Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

At the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting, held on IRC, Oracle executive Dan Roberts has assured the community about the future of the open source version of Solaris. The statements, available as a log of the meeting, have led Peter Tribble, who had expressed concerns on the lack of communication, to conclude "rumours of its [OpenSolaris] death have been greatly exaggerated".

Mirano Cafiero and Saskia and Malakai Wade really do believe that in the future women will play a more prominent role in the world of high tech and computing. No, the record to date hasn't been good. But you can afford to be optimistic when you're 8, as Saskia is, or 12, as Mirano and Malakai are. Still, the girls aren't leaving anything to chance. Which is how they found themselves last week standing before a crowd of people giving a presentation during the Women in Open Source segment at the Southern California Linux Expo, one of the biggest open-source software conventions on the West Coast. They were there to be seen and heard, never mind the old admonition concerning children.

Adobe's upcoming Flash Player 10.1 may bypass devices running Android versions prior to 2.0. The software will also require that phones have ARM Cortex-A8 processors, according to recent posts by Antonio Flores, identified as a Flash product manager on Adobe online forums. According to Adobe Systems, Flash Player 10.1 is a browser-based runtime that leverages the power of GPUs (graphics processing units), where present, providing "accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization." New mobile-ready features are said to include support for multi-touch, mobile input models, accelerometers, and multiple screen orientations.

Lifehacker readers, you're in luck today; if you've ever wondered what a real life Macgvyer does for a living, I'm about to show you. I work with Limor at my "other" job designing educational electronics. It's a dream come true. Ladyada is perhaps the smartest person I've met on the planet. I've always called her "Lex Luthor smart" or "MacGyver clever", and most people seem to understand those analogies. She uses her smarts for mostly "good" and of course some mischief, which I would say is also good on a long enough timeline. That said, her work speaks for itself, so let's take a look and listen...

As part of a public consultation exercise, US industry association the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), whose members include lobbying organisations such as the Business Software Alliance, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has submitted recommendations to the US trade representative for revising the US' blacklist of copyright sinners. The 498 page submission lists a number of countries in which, in the opinion of the IIPA, intellectual property rights are poorly enforceable or inadequately protected. The submission expressly calls for a number of countries to be placed under special observation – in part in response to their support for open source software.

The GNOME community's design and usability experts gathered for a week-long hackfest hosted by Canonical in the UK to shape the next major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 3, which is tentatively scheduled for release in September, will introduce new user interface paradigms and include an upgraded desktop shell environment.

Linux is the operating system of choice for devices with ARM processors. Unfortunately problems with graphics appear in most cases. Ubuntu wants to fix this with a new GUI.

Ranger has changed people's perceptions of Linux clusters as supercomputers. This month, the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) celebrates two years of enabling groundbreaking computational science as a leading system for researchers in Texas and across the nation via the National Science Foundation's (NSF) TeraGrid initiative. At 579.4 teraflops, Ranger was the first system in the NSF "Path to Petascale" program and remains among the top 10 systems on the supercomputing "TOP500" list two years later because of its extraordinary scale. Ranger is also one of the top systems in the world in terms of total memory at 123 terabytes.

In yet another attack on open source software usage around the world, a copyright-focused organization is claiming that use of open source software promotes piracy. With a new 498-page report (PDF) that repeatedly defies logic, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) argues that the office of the U.S. Trade Representative should "carefully monitor" government mandates to adopt open source, and place numerous countries on watchlists.

At the start of the month we talked about GPU switching coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed notebooks with dual GPUs (one being a low-power, low-performance integrated chip and the other being the more performance-oriented GPU that's power hungry) to be switched from without the need for a reboot in Linux. This initial work was just a collection of hacks by David Airlie and it required VT switching after killing the X Server, etc. It also didn't power down the unused GPU. However, as the days passed, this code did more and delayed GPU switching came too.

LXer Feature: 26-Feb-2010

I was going to just cover the 2nd and 3rd days of SCALE 8x but after getting back home and sitting myself down in front of my favorite compy and started thinking about it, I figured I might as well go all out and give you a full recap of my road trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles for SCALE 8x and back. 

Brian Proffitt recently tackled the topic of distro-hopping over on LinuxPlanet. Proffitt wonders whether the practice might be passe or something to be discouraged, but it's here to stay and should be encouraged rather than looked at askew. Distro-hopping, if you're not familiar with the term, is the practice of switching Linux distributions. While some users find a "home" and stick with one Linux distribution, others "hop" around and try out several distros. Sometimes in an effort to find the One True Distro, other times just because the variety between distros is something to be enjoyed and experienced. Whatever the reason, it's a good thing for the user and community when people have experience with more than one operating system.

The BBC's iPlayer has long been a thorn in the side of the Open Source community. Since it entered public beta in mid-2007, the BBC has consistently flip-flopped between completely ignoring FOSS users, serving them third-rate pacifier versions, and begrudgingly granting access to what Windows users have had all along. And the flipping continues.

In Gartner's assessment of the server market in the fourth quarter of 2009, X64 servers and blades in particular were singled out as the growth engines. With IDC's similar, but different, report Thursday we learn that the Windows platform was the real beneficiary of the bump in sales. IDC tracks factory revenues by the server manufacturers, while Gartner tracks revenues that add vendor and reseller sales together. So their numbers are never quite the same. But they are similar, and they track. Gartner talks about sales by X64, RISC, and Itanium processors, while IDC looks at server sales by the primary operating system deployed on the boxes.

Emery Fletcher wonders if Microsoft has not emulated the IBM of old a bit too well, becoming a slow, bloated engine of intimidation, rather than a lean mean innovator.

The BBC have activated a protection mechanism on the Flash based streaming system used by iPlayer, stopping open source media players from legally playing BBC content. The protection mechanism, known as SWF Verification, sends a "ping" message to the player software after one or two minutes of a stream being played. The player software is expected to identify the Flash version in use; if it does not, or if it's response doesn't match a list of authorised players on the server, then the stream is disconnected. Previously, iPlayer had not sent SWF Verification pings, and media players such as XBMC were able to include open source plug-ins which could play the content. Now, these plug-ins stop working after one or two minutes.

Recently my company had the opportunity to upgrade a server to Mandriva 2010 that was running an old version of the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution. The system had been in place running along nicely for a few years and had not been upgraded to a new release in all that time except for some security patches. Then it started hanging mysteriously whenever under load from users opening Squirrelmail with large amounts of mail in the INBOX. Looking at logs, checking settings and system files revealed nothing. However, once the system was taken off-line, brought in-house to ERACC and the cover removed we discovered there were several popped capacitors on the old motherboard.

If people haven't started thinking about the current crop of smartphones as computers, maybe this will help: Quake III Arena (Q3A) ported to the Android platform. If a device can run a custom port of Id Software's legendary first person shooter, surely it qualifies as a computer more than a phone. That might sound silly, but think about it: When Quake III Arena was initially introduced, it took massive (at the time) processing power and a beefy (at the time) video card to run. We're now at the point where the computer in my pocket can run the greatest game of all time. The fact that smartphones also make phone calls is almost incidental. Phone calls are handled by just one program of many on the device.

Mozilla has officially ditched Firefox support for Apple Mac OS X 10.4 for upcoming versions of its browser, despite gripes from some web surfers. The open source group confirmed on Tuesday that, following heated discussion from the Mozilla community, it would only support Mac OS X 10.5 or later when it released the next iteration of its browser.

Boxee is a home theater PC software program that runs on Linux and has been designed to be used like an interactive TV, somewhat like the Xbox 360 interface. In fact it’s based on another program called XBMC which was originally created to run on the first Xbox consoles. These days, you can use Boxee to not only manage local music and videos, but stream audio, video, and image content from places all over the web. There are connections to popular media sites like Last.fm, Flickr and YouTube, and a custom web browser to get additional content without leaving the Boxee environment.