted and contradictory. It's not my original answer, it originates from Alan Kay and his analysis originates from anthropologists. The answer is not that children should learn universals but there needs to be more focus on what Kay has called the "non universals". From anthropological research of over 3000 human cultures, Kay presented two lists, the first were universals, the things that all human cultures have in common.

Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. Designed to keep the software simpler but still effectively help users to manage their finances. Buddi is released a free opensource software released under GNU GPL license. Buddi will run on almost any computer which has a Java virtual machine installed. This can include Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, and many other operating systems.

Project Gutenberg, the online library of more than 25,000 free books, is a treasure trove for bookworms and casual readers alike, but turning electronic text files into a readable form is not as easy as it may seem. In theory, since etexts are just plain text files, you should be able to open and read them on any platform without any tweaking. In practice, however, this approach rarely works. Hard line breaks, for example, may ruin the text flow, making it virtually impossible to read the book on a mobile device. Another problem is that most books are stored as single files, so locating a particular chapter or section in a lengthy book can be a serious nuisance. Then there are minor but annoying formatting quirks, such as inconsistent handling of italicized text, use of straight quotes instead of smart ones, and so on.

The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology. As a 501(c)3 charity in the United States, the FSF is run by a board of directors. The current board includes FSF founder and president Richard M. Stallman and long-term member Henry Poole, but, in the last few years, new faces have appeared on the board.

This tutorial describes how to install and run KDE4 applications natively on Windows. Windows 2000, XP, and Vista are supported. KOffice, Kopete, Amarok, Ktorrent, Konquerror, KDevelop, K3b, Kmail, Dolphin are only some of them.

What's that super-bright star in the western sky after sunset? Was the moon full last night? Is Mars visible now? What time will the sun set on Saturday? Do you ever look up at the sky and wonder about it? Your Linux desktop has lots of astronomy programs that can help you explore the night sky. This article will start with the one that's easiest to use: KStars. KStars is a nifty "planetarium program" that's probably available through your Linux distro. Don't let the "K" scare you off -- kstars works fine even if you're not running KDE.

An e-mail client, aka Mail User Agent (MUA), aka e-mail reader is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail.

Intel is pushing forward with its Moblin mobile Internet and Linux project, focused on mobile and automotive Internet devices based on Atom processors. Its latest move is acquiring OpenedHand, which provides software development and consulting services, in addition to maintaining several ongoing projects focused on mobile and embedded Linux. OpenedHand's team maintains and contributes development efforts to the Matchbox window manager (on Nokia's devices), the Pimlico suite of PIM applications, Poky (an embedded Linux distro), and more. In essence, Intel gets a distributed set of open source applications and Moblin development resources in picking up OpenedHand.

Does Cisco's Buyout of PostPath signal a showdown against Microsoft Exchange? The VAR Guy doubts it. Here's why.

Intercepting Internet traffic and spying on the communication between two computers is a gold mine for hackers. Now Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope software they've built will make it harder for criminals to hit that jackpot. The software, for use with latest version of the Firefox Web browser, creates an additional way for people to verify whether the site they're trying to visit is authentic.

This month saw the release of LyX 1.6 release candidate 1. Occupying a position somewhere between a word processor and a mark-up editor, LyX is designed to meet the needs of professional and academic writers by allowing them to focus on their content rather than formatting and layout. It achieves this by eschewing some of the WYSIWYG conventions of a word processor. We've covered LyX in the past, so this time we'll focus on the enhancements that the 1.6 release brings with it.

At Akademy 2008, KDE Release Team members Sebastian Kügler and Dirk Müller discussed the future of KDE's development process. Describing the challenges KDE faces and proposing some solutions, they spawned a lot of discussion. Read on for a summary of what has been said and done around this topic at Akademy.

In general, once the FreeNAS server is configured and running, it doesn't really need much attention, it should just work. However, there are lots of different features which can be configured. In this article by Gary Sims, we will see how user management is done in FreeNAS.

Last week I discussed the SliTaz Linux distro and the use of QEMU to launch a virtual machine on Windows in which SliTaz or pretty much any other operating system can run. As always, your feedback didn't disappoint. Reader Art Gibbens wrote, "Thanx so much for the tip on QEMU. I also stuffed both a Knoppix and PCLinuxOS [ISO files] in the folder (separately - of course) and they both came to life. I had to tweak screen resolution in Knoppix and the login doesn't work in PCLinux, which I would think could both be rectified. Keep up the good work!"