Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In the beginning, there was word processing. Then, simply, Word. Spreadsheets became Excel. Presentation software, if it was ever known by such a name, was simply PowerPoint. Long before Google's preeminence in search, Microsoft dominated business and personal software with a suite known as Office. The company launches its latest version, Office 2010, on Wednesday in New York — and the stakes couldn't be higher. The lucrative franchise is threatened by a changing market spouting a four-letter word: free. The biggest threat comes from Google, specifically Google Docs, Web applications accessible from any computer. Because of Google, Microsoft has been forced to make a free ad-supported version called Office Web Apps.

Open-source software veteran Paula Hunter has one of the more interesting jobs in the industry, as the executive director of the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit, open-source organization that was established with Microsoft as its founding sponsor. On a visit the Seattle region this week, she sat down with us to discuss the CodePlex Foundation and its future, including its efforts to expand beyond that Microsoft investment and diversify the open-source software projects that it supports as part of its portfolio.

Much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft does some things better, much better, than Linux. Number one with a bullet is how Microsoft helps programmers and ISVs (independent software vendors). MSDN (Microsoft Software Developer Network) is a wonderful online developer resource. Linux has had nothing to compare. True, there is the Linux Developer Network, which, when it began, looked like it would be the Linux equivalent of MSDN, but it hasn't lived up to its promise. And, I can't overlook the Linux Foundation's Linux training classes. But, if I'm an ISV and I want to write software for Linux, I'm still going to need to piece together a lot of it by myself.

Almost two months after the technical preview was released, the development of version 4.7 of the cross-platform Qt C++ framework for GUI applications is beginning to take shape, as Nokia has now presented a beta version. A beta of the Qt Creator 2.0 development environment, which is part of the framework, has also been released. The developers highlight the integration of Qt Quick (Qt UI Creation Kit) as the prominent feature of the next version of Qt. Qt Quick is a tool collection for creating animated, touch-enabled Qt interfaces and applications for mobile and embedded devices.

Not long ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who works at VMware, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based irtualization software giant. Many people, even very technology-savvy folks, don't realize how big and powerful VMware really is. This is a software company with a market capitalization of nearly $23 billion, and its market cap was larger than that not long ago. The company's CEO is Paul Maritz, who was a powerful executive at Microsoft for many years. Lately, though, VMware's future has been widely questioned because virtualization features are showing up free in operating systems and there are numerous free and open source virtualization options. My friend at VMware, though, made clear that the company is far from dead.

Virtualization technology has long found a home in Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution. Ever since Fedora 4 emerged in 2005, virtualization technologies have continued to advance in the distro and that remains the case with the upcoming Fedora 13 release set for later this month. Unlike Fedora's early virtualization features, which all leveraged the Xen open source technology, more recent Fedora releases have relied on KVM. New KVM performance and scalability features for virtualization will debut in Fedora 13 that will help to push the envelope for large-scale virtualization deployments.

The first major update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in more than three years hit last month, and judging by the traffic that took down Red Hat's download servers, it's long over due. RHEL 5 came out in March 2007 with the Linux 2.6.18 kernel and while incremental updates have added kernel updates and new features, it's showing its age. Of course, the whole point of running an enterprise distro like RHEL is that it isn't Ubuntu or Fedora, and it doesn't completely change all the rules every six months.

Motorola is acquiring LiMo-linked middleware and Web 2.0 app software company Azingo, according to several reports. Several hundred India-based software engineers would be focused on lessening Motorola's dependence on Google, suggests The Register, while GigaOM speculates that Motorola is building its own OS and SFGate sees a China connection.

Sometimes, it's difficult to be the guy who complains when all around seem satisfied. However, criticism, when well-founded, has its place. It's an idealogical equivalent of an attack, and you sometimes make things stronger by attacking them. For example, in nature, only the hardiest and most efficient creatures win the evolution game when competition exists. The more pressure a species is placed under, the stronger it becomes. It has to.

Ryzom, a popular massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), is being entirely open-sourced and even the artwork is going to be provided freely too. The Ryzom game is being put out under the GNU Affero GPL and the artwork is going under the Creative Commons.

Other than the default Ubuntu that we all know of, there are also the Kubuntu (KDE), Xubuntu (XFCE), Edubuntu, Mythbuntu etc that run different desktop environment and serve different purpose. And yes, there is a new buntu addition to the family. Let’s welcome: Lubuntu. Lubuntu is a Ubuntu variant built using the LXDE desktop, which is in turn based on Openbox. It’s designed to be a lightweight and easy-to-use desktop desktop environment.

The mobile application for Android got updated today with the ability to snap a picture of some words and instantly translate them into the language of the owner. Google's Goggles mobile application has always been a fun tool. The idea is that if you snap a picture and upload it to Google (as well as your location/time), Google could present more about that object, and by extension, your surroundings. It isn't always terribly accurate in identifying what is in the picture, but the results are sometimes helpful, if not amusing.

For those that haven't been paying attention to our recent coverage of Valve's Steam Client / Source Engine coming to Linux, last month we discovered Linux references in the Steam Mac OS X client and other Linux support references, which that combined with word from sources yielded no doubt that Steam/Source is coming to Linux. We ended up even finding the Steam client binaries that are actively being worked on.

The AMD and Intel graphics drivers now support a wider range of chips and make better use of power saving features on the older chips. A major revamp of the recently introduced KMS driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware means that the Nouveau driver for X.org will in future make use of kernel-based mode setting.

Google released a Chrome 5 beta build this week that brings a significant boost to the browser's JavaScript performance, improved support for emerging Web standards, and a number of noteworthy enhancements to the browser's cloud synchronization framework. After running the beta for most of the day, I'm convinced that Chrome is reaching a sweet spot of feature richness and leading performance that will make it a real winner.

It seemed like they'd be ice skating in Hades before Apple would bless a real competitor to Safari on the iPhone, but Opera Mini has made its way into the App Store. Now that Opera has sailed past the gatekeepers, what's the verdict?

Anyone who has taken a class in economics is familiar with the difference between the direct cost of something and its 'opportunity cost'. Developing free software is a great example of this difference. A KDE developer does not have to spend hundreds of dollars on an SDK, he only needs to give up some of his time to develop.

There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with VLC, the high quality audio and video player for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Its speed, portability, and built-in support for most common codecs make VLC an extremely popular choice for playing video. While that’s all well and good, VLC can do a lot more than basic video playback, including things like video encoding, DVD ripping, volume normalization and more. Today we’ll look at some of VLC’s most interesting and little-known features that help make this an indispensable application for nearly all desktop platforms.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski claimed power to regulate companies that provide Internet access, opening a fight with cable and telephone companies and sparking opposition from Republicans. Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp., cable operators that sell Web connections, fell more than 5 percent in New York trading. Genachowski’s proposal lays a foundation for net neutrality rules to bar Internet service providers from interfering with users’ traffic. The plan provides “only the modest authority” needed after a U.S. court stripped its power over the Web, Genachowski, a Democrat, said today in a statement.

[Not directly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think. - Scott]

Opera has switched its Dragonfly open source debug tool to an Apache 2.0 license to include a promise that users are protected from patents owned by Opera or any other contributor to the project. Dragonfly - similar to Mozilla's Firebug tool - completed its open sourcing in February, when it was moved from Opera servers to BitBucket. It was originally under the BSD license.