Showing all newswire headlines

It's the holiday season! Regardless of which holidays you celebrate, it's a good time to connect with relatives and absent friends. GIMP is a great tool for creating your own custom holiday cards; Akkana Peck shows how to do this using your own images.

The computing world is always very unpredictable. That must be why there is a small number of people who make large amounts of money from it: they are in the right (unpredictable) place, at the right (unpredictable) time. Who would have ever guessed that Javascript, a simple scripting language initially thought as a simple means to make web pages “cooler”, would become… drum roll… the world’s new CPU? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Red Hat has long been the poster child of Linux and open source, the distribution that has been there since the beginning, grew up right, got all the luck, usually made the right decisions, and fetched up on top of the pile. Staying at the top of the pile may present a different set of problems. Free and open source software has made its presence felt, the operating system has become increasingly commoditised, free software is rising up the stack, cloud computing and virtualisation are transforming the market for operating systems, and open source (in some form or another) is being adopted or proclaimed by many different companies.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny.

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT has decided to spend a lot of its citizens' tax money helping them recover from malware directed at Microsoft machines. Spiegel Online reports that the government wants to prop up another industry giant. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) plans to team up with Internet service providers (ISPs) to establish a call centre helping Windows users who have malware problems. Starting in 2010, ISPs will track down customers with infected PCs. These customers will then be directed to a special website offering advice on removing the malware. If this does not work there will be a call centre where a staff of about 40 will try to fix the problems. There is no indication about how much the German government intends to spend on the project.

I am very happy to announce that the Mono C# compiler is now C# 4.0 feature complete.

Red Hat held the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 today and it was awesome. What was it? It was a completely online conference that offered everything you'd find at a traditional face-to-face show like the annual Red Hat Summit. I was hoping Red Hat would use this event to introduce / announce RHEV for Desktops but no such luck. I guess we'll have to continue to wait until January.

How to Configure compiz Fusion in Ubuntu 9.10(Karmic). Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE. Compiz Fusion is a collection of plugins and a configuration system for the Compiz compositing window manager. It was created from the remerging of Beryl into Compiz.

Massive storage usually equates to a massive footprint on your desk or place of work. The Western Digital ShareSpace is, for its 8TB storage allocation, relatively compact – about the size of a toaster and much smaller than a desktop-size server…

Now gamers can play the games they want, on whatever platform they want! With CrossOver Games, you can run many popular Windows games on your Intel, OSX Mac or Linux PC. Whatever your tastes, be they first-person shooters, fantasy, strategy, MMORPGs, or more, CrossOver Games provides the capability to run many popular games titles.

According to a recently released report, based on a sample of 3 million users collected over a period of 3 months, approximately 45% of the time, users submitted their login information to the phishing site they visited.

When installing an innocuous "waterfall" screensaver from Gnome-Look.org, an Ubuntu user noticed something strange: apart from the screensaver not being on GNOME's approved list, it also contained a script that performed some peculiar substitutions.

At the heart of every serious software development project is the use of some kind of version control code repository. For Ubuntu Linux, that version control system is its own Bazaar (bzr) system, which make it easier for the project to encourage and manage developer participation. Now thanks to a new effort from Ubuntu's commercial sponsor Canonical, Bazaar is now set to receive commercial support.

I have been using Android-powered phones since the release of the g1 and have always been happy with the Android Market. One of the first things I did after buying the g1 was make a list of what I felt were "essential apps". One of the tools I needed was a text editor, because, let's face it, with a "mini computer" in your pocket you'll need a way of creating and editing text files. After testing several text editors I found that Text Edit was the best.

The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has started work on WiFi the next generation. While that news in itself might not exactly rock your socks off, the small matter of a big speed increase might. Word is that WiFi TNG could be fast, very fast indeed. Anyone fancy some 1 gigabit per second wireless networking?

A screensaver from Gnome-Look.org at closer look revealed itself to be malware.

Sugar Labs has revised the LiveUSB version of its education-focused "Sugar" Linux distribution. "Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry" offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined activities updating, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash, and activities designed for reading electronic books (ebooks), says the non-profit organization.

GNOME Do 0.8.3.1 has been released with a couple of extra bugfixes. The main attraction in the 0.8.3.1 big top is a fix for the "Do sits there eating 100% cpu" bug. In the lesser rings are multiple fixes for crasher bugs, numerous Network-Manager related fixes,see also installation instructions for linux

Key to Google's Web application development effort is its Google Web Tools (GWT) applications, which became open source in 2006. This week, Google debuted GWT 2.0, which provides new developer workflow improvements as well performance enhancements. "Developers are impatient because their users are impatient," Dave Glazer, Google's director of engineering, said during the Campfire One developer event this week. "We all—when using and building software—just want to get things done. The theme of GWT 2 is building faster apps and running them faster."

I begin this tutorial a few weeks ago with Part I and received some very nice comments correcting my (fortunately) minor errors. This isn't a tutorial about how to program in a specific language or even really about how to program. I wanted to show the common structure of interpreted programming languages in the hopes of revealing some common threads, rather than focusing on the ins and outs of one language. I've heard it said that if you learn one language, it makes learning the next one easier. My problem is I get lost in the nuances of the language in question and lose track of the basic structure of programming...