Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

San Francisco's rogue sysadmin Terry Childs, who refused to reveal passwords when he was sacked, could learn his fate later today. The jury has started deliberating on whether Childs is guilty of locking the city out of its own network. He faces up to five years in prison if found guilty. Childs refused to hand over passwords when he was sacked in 2008.

SAN FRANCISCO – APRIL 20, 2010 – MuleSoft, the Web Middleware Company, today announced that it has partnered with Canonical, the number one Ubuntu services provider. Through this partnership, MuleSoft, is working with Canonical to improve the Apache Tomcat package for Ubuntu and Debian. These contributions, focused on improving “out-of-the-box” usability of Tomcat with these distributions of Linux, will appear in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Debian Squeeze (6.0) releases.

Oracle has imposed a fee of US$90 per user on a plug-in for Microsoft Office that was available at no cost under Sun Microsystems' ownership. The tool allows Word, Excel and PowerPoint users to read, edit and save documents in the ODF (Open Document Format), which is used by the competing OpenOffice productivity suite.

Those who have been following Gluon closely over the last months know that at the developer sprint in Munich in October 2009 the foundations were laid down for the Gluon vision. Put simply, Gluon provides a new way for game creators to make games and distribute them to the players of games. The development of the new Gluon vision has led to a lot of refactoring of the Gluon codebase and structure. Now, after months of work, the Gluon team is able to release a first Alpha, Gluon 0.70, using the new structure. Read on to find out more about Gluon and how you can help.

So you've got to cut costs, but you're not a manager. You're a software developer, or a power user, or just someone who needs to keep the bottom line healthy enough to support your salary. These are ideal situations for introducing open source software solutions into your environment. That might sound like you'll spend the next three weeks learning to program or write makefiles, but it's just not so. Read on and see how open source is a flexible, usable approach to efficiency in your work environment.

While Ubuntu has always emphasized usability, Fedora's focus has been innovation. Now in current beta, Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) is no exception. However, at first Fedora 13 may seem to lack many innovations unique to the distribution as opposed to its component applications. In fact, with many of the improvements and innovations either working behind the scenes or available only if you are specifically aware of them, many of Fedora 13's enhancements risk being invisible to the average user or even administrator.

Browser-obsessed netbooks running Google's Chrome operating system will be the freshest thing to hit computing in two decades, Eric Schmidt claims. Speaking at the Atmosphere Cloud Computing Forum the Google CEO heralded the coming of "completely disposable" mobile devices running Chrome OS that will will boot up in two seconds and incorporate web-based storage, HTML5 for security, and combine input, communication, and data-sharing capabilities.

We'd all love to have a supercomputer, but sadly, most of us will never have the chance to put that much umph in our computing. If you happen to be in the market for a sweet little Linux box with a half-million cores or so, though, Cray may have just what you're looking for. On Wednesday, Cray Inc. — maker of some of the fastest supercomputers in the world — released the third-generation of its super-operating system. What makes it so super special? For one, it's Linux — and that's always a good thing.

Outside of geometry, the word parallel takes on many meanings. The term is often used to indicate “two or more things used in the same way at the same time.” I remember my first experience with circuit analysis. We learned that total resistance for resistors in series is a simple sum of the individual resistances (RT=R1+R2…), but resistors in parallel did not work that way. The formula for the total resistance was a sum of the reciprocals of all individual resistances (RT=1/R1+1/R2…) and was always less than the smallest resistor in the circuit. At first it seemed odd. You introduced more resistors but got less resistance. Working the numbers shows why, but at first blush it really did not make sense.

Once upon a time, IBM was seen as the dark force in the computing industry - Darth Vader in a Charlie Chaplin mask. More recently, though, the company has come across as a strong friend of Linux and free software. It contributes a lot of code and has made a point of defending against SCO in ways which defended Linux as a whole. But IBM still makes people nervous, a feeling which is not helped by the company's massive patent portfolio and support for software patents in Europe. So, when the word got out that IBM was asserting its patents against an open-source company, it's not surprising that the discussion quickly got heated. But perhaps it's time to calm down a bit and look at what is really going on.

Did you ever see one of those terrible Sci-Fi movies involving a killer Octopus? Ceph, while named after just such a animal, is not a creature about to eat an unlucky Spring Breaker, but a new parallel distributed file system. The client portion of Ceph just went into the 2.6.34 kernel so learn a bit more about it.

A computer security researcher has launched a project designed to provide people greater privacy when using Google, as the company expands the scope of data its collects about its users.

If you ask what's missing from open source software, one of the top responses is often "documentation." While there's piles and piles of great code stuffed up on Google Code, SourceForge.net, and others, the actual documentation to accompany it is often lacking. This is why it's doubly sad to keep seeing bounty programs aimed at generating more and more code, and more and more coders, but very little being done to address documentation.

Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project.

For a long time KDE has come with an assortment of games. Collectively, this suite of games is simply called “KDE Games“. With the advent of KDE 4, all of the KDE games were given face lifts and a standard set of features that make moving from game to game a seamless exercise. The games are two dimensional and do not run inside of a separate layer like SDL. Instead they run inside a normal KDE window, utilizing the standard QT interface. Nevertheless, the rendering of of the graphics is amazingly impressive because of the use of SVG vector graphics. With SVG, the animations are smooth and the images are scalable. You can play in a small window or maximize it without losing any of its quality.

In 2007, Sun released the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, as a closed source but free application which allowed Microsoft Office users to export and import documents in Open Document Format. Although the Oracle site still, at the time of writing, offers the software for free with the tagline "Get it now: FREE", users clicking through will find that Oracle are now charging $90, per user, for a right-to-use license for the plug-in and offering support costing $19.80 per user for the first year. Oracle also requires a minimum order of 100 licenses, which means the minimum purchase is $9,000.

Google is reportedly working on a tablet computer based on its Android operating system, not the Chrome OS. Google has declined to comment on the tablet rumor, but that hasn't stopped analysts from mulling over the operating system choice.

On March 10, 2010, the HelenOS project released version 0.4.2 of their operating system. HelenOS sits on top of the SPARTAN kernel, which supports SMP, multi-tasking and multi-threading on a variety of common architectures. One of the developers behind HelenOS, Jakub Jermar, was willing to take time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions.

There are some superb desktop Linux distributions that are designed to work with very old hardware. For example, Puppy Linux is a great choice to quickly turn an old PC into a secure, easy to use word processing, email and light web browsing workstation. Puppy can work minor miracles on very old hardware, and I carry a Puppy boot CD-ROM around with me as my emergency recovery system.

Hello again for another interview with KDE people. Last time we had Aleix Pol with us. Now it is time for Thiago Macieira. One of the first KDE developers, he is still working towards world domination at Qt Software as he will explain to us in the interview. For the Italian readers here is the original interview.