Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Akaza Research is pleased to announce the release of OpenClinica 3.0, the newest version of the world’s most popular open source electronic data capture (EDC) software for clinical trials. This latest production release marks a significant milestone for open source software in the clinical trials field, adding a host of new capabilities designed to further accelerate the adoption of open source into mainstream research.

Home automation may sound like a science-fiction dream, but in reality it is not only commonplace, but relatively simple to get started, especially with Linux. Smart control of household appliances and utilities begins at the low end with plug-and-play radio frequency (RF) and powerline modules and relays that can easily interface with a small home server in charge of scheduling and monitoring. At the high end, a home automation setup may include environmental controls, home security systems, and many other add-ons, which--despite the name--are important concerns for businesses as well as residential customers.

Hulu Desktop is now available for Linux. Ars puts it to the test on Ubuntu 9.04. Although it's extremely resource intensive, it's reasonably acceptable for a beta.

One of the things I love to hear about is success stories of Linux in education, especially in the K12 arena. Early adoption and exposure to Linux and Open Source has the very positive effect of opening the horizons of these students to the vast array of options available to them. But the number of instances that you hear of in regards to actual full on Linux and Open Source adoption in schools is few and far between, even though the number of schools supporting both is on the rise, albeit slowly. That's why I was very pleased recently to hear about a local school just southwest of where I live that had taken to living life with the penguin.

If you are a scientist and KDE user, you may already have been impressed by the range and quality of specialist software available for your use. But you may not be aware of the scientific graph plotting applications LabPlot (stable KDE 3 release with a KDE 4 version in progress) and SciDAVis (Qt4). The two projects have announced a collaboration to share common backend code to accelerate their development. We contacted the developers to get their take on their applications, the collaboration and the future of their projects. Read on to find out about the future of free software plotting.

In Part I of this OOXML update, my first post on the topic in over a year, I showed you how Microsoft maintains strong control over the OOXML standard. Despite their earlier promises that control of OOXML would be handed over to an independent, international committee, a look at attendance records reveals that the committee that maintains OOXML (JTC1/SC34/WG4) consists mainly of Microsoft employees, who outnumber any other company or organization on the committee 10-to-1.

According to Harald Welte, the source code for the Palm Pre GSM model, currently being sold in Europe is now available from the opensource.palm.com site. Earlier this week, Welte pointed out that the source code for the new model of the Palm Pre was not available to the public, as it should be to comply with the terms of the GPL. An email to Welte from Palm has now confirmed the availability of the code for WebOS 1.1.2 and 1.1.3.

The Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala") beta won a positive review from eWEEK, while InfoWorld reports on the server edition's capability for developing private clouds that are compatible with Amazon EC2. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica found the developer's version of Ubuntu Moblin Remix to be "promising" but "rough."

Next month will mark the two-year anniversary of the Unreal Tournament 3 release, but to this day the UT3 Linux client still has not been released. Up to this point we have been told by Ryan Gordon (the one porting over the game and engine to Linux) that it is still being worked on and Epic Games has similarly told us -- just two months ago -- that it is slowly being worked on. We've been told similar statements now going back many months that the Unreal Tournament 3 Linux client was still being worked on, but there was no ETA for when it might be released -- even though Ryan has been porting the game for over two years and originally he was hoping to ship the Linux client on the same-day as the game's release.

There are easy ways to manage Linux servers, and there are hard ways. Charlie Schluting shows how to go from hard to easy.

Uruguay has become the first country to provide a laptop for every child attending state primary school. President Tabaré Vázquez presented the final XO model laptops to pupils at a school in Montevideo on 13 October. Over the last two years 362,000 pupils and 18,000 teachers have been involved in the scheme.

Last week, Munich saw the 2009 Edition of the Qt Developer Days. Qt Developer Days is a Qt-focused software conference which is held yearly in Europe and the U.S. The American edition will be held at the start of November in San Francisco. 700 attendants and more than 70 Trolls made this edition the biggest Developer Days to date. Qt Development Frameworks had invited a group of KDE developers to the conference, more well-known heads from the KDE world were sent by their respective employers. The days brought training sessions around Qt and many interesting presentations ranging from higher level topics such as the future roadmap for Qt to topics related to Qt programming with techniques and technologies such as the Model/View Framework, QGraphicsView, WebKit, multithreading and many more. Read on for a more detailed report of what has been revealed and talked about during the three-day conference in Munich's Hilton Park hotel.

While the European Linux scene has been busy with KDE and Qt, a relatively unnoticed but important gathering occurred in the U.S. to determine the future of the GNOME desktop: the GNOME Boston Summit 2009.

Although the 8th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) isn't until February, 2010, a Call for Papers has already been announced. If you've got something you want to discuss with the FOSS community, head over to the registration page and submit your idea for a talk. There are five speaker tracks to choose from including two specialized tracks -- one for beginners and one for developers. I caught up with SCALE Publicity Chair Orv Beach, to get the inside scoop on what makes a successful presentation, what the review committee is looking for (hint: it's not Big Names in FOSS), and more.

Web video site Hulu has released a Linux version of its Hulu Desktop. Hulu Desktop for Linux is optimized for Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11, offers search and playback controls, and includes publisher tools for locating and integrating content, says Hulu.

The 11th Real Time Linux Workshop was held in Dresden, Germany, at the end of September; it was attended by some 200 researchers and developers working in that area. RTLWS was a well-organized event, with engaged participants, interesting topics, and more than adequate amounts of German [Conference speakers] beer. This article will be concerned with three sessions from that event; other topics (deadline schedulers in particular) will be looked at separately.

Earlier this week AMD launched the Radeon HD 5700 series GPUs using their Juniper GPUs as part of the Evergreen family. We published Linux benchmarks of the Radeon HD 5750/5770 on Tuesday with our thoughts on these new mid-range graphics cards, but today there are a few more Ubuntu results to add in for these ATI graphics cards.

Whenever ideas run short, columnists and bloggers like to pontificate about why free and open source software isn't more successful. Inevitably, they trot out the same old explanations. Microsoft's monopoly, lack of vendor support, community unfriendliness and infighting, and inertia are some of the most popular ones.

The logic of open source is increasingly clear to a growing number of businesses. Ironically, however, that logic generally dovetails with a recognition of how to marry open source with a proprietary revenue driver. Once you figure out the scarce good for which customers will pay, open sourcing everything else becomes a no-brainer.

We all know we can use open source software without paying, but the real question is: what compels people to buy free stuff? Most widely used free and open source software can also be purchased. We are not speaking of alternative commercial licensing, in this context. We are talking about purchasing support contracts and add-ons for open source software. While you certainly do not need to purchase support services, there may be benefits beyond the obvious ones.