Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Following Saturday morning's major earthquake in Chile, aid efforts worldwide are already springing into action. The open source Open Street Map (OSM) project plans to lend its support by calling for volunteers to update its maps of Chile on the basis of the latest satellite images. This will assist orientation and coordination of aid teams in Chile.

Government competition agencies are increasingly focused on Google’s growing power in search and online advertising. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission have all determined that Google is dominant in certain markets, including search advertising. In late 2008 the DOJ was prepared to go to court to block Google’s attempt to partner with its largest search rival, Yahoo!. Last year the DOJ told a federal court that Google’s book search plan is anticompetitive in several respects. (One big problem is that Google would help itself to essentially exclusive rights to tens of millions of books—effectively locking out everyone else.) Last week the DOJ reiterated that view in court, even after Google had an opportunity to address the DOJ’s concerns. This week came news that the European Commission is investigating various aspects of Google’s conduct, including claims of retaliation, exclusivity and manipulation of search results to disadvantage rivals. The European Commission is likely to treat these cases quite seriously, given that Google’s share of search and search advertising is north of 95% in many European countries.

LXer Feature: 28-Feb-2010

In this week's LXWR we have a Ubuntu fanboy who comes clean, A Windows metrics source lies about his identity, is Linux Distro-hopping a Thing of the Past?, SCALE 8x: Review Of My Road Trip To L.A. and a whole lot more.

A chunky Visual Studio 2010 releases soon, packing more features and representing perhaps more hours of development than any other single-vendor's development tool. How could you resist? And yet many do resist such highly automated and powerful productivity tools and continue to favor Emacs or other text editors and command lines for their development. Ruby, the fastest growing language ecosystem, has evolved primarily without IDE tool support. What explains this love/hate relationship with the IDE among developers and the companies that make them. Will we ever all get on the same page?

Novell executives said this week that it's seven-year-old Linux business has finally broken even -- making good on promises made a year ago. But it hasn't been an easy trek to begin making money off of Linux, and one factor may way against Novell's Linux business going forward: The waning revenue from its landmark 2006 agreement with Microsoft to begin reselling Linux support subscriptions. This week, Novell reported its first-quarter fiscal 2010 earnings for the quarter ending on Jan. 31. Net revenues came in at $202 million, a decline from the $215 million reported for the first quarter of 2009. On the net income side, things are a bit brighter. Novell reported GAAP net income of $20 million, or $0.06 per share, an increase over the $11 million or $0.03 per share it reported for the first quarter of 2009.

First of all, I want to thank Haiku, Inc. for giving me the opportunity to concentrate fully for a while on the WebKit port and browser! This is an awesome chance that I intend to make full use of. At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I've seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable. After we upgraded to a newer WebKit version as the basis for the port, the frequent random crashes have almost disappeared and I saw only one crash in three days. Compared to one every few minutes before.

Android's been around for more than a year, and in that time developers have whipped up some great apps. Whether you're a new Android owner or a pro looking for new tools, these 10 great and free apps belong in your arsenal.

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.