Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

From the forthcoming version 4.1, Google is doing away with the Chrome feature which has attracted the most criticism: unique IDs. Until now, this token has been stored in the user_experience_metrics.user_id key in the User DataLocal State file in the Chrome installation folder. Supplementing other measures to improve the browser's reputation for data protection, in a white paper on Chrome data protection, Google has announced that it will in future delete the token once Google Chrome runs and checks for updates the first time. From version 4.1, the allegedly anonymous ID will only be used to report successful installation of the browser to Google.

Shuttle announced a Barebone XS35 nettop equipped with a dual-core Intel Atom D510, and Nvidia Ion 2 graphics. Meanwhile NewEgg is selling a Linux-equipped Eee Box B202 nettop for only $189, and the Eee PC-oriented Eeebuntu distro is moving from Ubuntu to Debian with EB 4.0.

Mini is designed to work on less-capable phones with smaller screens, slower network connections, and less-sophisticated user interface abilities. Version 5 offers support for features including Speed Dial, which is a grid of favorite Web pages, compression through Opera's servers to speed download of Web pages that aren't tailored for mobile phones, and tabbed browsing.

If you’re a Linux user, you’ve likely come across Git at some point, perhaps while trying to download a new program or looking into version control systems like CVS or Subversion. Git is the revision control system created by the Linux kernel’s famous Linus Torvalds due to a lack of satisfaction with existing solutions. The main emphasis in the design was on speed, or more specifically, efficiency. Git addresses many of the shortcomings of previous systems, and does it all in a lot less time.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has elected Simon Phipps to the board of directors; Phipps recently left Oracle after serving as Sun's Chief Open Source Officer. He will take up his new position on the OSI board from April 1st. In a blog posting confirming the appointment, Phipps says he is "honoured and delighted" to take up the position on the board of an organisation which "still plays a very important and relevant role in the world of software freedom".

By a remarkable vote of 633 to 13, the Parliament rebuked European negotiators who have been drafting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in a series of confidential meetings around the globe. No version of the document has been disclosed by the participants, which include the United States, the European Commission, Japan, and Canada. Parliament's resolution demands that the European Commission--the EU's executive branch--grant "public access" to the ACTA documents. If the negotiations are not sufficiently transparent, the resolution says, Parliament "reserves its right" to take legal action.

[Three cheers for openness! - Sander]

I’m a sucker for a cool space wallpaper, and judging by the images I find online, so are many of you. Creating a cool space scene can be done in a few minutes once you’ve got the basic method down, and Gimp provides several ways to go about adding random elements to keep things interesting. In this guide we’ll cover a 10 minute method to creating a galactic landscape that may not win you any awards but will certainly add some depth to your desktop. If you do not already have Gimp (available by default in current Ubuntu versions) it’s freely available for download here for Windows, Linux, and Mac. This tutorial will be using Gimp 2.6.7.

More than 100,000 app developers have reportedly signed the iPhone Development Program License Agreement allowing them write software for the iPhone, however few people outside the inner circle of developers have ever seen the documents thanks to a non-disclosure clause included in the agreement.When NASA released the NASA App for iPhone, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) seized the opportunity to get a copy from the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act. The EFF scoured the pages and released a fascinating look at the agreement, teasing out some of its finer points for closer inspection.

Building distro-specific packages is not one of the strengths of most developers. The KDE OBS Generator should solve this problem with the help of openSUSE Build Services.

The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation. When the CodePlex Foundation was established by Microsoft last year, an interim board of directors was assembled to help get the organization off the ground while permanent board members were being chosen. A number of the interim board members, including Novell's Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza, will be turning their seats over to new representatives. Former Microsoft open source evangelist Sam Ramji, currently VP of strategy at Sonoa, will be remaining on the board, along with Microsoft .NET Framework program manager Davies Boesch.

This year's CeBIT, held each spring since 1986, took place from the 2nd to the 6th of March, 2010 in in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT, an acronym for "Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik", which means "Centre of Office and Information technology", is the world's largest trade fair showcasing the latest in information technology (IT) products and solutions from more than 4,150 companies from 68 countries. The trade show is held on the Hannover fairground which features its own railway station, 5.3 million square feet of covered indoor space and consists of 27 halls and pavilions plus a convention centre with 35 function rooms.

The GNOME Developer Kit is a Linux distro based on Foresight Linux. Its new release shows a somewhat reduced collection of software for GNOME developers.

Novell Inc. lied about owning the copyrights for the Unix computer operating system then collaborated with IBM to damage Unix owner The SCO Group, the latter's attorney told a federal court jury Tuesday. In the first day of testimony in a trial to settle a long-running legal dispute between SCO and Novell, SCO went on the attack by calling as its first witness the former CEO and chairman of Novell. Robert Frankenberg testified that despite Novell's claims of ownership, his intent was to sell the copyrights in a 1995 deal that's at the heart of the conflict.

In my last article I looked at performance loopers for Linux. This week I begin a 2-part review of similar applications called arpeggiators. What Is An Arpeggiator? An arpeggio is a musical technique whereby the notes of a chord are played in succession rather than all at once. The order of the chord notes in this succession may follow a strict set of rules or they may be played in purely random sequence. A device that acts upon a chord in this manner is known as an arpeggiator.

In this ongoing series on lightweight Linux desktops, Juliet Kemp takes us on a tour of Windowmaker, the popular fast, lightweight window manager based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface. How does Windowmaker measure up in this era of fancy special effects GUIs?

Fedora 13 Alpha was released yesterday with a plethora of new features and updated packages for this Red Hat Linux distribution. Aside from the features like Btrfs system rollback support and PolicyKit One support for Qt/KDE applications to excite end-users, each Fedora release always pulls in the very latest Linux graphics code. Fedora was the first distribution shipping with the Nouveau driver, then its KMS driver, and now with Fedora 13 it's the first OS deploying Nouveau's Gallium3D driver (there's benchmarks behind that link). Fedora 13 is also carrying the latest packages for the unreleased X Server 1.8, DisplayPort monitor support for more graphics cards, the latest ATI driver code from the xf86-video-ati DDX to the in-development DRM, and then there is the very latest Intel work too. To get an idea for the direction that the Intel 3D support is heading in this release, we have carried out a few quick OpenGL benchmarks.

Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

Access subsidiary IP Infusion announced a new Linux-ready "stateless tunneling" product that enables the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Based on the IETF's "6rd" (IPv6 rapid deployment) specifications, ZebOS Rapid Deployment forwards IPv6 traffic though existing IPv4 networks, enabling carriers to more easily transition to IPv6, says IP Infusion.

The casual view of open source software is that the code always comes first: releases are made when the code is ready, new contributors prove their chops by the quality of their code, and so forth. But in reality the FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal framework in order to run smoothly and to stand up to proprietary software competition: the various software licenses, contribution agreements, copyright and other "intellectual property" law. Every once in a while, a good status check on the legal dimension is healthy for the typical developer, and SCALE 8x offered just that in a series of talks.

We've all seen countless articles, blog and forum posts explaining how to back up a server with rsync and other tools. While I've cringed when people talked about using non-scalable methods, there actually is a place for quick and dirty backup mechanisms. Small companies running just a few virtual machines in the cloud, or even enterprises with test instances, may wish for a quick and effective backup.