Showing all newswire headlines

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Sept. 23, 2005 - LAWFUEL - The Law News Network - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced Marek Cygan, a student at Warsaw University, as the grand prize winner of the 2005 Google Code Jam, Google's annual computer programming competition. Cygan competed against 14,500 registrants from around the world, more than double the number of competitors from years past, to bring home the $10,000 grand prize.

An initial roadmap for the Lightning calendar project has been created by Dan Mosedale. The document, which is currently rather sparse, sets out the basic plan for the Mozilla Thunderbird calendaring and scheduling add-on, specifying the aims for Lightning 0.1 (targetted for November this year), Lightning 0.2 and the future.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web 15 years ago, he always intended that it should be easy for people to write to it, not just read from it. But if websites are opened up to anyone, they often get vandalised by people with axes to grind. Now, a researcher from Manchester has brought together two of computing's current buzzwords - the Grid, and Wikis - to overcome this problem. A Wiki is a web site where users can easily add and edit its content. Although some Wikis ask contributors to pick a username and password, people running the sites have no idea who their users really are, and the better known Wikis have to be constantly on the look out for offensive or just irrelevant additions. The new open source software, GridSiteWiki, combines the functions of a Wiki with user authentication based on security tools developed for Grid computing. Dr Andrew McNab of Manchester University, who developed the new software, will be speaking on Grid security at the UK e-Science All Hands Conference in Nottingham on Thursday.

On the auto-market trend, Guruswamy pointed out that today, traditional body, chassis and safety applications, from climate control to power steering, have in some cases exceeded the performance scope of existing microcontrollers solutions. A drift, which would shoot up in the days to come, is the usage of embedded Linux in car infotainment systems.

After boldly investing billions, IBM has its rivals on the defensive. With a subpar product in a dying market, IBM Corp. simply did what any rational company would do — double its billion-dollar investment.

NASHVILLE, TN - September 23, 2005 - Guests from Addison-Wesley and Diskeeper will appear on radio talk show "Let's Talk Computers". Addison-Wesley, a unit of Pearson Technology Group, an operating unit of Pearson Education, which is a part of Pearson plc, the international media company. In recognition of Diskeeper's 19-year leadership position as the number one automatic defragmenter in both the Windows® and OpenVMS® markets, Executive Software has now focused that leadership by becoming Diskeeper Corporation. Let's Talk Computers ranks as one of the longest-running computer radio talk shows, and airs on multiple radio stations weekly - and 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the Internet.

IBM has kicked off this morning the fourth Middle East CIO Conference hosting over 50 of the leading players in corporate technology deployments in Dubai as part of the company's strategic initiative to work more closely with customers across the region.

Microsoft has been dealt a massive blow in the USA with the US state of Massachusetts requiring that by 2007 all documents produced by the state's executive branch must be stored in a new universal format that is not compatible with Microsoft Office.

"It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly. [Jim Allchin] The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.

How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers?

The recently released security update of XFree86 in DSA 816 for sarge and woody had caused the host of security.debian.org to saturate its 100MBit/s network connection entirely this past week. Due to the large number of X packages, the gross size of these packages and the high number of users who need to install the update, the server was busy sending out updates which exhaust its total outgoing bandwidth.

Earlier in the week, I conducted a lengthy phone interview with Aaron Seigo about the Open Source Desktop Workshop being held in San Diego on October 13th and 14th. Fast approaching, we discuss the workshop's inception, target audience and expectations. Read on to learn more about the first in a series of workshops planned for North America.

Xara is pleased to announce it is sponsoring an Open Source project for a 'universal vector graphics translator' to help facilitate the conversion between various vector graphic file formats. The Uber-converter is a universal vector graphics translator that can convert between numerous different vector formats. It is an Open Source software project produced by Scratch Computing. Converting between graphics file formats is a nightmare for both users and developers. Each new format results in a factorial increase in the number of converters needed to directly convert from one format to all the others.

The independent Mall School in Richmond has replaced its aging Windows 2000 PCs with a Linux thin-client network rather than going for an upgraded Microsoft-based solution.

Novell introduced its new PartnerNet program in India. The company said that the program will enable unified, effective synergies between the company's global solutions, technology and training partner relationships. Novell will integrate the existing Indian partners into the new partner program. Novell will have three tracks in its PartnerNet program: solutions providers, technology partners and training partners.

One excellent open-source program that often gets overlooked in the focus on products like Linux is The Gimp. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is freely distributed software for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

The foundation just released their latest stable security update, which fixed a crucial security flaw. This IDN bug has now been published on the Internet as per the news released by a French security vendor. FrSIRT has now warned the users to upgrade to the latest release soon as the exploit can now be deployed by random public sites, which can lead to problems for the users.

The 451 Group is hosting a senior executive-level industry summit to discuss the impact of open source software in the enterprise IT arena and to identify how to build a successful business model around open source. The use of open source software is fundamentally changing the way that vendors, end users and investors do business and make money. Like all powerful tools, open source can do damage if used improperly; however, the potential benefits also are massive, and that's why it's important to understand where there is upside potential in the commercial adoption of open source.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, and is intended primarily for Linux newbies who use it mainly as a desktop. In short, it's a well-polished Debian distro, with fewer customization capacities and an excellent hardware detection. But Ubuntu is much more than that. Ubuntu never positioned itself as a Debian derivative, like Xandros, or Mepis, or Knoppix.

South African software house Dariel Solutions has launched a full service level agreement for Jboss and PostgreSQL platforms.