Showing all newswire headlines

Microsoft and TomTom have settled their patent lawsuit in a way that leaves Microsoft's FAT patents active as a threat to other companies. Since I last wrote on this topic, TomTom brought a counter-suit against Microsoft, attempting to get the software giant to license four mapping patents that TomTom claims MS infringed. Tomtom apparently had previously been attempting to convince Microsoft to license. So, it's hard for me to find sympathy for either player in these lawsuits, but there's lots of sympathy to hand out to the software industry, justice, and Linux – all losers in this deal. Justice lost because there's been no trial to overturn the FAT filesystem patents. As venture capitalist Larry Augustin wrote: "Those of us who have PhDs in computer disciplines and have studied operating systems and file systems, don't see anything particularly innovative in FAT or its extension to support longer file names, FAT32."

The following article presents a status report on the development of five of the most active notation software projects for Linux. Most of them are works in progress, but all are well along on their development track and in varying states of usability.

The short story: a little pricier than other brands, but a good sturdy satisfying machine with a choice of operating systems. Eric Grevstad gives an informative, detailed review.

Not so long ago I put up a tutorial which included three useful tips for Konqueror 3.5.9 (KDE3), and one of them was how to create an Open as Root service menu for directories. In this how-to I will show how to accomplish the same thing in KDE4 this time, for both Dolphin and Konqueror.

Enomalism ECP (Elastic Computing Platform) provides a web-based control panel that lets you design, deploy, and manage virtual machines on one or more host systems (in the case of multiple systems, we speak of a cluster or cloud). This article shows how you can use Enomalism (also know as Enomaly) to manage KVM guests on one Ubuntu 8.10 server.

Novell is making it easier for a Microsoft .NET developer to deploy their applications on Linux, whether they develop their applications on Windows or on Linux, with the release of Mono 2.4. Mono is a .NET on Linux implementation and the new version, released Monday, promises greater compatibility and better performance for deploying .NET apps on Linux. Also, Novell is also releasing MonoDevelop 2.0, an improved IDE (define) for building .NET applications

When big companies release new software, they launch it with lots of hoopla: press tours, technical conferences, free T-shirts. Open-source projects, even the well-known ones, generally release their major new versions with a lot less fanfare. The FOSS (free and open-source software) community is often too busy coding and testing to bother with marketing, even when the new "point release" of the software is really remarkable. And there are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I've rounded up 25 of the most notable here.

"Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries"-- sounds promising, right? In the New York Times, no less, so it should be good. Well, no, I was rather disappointed at yet another security analysis that left out vital information-- which operating systems and applications were vulnerable. If it were Linux or Mac do you think they would be so tight-lipped? Why is the Dalai Lama running Windows?

This article is a guide on how to solve problems with your FreeNAS server. It covers where to look for information about the problem as well as how to hunt down problems by being methodical. It also looks at the common problems people have with their FreeNAS servers including networking problems and possible solutions along with how to handle RAID failures.

The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu has it latest Beta version released, version 9.04. This Beta is running fine on several Netbooks, as both Liliputing.com & the Ubuntu Mini Blog are reporting.

IBM last week filed a patent application for an offshore outsourcing methodology that is intended to help companies minimize the financial risks associated with sending work overseas. The patent application describes a computer-driven approach for putting values on both the quantitative and qualitative attributes of a "global resource sourcing strategy." For instance, the methodology takes into account the language skills and morale of offshore workers, as well as a list of the hard numbers involved in setting up an offshore operation, including labor rates and currency valuations. In short, IBM is attempting to reduce offshoring considerations to a mathematic model — or, in the words of the application, "a robust and reusable sourcing template" for identifying and analyzing "global resource pools."

I personally hope that the Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido computer worm — that surfaced in October 2008 and targets the Microsoft Windows operating system, that activates on April 1st — shows Windows users just how insecure the Windows operating system is, and how slow Microsoft is to react to it, and “patch” it. ... businesses stop production because of this worm ... become spam websites, displaying advertisements and sending out thousands of spam and denial of service emails. ... GNU/Linux might actually become mainstream, maybe even over night.

Last week marked the release of the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta and this week there is the planned release of the Fedora 11 Beta. Both distributions are similar in the respect they will be upgrading several common packages like GNOME 2.26, but in Fedora 11 are more upstream (and experimental) bits like kernel mode-setting, the EXT4 file-system by default, and various other features. Being the Linux benchmarking fanatics that we are, we set out to run a few performance tests comparing the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to the latest Rawhide packages that will make up today's Fedora 11 Beta release.

When you save a document in your word processor, your work is encoded in a particular file format. You often have a choice of formats that you can use, with names like DOC, DOCX, RTF, WPD or ODT. Your choice of format will influence whether others can easily read your document today, whether you yourself will be able to read your document ten years from now, and whether you will be able to migrate painlessly to another word processor or operating system if and when you choose to do so.

The Linux Foundation welcomed its newest member today, the European-based free and open source standards consulting firm, credativ. This new partnership is a particularly exciting one, thanks to credativ's presence in the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, and its focus on creating and implementing standards. Naturally, credativ's business -- providing consulting and support services to businesses using free and open source software -- means it will take an active role in the Linux Standard Base workgroup. Because credativ is one of Europe's largest employers of Debian developers, the company also plans to participate in the Desktop Linux workgroup.

Egerstad and I had concluded at the time that someone had likely infected computers belonging to embassy workers and human rights groups and was using Tor to anonymously transmit data that was being stolen from the computers. He'd inadvertently scooped up the stolen data as it was transmitting from the infected computers to another location. Threat Level contacted a number of embassy and rights groups in China to notify them at the time that their computers were being spied on, but none of the groups responded. It seems clear now that Egerstad had tapped into data that was being stolen by GhostNet.

This communication provides additional information on the Fedora infrastructure intrusion first reported on August 14, 2008. In part this communication reiterates information provided in previous announcements.

[Includes a fairly detailed timeline of the incident.--gus3]

JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey is leaving Red Hat. Labourey had been at JBoss for the past eight years, nearly three of which were under Red Hat's ownership. Labourey's departure comes over two years after JBoss founder Marc Fleury left Red Hat in 2007. Times are good for Red Hat if its most recent financial results are a good indicator. But it seems as though Labourey is just ready to move on and take life a little slower too.

This is the first time I ever used Puppy Linux and the interface is really impressive. The install was not as simple as I expected it to be. ( But then again, the Ubuntu based Distro's have spoiled me, what can i say??? :) ). Also this is the first time I used JWM ( Java Window manager ). What really grasped me about Puppy Linux was how fast the applications launched. Also Puppy Linux reminded me of Slax on how fast the applications loaded, which is a good thing.

A quick bash script to help measure process cpu usage over time and, possibly, do something about it ;)