Showing all newswire headlines

There is no denying the fact that we have become a touch-centric society in regards to our technology. Where is our technology headed though? With the idea of "bigger is better" in mind: if a 3.5~ inch touch screen is good a larger screen must better right? Enter Tablet PCs and the year 2010

WordPress users rejoice! The latest release of BuddyPress finally brings all that social media goodness to standard WordPress installs. With BuddyPress 1.2, it should only take three steps to get BuddyPress working with a standard WordPress install. BuddyPress was initially developed to add social networking features to a site based on WordPress MU (multiuser), and a stable release followed in 2009, but only for that platform. Installing BuddyPress in the early days was not trivial.

How much functionality can you pack into a 64×64 square? That’s the basic question behind many dockapps – utilities that can be run on the “dock” of many popular desktop environments. While most of them are designed for Step-type window managers such as Windowmaker, these dockapps can also run in things like XFCE, Fluxbox and Openbox. They include system monitors, volume controls, program launchers, email checkers and more. Today we’ll check out some of the more useful dockapps out there, and each will include screen shots, descriptions, and any little notes that might help when it comes to usage. All of the dockapps below are available in the standard Ubuntu repositories. Most of these, and many additional dockapps, can be found at Dockapps.org. Also, as hinted in the opening paragraph, most of these are designed with Windowmaker in mind, which is why so many start with the letters wm.

Last fall, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) issued its much-anticipated Internet traffic management ruling, better known as the "Net neutrality decision." The case attracted national interest because the CRTC established several key requirements for Canada's Internet providers.

Acer announced three new Android smartphones, as well as an Android 2.1 version of its Liquid phone. Acer's BeTouch e400 and BeTouch E110 fall into the mid- and low-end range, while the Acer "Liquid e" and Formula One styled Acer Ferrari smartphone both appear to target the upper ranges of Android phones.

Many times while going through some perl code, you must have come across snippets like “select((select(fh), $|=1)[0])” and wondered what this means, even though you might know that: * $|=1 is used for setting autoflush (i.e. unbuffered data output) and that * select is used to set the default output to a given file handle instead of STDOUT

Call it a rare triple play in the open source server market. Lenovo, Red Hat and Tech Data are partnering to give partners discounts on select Lenovo ThinkServers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced. Here are the details — and the implications for the smal business market.

The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle's main message to Sun's customers seems to be "Don't worry, be happy." That's not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice and OpenSolaris. In general, we know that Sun's software product catalog will be cut back and that many Sun staffers will soon be laid off. Historically, when Oracle acquires a company, deep cuts are the rule. For example, Oracle fired about 5,000 workers after acquiring PeopleSoft. This time around, Oracle is saying that there will be only about a thousand layoffs. In particular, although no one is going on record, it's feared that Sun's open-source groups will take the brunt of these cuts.

At this year's Mobile World Congress(MWC) in Barcelona, while Microsoft announced its Windows Phone 7 Series this week, a number of other companies are announcing their new Android-based devices. The open source Android OS devices, which range from mobile phones and notebooks, to tablets and Internet Devices, include updates to popular well known handsets and several new mobiles.

Embedding copyright info into each photo may sound like a daunting proposition, but digiKam provides a nifty template feature which lets you create copyright templates and apply them to multiple photos in one go.

Eric Geier reviews 10 essential Firefox add-ons that will make your cross-platform Mozilla web browser even better. He finds add-ons to help fix annoyances, save time, discover advanced functionality, and stay connected.

Well, I figured that I should take an opportunity to introduce a few opensource OSs that really haven't been in the lime light much. We all know about Linux and many of us also know about Darwin and BSD. Still some know about OpenSolaris. Which ever ones you know or don't here's a chance to get the scoop.

When I write about the disposable PC, blame for the creation and maintaining of such a culture does not belong to a single entity. It has gotten to the point where hardware has become so cheap that whenever someone who lacks any real technical knowledge comes across a computing problem (whether it be hardware or software related) has no problem running out and purchasing a new replacement. Microsoft and retail stores add to this culture.

To compliment our ‘ten essential Python tips for beginners‘ and ‘ten more essential Python tips‘ features, we’ve compiled yet another collection of ten gems to make your Python experience that much more worthwhile…

Linux Pro Magazine met the author of numerous standard works in informatics and the most famous Linux critic at the Fosdem in Brussels.

It all originated from the need to host GNUmed Live CDs, VMware images and so on. Nothing comes for free and there was no way we could host these images on the GNUmed servers. That is why we started the GNUmed Live project on sourceforge. This gives us the room we need to offer GNUmed in a form that allows users to try GNUmed without going through the whole installation process.

The "operating system for embedded smart objects", Contiki, has been updated to version 2.4 with new experimental platforms and improved stability. The BSD licensed operating system is designed to be small, highly portable and work in networked, but memory constrained systems, such as sensor network nodes. Typical configurations can use as little as 2KB of RAM and 40KB of ROM and Contiki has been ported to computers such as the Commodore 64 and microcontrollers such as the TI MSP430 and Atemel AVR.

Microsoft made Software Piracy Prevention a voluntary thing. Of course Microsoft will probably pitch a different explanation, but what they actually did was post an "update" to Windows 7 that had lots of anti-piracy software in it, and told their customers that it was "voluntary" to install the anti-piracy software.

There are a few good reasons why open source fans should support the Business Software Alliance. I've never made a secret of the fact that I dislike the Business Software Alliance (BSA). It's questionable statistics and its sweeping generalisations make for annoying reading at the best of times. But recently I've been thinking that perhaps open source advocates should get behind the BSA.

For the longest time I have been less than a fan of KDE 4. From the initial release, up until about 4.3.0 I was, well, less than impressed. It was buggy; it felt unstable at all points; and what was worse, for any new user who made the mistake of using a distribution with KDE 4, it gave the Linux operating system a bad name. No one wanted to use a desktop that might crash at any given moment, suck up 100% of a system CPU, or lose data. It simply wasn’t worth the effort. But this morning I decided to give the latest iteration of KDE (4.3.5) a try and see what it had to offer. Could it make stable what had previously been so lacking in stability? And, more importantly, could it make me think KDE was once again a viable desktop for every day use. Let’s take a look and see.