Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux is often overlooked when it comes to music production. For a long time, there were good reasons for that. The complicated sound system, lack of professional-quality software, and limited hardware compatibility have all contributed toward a bad reputation for Linux when it comes to quality audio tools. We here at MakeTechEasier thought it was time to take a look at where things stand when it comes to music production on Linux, particularly for guitarists. In this article, we’ll cover some things like tab/notation software, audio editing, and multitrack recording.

It's a Bizarro-World indeed when Microsoft is held up by a judge in Europe as a paragon of openness, but that's apparently what happened in a law suit brought by Nintendo. The games console and software maker has lost its case against Divineo Group in a Paris suit to block the sale of Nintendo DS Flash cartridges in France. The judge dismissing Nintendo's case is reported to have said that by blocking non-Nintendo carts, the company is purposely locking out developers from their consoles.

AMD and SiSoftware have teamed up to develop a benchmark testing suites for OpenCL. Released by SiSoftware, the OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite is part of SiSoftware's Sandra 2010. OpenCL is an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. SiSoftware's Sandra 2010 software provides remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of a stable Linux 2.6.32 kernel. Major additions include kernel-based mode setting (KMS) and 3D graphics support on select Radeon cards, plus new kernel shared memory (KSM) technology for KVM virtualization, power-saving and performance improvements, and a faster "Devtmpfs" boot technology.

The popular Ubuntu Linux's six-month release schedule keeps it in the public eye; every release is greeted with a barrage of news, reviews, praise, and complaints. It seems the last few releases have generated an increasing number of cries for longer release schedules, that six months is too short and results in too many bugs. Mark Shuttleworth discussed at length the importance and benefits of a short release cycle in his Linuxcon keynote: it generates excitement and keeps contributors motivated. And it follows the long-standing principles of "many eyes make all bugs shallow" and "release early, release often."

In this post I will collect all commands which SHOULD NEVER be executed in Linux. Any of them will cause data loss or corruption, can freeze or hang up running system. NEVER RUN THESE COMMANDS IN LINUX BOX CLI! Even if somebody advises you in forum/im to do it.

3D support for newer Radeon graphics chips, better use of power saving features offered by the latest hardware and numerous enhancements to KVM and Btrfs are some of the outstanding items among the many thousands of changes undertaken for the latest kernel version. Various other improvements should also make Linux 2.6.32 more reactive and as a result, feel faster.

Viosoft Corp. is shipping an Android development kit for MIPS-based digital multimedia designs, with a special focus on IP set-top boxes (STBs). The Android Adoption Kit combines Sigma Designs' SMP8654-based Vantage 8654 Development Platform with a version of Viosoft's Arriba IDE/Debugger optimized for Android on MIPS, says the company.

As I've noted many a time, the UK government has been one of the most backward when it comes to adopting open source solutions. The fact that over the last few years it has started to make vague noises about doing so shows more that it's realised it looks pretty dumb compared to other governments as a consequence, not that it's serious about things. Indeed, it's still the case that closed-source software dominates government procurement.

Nokia is ramping up development of its Qt open source user interface and application framework with a new release this week. Among the big new additions to Qt 4.6 is support for the widespread Symbian mobile phone operating system. Nokia is one of the biggest supporters of Symbian, with the vast majority of its devices using the OS. In 2008, it purchased Symbian and has since set on its own open source path. As a result, bumping Qt to version 4.6 -- its second update this year -- signals an acceleration of Nokia's developer efforts.

I just received our first word on the hearing in Utah on SCO v. Novell from one of our reporters. "looking for a march 8th trial date, to run 3 weeks" is the report. I'm sure there will be more info on the way as soon as they can type it up. We had several eyewitnesses in attendance. So stay tuned for updates.

For years the mobile development experience has been a game of “my widgets are cooler than your widgets.” Or “My development environment is faster than yours”. The truth is that quality applications often take a lot of time and energy to write well. Sure, the first 90 percent may go quickly enough using — particularly if you are using the latest tool or framework — whichever it is — it doesn’t reall matter. It’s the “second 90 percent” that takes time and talent.

Best known for its monitors, ViewSonic has announced two 17-inch touchscreen PCs designed for medical applications. The MPC1700 and MPC1701 include anti-bacterial coating, Intel Core 2 Duo processors, bootable CompactFlash slots and 2.5-inch drive bays, plus PCI, PCMCIA, and Mini-PCI expansion slots, according to the company.

When Google first announced its Chrome OS project, many commentators assumed that the Internet giant was challenging the dominance of Microsoft Windows. The truth is, Chrome is not a threat to Windows, OS X, or any distribution of Linux--nor is it meant to be.

Some projects make it easy for Linux distros to package their software, others not so much. Google Chrome, or rather its Chromium project, is one of those projects that is emphatically not easy for Linux distros to re-package and ship. Tom Callaway of the Fedora project explained this week why he's packaging Chromium for Fedora users, but not as an official Fedora package. The rationale is interesting in the specific instance of Google Chromium, but also a good lesson for other projects and companies that are doing open source development.

Google has announced that it will be focussing its web development plans on HTML5 and that, as a result, development on Google Gears is to slowly wind down. Gears was introduced by Google in 2007 as a browser plug-in to support local browser databases and geolocation functionality. Since then, many of the functions of Gears have been incorporated into the emerging HTML5 specification which is being implmented by Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari and Google's own Chrome web browser. This has left Gears looking more like a non-standard extension, even though it pioneered the ideas of offline databases and caches.

Nokia has announced the availability of Qt 4.6, a new version of the popular open source software development toolkit. It introduces official support for Symbian S60 and Nokia's Linux-based Maemo platform.

Apple is making a lot of money these days. The more money it makes, the greater the contempt for its customers it seems to display. A critical bug recently discovered in FreeBSD, and the speed with which this bug was resolved, illustrates this rather well. If you use Apple's products in your business, be afraid; be very afraid. Here's how the sorry story unfolds. FreeBSD 8.0 was released last week, and the latest version of the UNIX-like OS was generally received with approval. FreeBSD enjoys a good reputation with its followers, and many OSes and products contain code based on or borrowed from the OS, including Juniper routers, and — ironically, as we shall see — Mac OS X.

"White space" networking, which will use unused TV spectrum to deliver broadband services, has moved a step closer. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission said it would begin establishing databases that will warn white space devices when existing TV signals are present, according to a story on our sister site eWEEK.

Can we liberate tweeting from Twitter? It's an open question. And it's one that Dave Winer hopes we can answer, in response to his post We need: An open source Twitter shell. He begins, It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does.