Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

About-information from developer profiles, desktop searches in online forums, an interface library and update notification of web page content bring the concept of a social desktop a step closer to reality.

OLPC Afghanistan; now running for about the last year has a few technical updates we'd like to share with the community. Just this morning we tested the first prototype - the PAIWASTOON team that perform the technical implementation designed a new pedal powered machine that can power the XO as you pedal and use it at the same time. Even small kids (3/4th grade) can power it.

The Linux Foundation rolls out some new member benefits this week, along with a membership classification just for students. Though there were already a ton of cool membership perks to begin wtih, new access to employee purchase pricing on products from HP, Dell, and Lenovo is a really terrific addition to the list.

In my last post, I covered some of the features in Dolphin that I find particularly useful. In this post, you will learn about some very basic features that everyone uses, but you may not know all of the various easy methods of accomplishing them. In KDE, there are several ways to copy, move, rename, and archive files. Let’s take a look at a few them.

France's national computer science institute, Inria, says free software is essential to develop digital society. The institute is launching a research centre to focus on this type of software, Cirill (IT Innovation and Research Centre for Free Software). The foundation of Cirill was announced at the Open World Forum in Paris earlier this month. Cirill is to become a reference centre for the research and development of stable and reliable free software.

Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of the 10/09 update for its Solaris 10 operating system (OS). The latest release includes a number of bug fixes, feature updates and expanded support for new processors.

The Linux technology, development model, and community have all been game-changing influences on the IT industry, and all we can really do is stand back and look at it all, happy to have been along for the ride for developerWorks' first 10 years. The Linux zone team has put together this greatly abbreviated collection of things that stand out in our minds as having rocked the world of Linux in a significant way.

For a brief time in 2008, the Linux desktop actually owned a segment of the desktop industry: netbooks. When netbooks first showed up, they ran Linux and nothing but Linux. Microsoft panicked and brought XP back from the dead, offering it for next to nothing to netbook vendors and thus successfully fighting off the Linux challenge.

T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger have told Sidekick users who have been suffering for a data outage this week that their data is gone for good. So far, tech punditry's read on this massive, high-profile data loss is that it's a black eye for "the cloud." For once, the consensus is spot-on.

There is more to "green" computing than turning things off when you're not using them-- Juliet Kemp exposes the total energy cost of computing, from manufacturing to disposal.

Mixing Open Source communities and corporate boardrooms is a lot like mixing nitroglycerin — done properly, it produces unmeasurable good, but make a wrong move and the results won't be pretty. Some companies, like Red Hat, are adept at successfully marrying the two, while other companies seem to spend more time than they should diving for the nearest bunker. We here at the news-desk are fans of the near-omnipresent search giant that is Google, and we don't mind saying so. However, though we don't play much poker, we know a spade when we see one, and we're not afraid to call it when we do. One such spade comes in the form of events that played out over the past few weeks with regard to the company's Open Source darling, Android.

LXer Feature: 12-Oct-2009

When an open source project wants to make major changes in its core code, such as revamping a user interface library, it faces the two elephant problem. The first elephant in the room is the existing community and its familiarity with what had already been implemented. The second elephant, which the developers want to bring into the room, is all the changes that they want to incorporate into the project. The difficulty is moving the second elephant into the room without disturbing the first or just filling the room completely with elephant.

Are you tired of being hunted down by marketers following your digital crumb-trail? If the answer to that question is yes, you might want to take an interest in a panel called Getting Personal With Data: How Users Get Control — And What They Do With It. It's happening Tuesday morning at 9:30am (U.S. Eastern time) at Harvard Law School. I'll be moderating it, and the panelists are four very cool people, each working (one way or another) in the fields of self-tracking and personal informatics.

This week there were several new software releases including the Linux 2.6.32-rc3 kernel, KDE 4.3.2, Alien Arena 7.31, OpenChrome 0.2.904, Wine 1.1.31, and xf86-video-radeonhd 1.3.0. Worth noting with the new Wine release are continued Direct3D 10 advancements and the start of Microsoft ActiveX support within JavaScript. The Alien Arena release is also interesting for the graphics improvements, new game mode, and other new content for this first-person shooter. Also made available this week were new preview releases of Mutter and the GNOME Shell.

When rumors first began to fill the air that an agreement of some sort between Microsoft and the EU Commission was imminent, Sean Daly interviewed Thomas Vinje and Ashwin van Rooijen, attorneys for ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, which is an intervenor in the case.

This article examines a field called compliance engineering. Compliance engineering was pioneered by technical experts who wanted to address misuses of software, and was made famous by gpl-violations.org, FSF, and similar organizations correcting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) license violations. The field has grown into a commercial segment with companies like Blackduck Software and consultancy firms like Loohuis Consulting offering formal services to third parties.

Yesterday there was a news article on Phoronix entitled What's Up With RadeonHD and Nouveau? As was mentioned in that article, not a lot of news has come out of either X.Org project in recent months nor any driver releases (except that changed for RadeonHD yesterday afternoon) and users have started to wonder about the project's status. Never once did we imply that the Nouveau driver was dead, but that it was "not accelerating as fast as some would like." Nouveau's Ben Skeggs though felt differently and has now written a blog post detailing some of the recent developments for this open-source NVIDIA driver.

Read an excerpt from the 4th Edition of the book Python Essential Reference by David Beazley. Chapter 6: Substantial programs are broken up into functions for better modularity and ease of maintenance. Python makes it easy to define functions but also incorporates a surprising number of features from functional programming languages. This chapter describes the basic mechanisms associated with Python functions including scoping rules, closures, decorators, generators, and coroutines.

The introduction of KDE 4.0 was met with such an avalanche of outrage and criticism that Gnome developers can be forgiven for being a bit gun-shy. Gnome 2.28 appears to be almost a stealth introduction of Gnome 3.0; will anyone notice?