Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

A new kernel release makes its debut, with Nvidia and without Android, and top Red Hat and Novell kernel developers share their inside view.

In accordance with US trade law, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is required to conduct an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws. This review, which is referred to as Special 301, is typically used to denounce countries that have less restrictive copyright policies than the United States.

Hi Lifehackers! MAKE Magazine is best known for sharing all the goodness of making things for yourself, learning new skills and many times, voiding warranties. Let's dive in and meet today's MacGyver - Jeri!

cently I wrote an article, How do I connect to a remote Windows 7 desktop from a Linux machine, and was asked to show how to do the same trick - the other way around. You might assume this trick to be a challenge. You will be surprised how little of a challenge it really is. But first off - you might be asking yourself “Why would I need this?” The answer is to use a single point of administration. How many times have you be scurrying around computers to try to resolve a problem only to have to waste time going back and forth. With the previous article you were given the means to connect from Linux to Windows. Now, with the ability to connect from Windows to Linux, you have all you need to make administrating from a central location much easier. And with that said, let’s get on with the setup.

The GRUB 2 boot menu is long, confusing, and ugly. Akkana Pecks uncovers undocumented features and shows us how to weed out bogus entries, and make it look nicer and more readable.

pril 2005 was a bit of a tense time in the kernel development community. The BitKeeper tool which had done so much to improve the development process had suddenly become unavailable, and it wasn't clear what would replace it. Then Linus appeared with a new system called git; the current epoch of kernel development can arguably be dated from then.

SCALE attracts largest crowd in its history, 30 percent increase in registration bodes well for show, FOSS in general. Observers looking to take the pulse of the Free/Open Source Software movement looked to the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 8x, the first-of-the-year Linux event in the U.S., and found that this year, and the immediate future, may be at its brightest.

Userful Corporation, the world leader in multiseat Linux desktop virtualization, today announced that 30,000 schools worldwide have chosen Userful virtual desktops to reduce computing costs and improve computer-to-student ratios. Microsoft recently announced it's own multi-seat solution, Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, seven years after Userful pioneered the technology on Linux back in 2002. Another classic case of Linux vs Windows, only this time Linux has the upper hand with Userful having already sold 750,000 seats.

Microsoft has managed to do what a roomful of secretive, three-letter government agencies have wanted to do for years: get the whistleblowing, government-document sharing site Cryptome shut down. Microsoft dropped a DMCA notice alleging copyright infringement on Cryptome’s proprietor John Young on Tuesday after he posted a Microsoft surveillance compliance document that the company gives to law enforcement agents seeking information on Microsoft users. Young filed a counterclaim on Wednesday — arguing he had a fair use to publishing the document, a full day before the Thursday deadline set by his hosting provider, Network Solutions.

Update: It looks like Microsoft has reconsidered their position. - Scott

OpenSSO Express has been removed for download from Oracle's website, leaving users of the community version of what was Sun's single sign-on platform to either, build their own version from source code, or to go to a third party. Norwegian company ForgeRock has stepped in and released OpenAM, based on OpenSSO source code. The ForgeRock builds are available to download. ForgeRock CEO, Lasse Andresen called Oracle's move "surprising", but said ForgeRock would be the new home for OpenSSO, now called OpenAM due to Oracle IP issues.

There's a fantastic little story in the Guardian today that says a US lobby group is trying to get the US government to consider open source as the equivalent to piracy. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), an umbrella group for American publishing, software, film, television and music associations, has asked with the US Trade Representative (USTR) to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they encourage the use of open source software. A Special 301, according to Guardian's Bobbie Johnson is: "a report that examines the 'adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights' around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure - often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods - to try and force governments to change their behaviours."

Amazon.com has signed a patent agreement with Microsoft over the use of Linux in its Kindle e-readers. In other open source legal news, the Jacobsen v. Katzer model railroad software case was settled, providing precedent for open source developers to seek monetary damages for copyright infringement, says BetaNews.

Every year was going to be ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’, until many began to wonder when the FOSS (free and open source software) breakthrough would come. As we watched for signs of hope in netbook sales, Drupal sites and partly-FOSS Android phones, a revolution was taking place all around, in the physical world but not entirely away from the internet. Enter, the Arduino: a low-cost, open source, tiny hardware board for connecting the real world to your computer, and/or to the whole internet. What can be done with it? Everything. The limit is the imagination, and as you’ll see from a few of the example creations we review here, imaginative use is the norm.