Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

We know that the jury in SCO v. Novell decided that SCO didn't get the copyrights in 1995 under the APA or by Amendment 2 or any fusion thereof. That killed SCO's slander of title claim as well. But that isn't the end. There were some issues the parties agreed before the trial which would be decided by Judge Ted Stewart. That has yet to happen.

LXer Feature: 19-Apr-2010

This week its all about choosing, switching, installing and migrating to Linux along with the question; Can I be a Windows, Apple, Linux, and Google guy all at once? Also, Microsoft wants to play the Open Source game, why iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Owners should use Linux and why I Want My Daughter to be a Hacker. Enjoy!

Eric Geier introduces us to to seven powerful commands for troubleshooting and configuring Linux networking, both wired and wireless.

Recently, we have seen two projects come under considerable criticism for the development directions that they have taken. Clearly, the development space that a project chooses to explore says a lot about what its developers' interests are and where they see their opportunities in the future. These decisions also have considerable impact on users. But, your editor would contend, it's time to give these projects a break. There is both room and need for different approaches to free software development.

Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She's one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It's often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren't just maintaining the status quo, they're also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what's she's been up to in the depths of corporate IT.

Moving all of your apps and information in the cloud has been adopted by a great number of people. However, there are also a large number who still prefer having a desktop application. Pretty much everyone like free. I am typically use Google Docs for my word processing and spreadsheets, but do on occasion tinker with OpenOffice. I tend to use OpenOffice if I am on my netbook and not connected to the internet. I can use the word processor to write and not be tempted to go on Twitter or use Stumbleupon to find random sites. At first, I didn’t realize you could use extensions; once I found that out, I was hooked. One of my favorites was covered in a previous post about OpenOffice extensions. It allows you to import, export and update documents you create in OpenOffice with Google Docs and other cloud office apps.

he Debian developers have announced that Stefano Zacchiroli achieved victory in the Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections held between the 2nd and the 15th of April. Zacchiroli succeeds Steve McIntyre who held the position the two previous years. There were three other candidates apart from Zacchiroli. Before the election, the Debian community had the opportunity to ask questions of the candidates and follow the discussions on the Debian Vote mailing list. 886 Debian developers were eligible to vote, and the election turnout was more than 50 per-cent.