Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Gordon Brown has announced that the government plans to open up map data from the Ordnance Survey, the UK's national mapping agency. The announcement was made by the Prime Minister in a speech at a Smarter Government seminar held at Downing Street where Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt also talked about the work being done with the "Make Public Data Public" project. According to The Guardian, the opening of map data will be part of a wider move to publish over 2,000 sets of data, which could include, for example, road-traffic counts, property prices, and motoring offence statistics.

It's not love, war, or baseball. But over the years some memorable things have been said about technology. Some have been memorably eloquent; others are unforgettably shortsighted, wrongheaded, or just plain weird. Let's celebrate them, shall we? A few ground rules for the list that follows: I considered only statements attributable to a specific individual, which ruled out most ad slogans ("Think Different") and many durable Internet memes ("You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"). I did, however, include individuals who happened to be fictional, or canine or inanimate. I also let a couple of quotes slip in that are not strictly speaking about technology, though neither would exist without it -- one from 1876, and one from earlier this decade. Sue me.

It's fairly simple to find large files on your system using commands such as find, but if you're looking for directories over a certain size find won't help you. The Perl script presented here can help you track down those explosively large directories.

Red faces all around at Redmond last week when Microsoft got caught distributing a utility to create bootable USB drives and DVD backup media from downloaded Windows 7 ISOs. There's nothing wrong with the company's USB/DVD Download Tool in and of itself, apart from the awkward fact (discovered by Rafael Rivera) that it contained code borrowed from an open source project originally made available under the GPLv2. As such, Microsoft should have made the source code for its tool available, and most certainly shouldn't have offered it under the license terms it did.

The Open Web Foundation (OWF), launched in July 2008 at OSCON, has announced that it has released its Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) and the first ten specifications that are under this new agreement. The OWFa is akin to a open source licence for specifications, allowing companies to place specifications under a common recognised license. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and SafeMashUps are the first organisations to make use of the agreement.

Bruce Byfield wonders why isn't "free as in freedom" more important to more Linux users? Is it all about free as in free of cost, or "free as in freeloader"?

errit, a Git-based system for managing code review, is helping to spread the popular distributed revision control system into Android-using companies, many of which have heavy quality assurance, management, and legal processes around software. HTC, Qualcomm, TI, Sony Ericsson, and Android originator Google are all running Gerrit, project leader Shawn Pearce said in a talk at the October 2009 GitTogether event, hosted at Google in Mountain View.

The Linux Mint team has announced the first (RC1) release candidate of the Ubuntu 9.10-based Linux Mint 8. Meanwhile, the Fedora community has released the final version of Fedora 12, and an eWEEK review praises the release for its improved system privilege management and virtualization features.

Addonics announced a low-cost, six-ounce network-attached storage (NAS) device for the SOHO market. The Linux-based Addonics Mini NAS offers a single 2.5-inch storage bay, an Ethernet port, a USB port, and multiple servers, including UPnP, and supports both SMB and open source Samba network protocols, says the company.

The truth about Linux today is that one may never have to actually touch a terminal or issue a single Linux command in order to run some versions of this flexible alternative operating system. While there are times when using the Linux command line could be expeditious and the benefits of possessing the ability to use it are numerous, many users can be intimidated by the prospect. They may think it’s too difficult or too much to remember. But once a user becomes accustomed to using the command line interface, it soon becomes the preferred method in many tasks. Not only is it much quicker to accomplish just about any given task at the command line, it opens a whole new world of possibilities. It allows the user to begin to understand how an operating system is structured and functions. It gives the user very powerful tools to do the things graphical interfaces will never be able to reproduce. And best of all, it’s just fun.

One of my favourite sites for anyone benighted enough to believe that Windows is in any sense superior technology to free software is Top500. As its name hints, this is simply the top 500 supercomputers in the world, with an analysis by location, vendors, processor architecture – and, of course, operating systems.

Representatives from three European member states, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, took part in the second Open Document Format (ODF) interoperability workshop held in the Italian town of Orvieto at the beginning of this month.

I've started to wonder if Novell or IBM has explained to SCO's Chapter 11 Trustee Edward Cahn how the GPL works. It cuts through all the other ways SCO is bound to lose, in my view. Then, I thought: why not just explain it myself? You never know. It might prove useful to put it all in one place. So, here goes, SCO and the GPL. As you may recall, if you've been around since 2003, SCO's position on the GPL has been that while it may have distributed its code under the GPL, it didn't mean to do it, that it never knowingly distributed Unix or Unixware code under the GPL. I'd like to briefly explain why that excuse doesn't matter to either Novell or IBM. IBM of course has always taken the position that it hasn't infringed any copyrights, no matter who owns them. But let's take SCO's words at face value, and pretend that they are true. Then how does the GPL moot their claims?

Microsoft has presented version 4.0 of its .NET Micro Framework at the Professional Developer Conference (PDC). The framework is being released as open source software under the Apache 2.0 licence. .NET Micro Framework, an offshoot of the standard .NET Framework, should allow developers to use .NET and Visual Studio as options for the development of applications for devices with limited memory and processing power, such as set-top boxes and car entertainment systems.

Raleigh, NC - November 17, 2009 - The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 12, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 12 includes a robust feature set for desktop users, administrators, developers and open source enthusiasts alike. New enhancements available in Fedora 12 include next-generation Ogg Theora video, virtualization improvements and advancements to NetworkManager, among numerous others.

Over the course of the last month or so, your editor has been to six conferences on three continents. When engaged in that kind of travel, it is, of course, obligatory to determine which country has the best beer; normally, substantial amounts of research are required. It's also normal to hear what's on one's co-researchers' minds while carrying out this task. This time around, your editor heard grumbles from a surprising number of people, all about the same topic: copyright assignment policies. In particular, developers are concerned and unhappy about the copyright assignment policy that Canonical has chosen for all of its projects. This agreement [PDF] is a relatively simple read; it fits on a single page. It applies to a long list of projects, including Bazaar, Launchpad, Quickly, Upstart, and Notify-osd; contributions to any of those projects must be made under the terms of this agreement.

Rumours abound that Google's Chrome OS will be 'open sourced' in the coming week, although the early glimpses are likely to be some way from the final product due for release in late 2010. The likes of TechCrunch and Reuters have suggested that this could be the week that the eagerly awaited operating system and rival to Microsoft's Windows is pushed out to developers, with its source code given out for anyone to see. Announced back in July, Google Chrome OS will launch as an alternative to Windows on the likes of netbooks, but the company will be aware that this could build a platform and user base for an all-out assault on Windows.

Web developers know the importance of testing web sites and blogs on the different web browsers available. A site/blog can look great on one browser, but if you try to access it on another one, it can probably look garbled. It’s a hassle checking a web site/blog on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. What if a browser combined the three main browser types, which removed the need to open up three separate browsers? There is one – Lunascape.

Listen up open source developers, if you want your project to succeed you’re going to have to do more than write great code; you’re going to have to document it, teach new users how it works and provide real-world examples of what you can do with it. That’s the message from Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the creators of Django, a very successful open source, Python-based web framework. At least some Django’s success can be attributed to its thorough documentation which is not just reference materials, but also includes tutorials, topical guides and even snippets of design philosophy.

Samsung announced an Android-powered "Galaxy Spica I5700" smartphone, targeting Europe. In other Android news, Dell confirmed Brazilian and Chinese carriers for its Dell Mini 3, Google released a second-generation developers phone, and ZiiLabs is prepping an Android platform, say reports.