Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Our Russian friends at Unigine Corp, who have their very impressive Unigine Engine that is multi-platform and delivers the best graphics on Linux and have said they like Linux very much, last month released Unigine Heaven. Heaven is the most-impressive tech demo / benchmark yet, but when released in October it only came out for Windows with its DirectX 11 renderer. However, as we exclusively shared, Unigine Heaven is coming out to Linux.

An experiment in Nicaragua shows just how powerful Open Source software can be in leveling the playing field. The second poorest country of the Americas now has one of the best software solutions for displaying agricultural data in the western hemisphere. It all started about a year ago. I was in Nicaragua doing anthropological research, when I was asked to give a talk at the yearly Debian Day in the capital city of Managua. I spoke on Latex, which really had nothing to do with agriculture, but afterward Denis Cáceres of Debian Nicaragua approached me.

What the heck does ?€œ mean? Why do we see these, and what be done about them? Akkana Peck explores the mysteries of character sets and encodings.

Not content to dominate search and online advertising, two operating systems, and cross-platform browser, Google is now getting into the programming language business as well. Yesterday Google announced Go a brand-new systems programming language. Why does Google need Go? According to the FAQ on the site, Google saw a gap in the existing systems programming languages, and the company decided it was "worth trying again with a new language" that has taken ideas from other systems programming languages as well as scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.

Lerdorf announced his departure via the popular Web2.0rhea service Twitter. "Feels a bit odd to be unemployed. Probably crazy to leave the best job I have ever had," he wrote, "but after 7+ years it was time for something new." Twitter is also where Lerdorf voiced his opinion of Yahoo!'s search pact with Microsoft back in July. "As lame as I feared," he said. "Time to find a new job." Yahoo! told The Reg Lerdorf had resigned to pursue "other opportunities.' And Lerdorf told us: "There is no juicy story here. I was there for over 7 years. It is a great place to work, and like I said, I am probably crazy for leaving. It was just time to try something different."

We, the developers of the Proteus Intelligent Processes (PIP) Project, are pleased to announce the availability of source code for tools related to the clinical decision support guidelines model, Proteus under an open source license (EPL). The open source development effort will now proceed in the PIP project.

Google has announced Go, a new, experimental, open source language which it says combines the development speed of dynamic languages such as Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. The new language has its roots in a discussion beween Rob Pike , Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer in 2007. Frustration with exisiting languages for systems programming drove them to consider what a new language, that addressed systems developers, would look like. By January 2008, Thompson had begun work on a compiler and since the middle of 2008, Go has become a full time project and has been taking contributions of ideas and code from within Google.

After a delay of several weeks, Nokia is finally shipping its Maemo Linux-based N900 smartphone for 500 Euros ($750), says eWEEK. Meanwhile, a research note supports rumors of an upcoming Maemo-based, mass-market smartphone designed to compete directly with the iPhone, says an industry report, and LWN.net reports on last month's Maemo Summit.

The alliance between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Corp. continues to bear fruit three years after it was first signed, say the two companies -- one the world's largest proprietary software vendor, the other one of the largest open-source companies. Once outright enemies on the opposite sides of an anti-trust lawsuit, Microsoft and Novell bridged that divide when they signed a controversial deal that included co-marketing arrangements as well as patent protection from Microsoft for Linux users.

When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

Like a number of Asian countries, Japan has, in the past, had a reputation for being a great consumer of Linux: Japanese companies have been happy to make use of it when it suited them, but contributions back to Linux have been relatively scarce. The situation has changed over the years, and Japanese developers are now a significant part of our community. We get a lot of code from Japan, and, increasingly, ideas and leadership as well. Japan is pulling its weight, and, possibly, more than that.

Semiconductor firm Cavium Networks announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire embedded Linux pioneer MontaVista Software for $50 million. After the acquisition wraps up in December, MontaVista will run as a separate operating unit, retain its own brand name, and support multiple architectures, MontaVista execs Jim Ready and Dan Cauchy told LinuxDevices.

Photos, slide stacks, and huge documents can take up a lot of file space and we frequently need to distribute those files out to colleagues working on a project. When everybody is working in the office, you might have the luxury of being able to put your stuff on an Alfresco (Linux) or Sharepoint (Microsoft) server. The situation gets problematic when your team is working at a virtual office at the coffee shop downtown or off-site in some client conference room somewhere.

Microsoft has pulled the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from the Microsoft Store website after a report indicating that the tool incorporated open source code in a way that violated the GNU's General Public License (GPL).

Is MySQL free in a free-market? With the European Commission's ongoing investigation, a debate over what makes free software free has emerged, ironically, centred on how money is made from free software.

Desktop developers are starting to understand that netbooks need different interfaces than workstations -- or even notebooks. The smaller screens on netbooks are a usability challenge, comparable to designing a business card when you're used to creating full-page ads. A case in point is KDE's Plasma Netbook interface, now available in a preview in Kubuntu 9.10. Scheduled for official release in January 2010 with KDE 4.4, the interface is still in development. But it's advanced enough to show the developers struggling with the screen size limitation, sometimes overlooking it but at other times showing enough promise that the main KDE desktop could learn a thing or two from it.

The idea of Microsoft releasing Visual Studio for Unix and Linux was once - quite literally - a joke. Not only was Visual Studio only built for Windows, but Microsoft's licensing had prevented people using its premier development environment with non-Windows platforms. Now, there's a little less to laugh about. Microsoft partner Novell has delivered a plug-in designed to help Visual Studio developers easily build, debug, test, and port applications built using C# in Visual Studio 2005 to Linux, Unix, and OS X. The plug-in has Microsoft's full blessing.

Linux lies at the heart of yet another big takeover deal in silicon valley. Chip makers love Linux. That was why, in part, Intel bought Wind River. And it is very definitely the main reason behind Cavium Networks acquisition of MontaVista Software. A truism of today's processor industry is that embedded Linux is the operating system of choice for developers.

Remote Linux PC access over the Internet requires extra security precautions. Today we lock down the OpenSSH server more tightly, get through a firewall without opening the LAN to the world, and decide if we want password authentication or certificate authentication.

Lordy, lordy, lordy. They have no shame. It appears that Microsoft has just patented sudo, a personalized version of it. Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that's been in use since 1980 and wasn't invented by Microsoft. Here's Wikipedia's description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft's description of its "invention". This is why what the US Supreme Court does about software patents means so much. Hopefully they will address the topic in their decision on Bilski. Sudo is an integral part of the functioning of GNU/Linux systems, and you use it in Mac OSX also. Maybe the Supreme Court doesn't know that, and maybe the USPTO didn't realize it. But do you believe Microsoft knows it?