Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The open source industry needs profitable champions to demonstrate success, and attract funding and participation in open source, according to Red Hat CEO. In an interview with ZDNet Asia Wednesday, Jim Whitehurst said revenue models of open source proponents such as Red Hat itself and Google, have brought success to the respective companies and allowed them to contribute back to the open source community. Google relies on ad-based revenue, while Red Hat's revenue runs on a subscription model.

A good portion of the boot time on current Linux systems is spent on system initialisation and starting dozens of daemons sequentially. The Ubuntu 9.10 development team have started to parallelise and accelerate the boot process through the large scale use of Upstart.

Spring Design, developers of a dual-screen e-book reader called Alex, has filed suit against Barnes & Noble, alleging that B&N's new Nook reader uses Spring's trade secrets and violates the companies' non-disclosure agreement.

Turnkey Linux, Songbird, LogicalDOC, Brain Workshop, Evolutility, and many more-- the Open Source world is full of great applications for everything under the sun. Cynthia Harvey shares a sampling of 49 applications for all occasions.

MIPS Technologies announced two new MIPS32 cores, including one that's optimized for Linux. Both the M14K core and the M14Kc -- a superset that incorporates Android-ready, Linux/Java microcode -- support MIPS' microMIPS instruction set architecture, enabling 1.5 DMIPS/MHz performance and advanced code compression that can reduce code size by 35 percent, says the company.

French Mandriva user Olivier Faurax registered a support case at Skype complaining about a missing Mandriva package. Instead of the package he received a reply of some amazement.

This morning I woke up to find an e-mail in my inbox which contained a link to an xeconomy.com interview with Nicholas Negroponte. While reading it over breakfast I managed to spill my tea because I couldn't believe I was really seeing the words I was looking at. XO-2 development canceled? An XO-1.75 to replace it? Talk about an XO-3? Going from OLPC to olpc? But let's take it step by step, shall we...

The openSUSE-Medical project is seeking developers and additional packagers. The distribution is an openSUSE sub-project aimed at doctors and medical staff and will include various open source software applications for medical use. The developers plan to start reviewing a list of open source healthcare software for inclusion in the distribution and adding packages to openSUSE, once enough packagers are on board.

Like the ticking of a Swiss watch, every month the KDE team brings you a new release. November's edition of KDE is a bugfix and translation update to KDE 4.3. With the KDE 4 series picking up in popularity, we're happy to encourage even more people to give KDE 4 another spin -- or just upgrade your existing KDE to KDE 4.3.3. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE 4.3.3 is more completely translated. KDE 4.4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come.

A software developer has uncovered a bug in most versions of Linux that could allow untrusted users to gain complete control over the open-source operating system. The null pointer dereference flaw was only fixed in the upcoming 2.6.32 release candidate of the Linux kernel, making virtually all production versions in use at the moment vulnerable. While attacks can be prevented by implementing a common feature known as mmap_min_addr, the RHEL distribution, short for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, doesn't properly implement that protection, Brad Spengler, who discovered the bug in mid October, told The Register.

Today, Yahoo moved its open source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own trafic and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing stacks. We asked the cloud computing team at Yahoo for a series of guest posts about Traffic Server, and you'll find the first one here.

In case you’ve been too busy dealing with rogue iPhones, October 2009 was a big month for operating systems. Do CIOs care about operating systems? Probably not as much as they used to, but with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" (from here on abbreviated to simply "Karmic" for sanity purposes) being released within days of each other, CIOs at least have a reason to be excited about the future of the desktop.

If you're buying a new netbook for this holiday season, odds are that it will be loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. While many users will be happy with Microsoft's new OS, others might balk at the limitations that this version includes -- for example, you won't be able to change your desktop background, and it doesn't include Windows Media Center. And it may even add a bit to the cost of the device. So what are your alternatives?

A few weeks back, we looked at the newly announced CodePlex Foundation. At the time, there were a few questions about the foundation and its plans. We asked Sam Ramji, interim president of the foundation—and, previously, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy—to fill in some of the gaps. Below are his answers to our questions, ranging from the foundation's governance and plans, to his thoughts on Microsoft's open source strategy going forward, as well as information about his new company and its relationship to open source software.

Techsol announced it is now shipping its Linux-ready Medallion Touch Panel Computers (TPCs) with Python-GTK support. The new support enables developers to develop embedded GUIs using Python-GTK on a desktop PC and easily load it onto Techsol's TPC touch-panel systems, thereby accelerating proof-of-concept design, says the company.

The Amarok Team have announced that Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). The Software Freedom Conservancy is composed of various Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects and provides member projects with administrative and financial services.

During the NLUUG end-of-year conference "The Open Web" in Ede, Netherlands, we did an interview with keynote speaker Steven Pemberton. Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the Center for Math and Information Technology in Amsterdam and has been involved with the web since it's first incarnation - he vividly remembers the day the connection from Europe to the US was doubled to 128 Kbit.

Google's developers clearly missed all the Halloween fun, with both the Chrome and Wave teams slinging out updates yesterday. The Wave team has pushed out a "developer instance" of the messaging everything platform.

One of the greatest things about the open source philosophy is that its principles can be applied to projects that help mankind. Content management systems, media apps, and gaming software all have their place in the FOSS ecosystem, but when projects like the Pink Army Cooperative come along, it reminds people of just how powerful the open source doctrine really is. Founded in March of this year, Canadian-based Pink Army Cooperative is using open source synthetic biology to create better drugs to fight breast cancer. The organization is comprised of members who pay $21 CDN to join the cooperative and, in turn, receive a small economic stake in the co-op.

MySQL Cluster has come a long way in the 4 years since I experimented with it. Compared to when I first got the cluster working on my home computer, I didn't have to change much get the latest version up and running. So, what is MySQL Cluster? It is a database solution which tries to solve high availability issues by using multiple synchronous masters (for the lack of a better phrase) in a shared-nothing environment. In order to solve a lot of the latency issues associated with multiple masters, it keeps all the indexed data in memory to enable fast processing of the data.