Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Are the fights that matter just the ones between giant companies? Doesn't the health of the Net and the Web matter more than any commercial battles? These questions came to mind when I read How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search in TechCrunch recently. In that piece Mike Arrington supported Jason Calacanis' suggestion that Murdoch stick it to Google by cutting an exclusive search deal with rival search engine Bing. Even Jay Rosen took the same side. (Though perhaps in jest.)

Technological advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have opened up the possibility of determining how living things are related by analyzing the ways in which their genes have been rearranged on chromosomes. However, inferring such evolutionary relationships from rearrangement events is computationally intensive on even the most advanced computing systems available today.

Bringing Windows 7 clients into your Linux network is exactly what the fine Samba server is made for. But every Windows release comes with new interop roadblocks, and Windows 7 is no exception. Charlie Schluting shows how to get past the latest ones.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that Chrome OS and Android are likely to merge at some point, say reports. Meanwhile, we sample the response to Chrome OS from across the Googleverse, and explore whether calling the cloud-oriented, Linux-based OS "underwhelming" is a diss or a kiss.

For months, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of global media giant News Corp, has been complaining about his publications' content showing up in Google searches. Now Microsoft is reportedly offering to pay publishers, including News Corp, to block Google searches in favor of Bing listings.

Fedora 12 promises seamless, reliable Bluetooth tethering, great support for 3G, mobile USB networking devices, and a very improved Network Manager. Plus a raft of other improvements, as Sean Michael Kerner reports.

Dan Williams, Red Hat collaborator and NetworkManager developer, might be upset but doesn't let it get to him. In the GNOME blog, he advises "just say no" to WiFi drivers in the linux-staging tree and recommends changes.

A project to protect national internet infrastructure in Estonia is planning to publish some of the tools it has developed as open source under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). The project, run by the National Informatics Centre (RIA), is already using a number of open source tools in its goal to monitor Estonian network traffic and prevent network problems.

The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it's worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it's going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla's success to fund more and more FOSS development.

In case you are not aware, GIMP is an open source image editing software that is bundled in most Linux distro and is touted as the closest alternative to Photoshop. It comes with plenty of toolset and filters for you to create/edit your image, and the best thing of all, it is free. However, as good as it can get, there are several handy and useful features Photoshop that are not available in GIMP and one of them is the Save For Web feature. I used the Photoshop’s Save For Web feature extensively as it enables me to optimize my screenshots to the smallest possible size without affecting their quality to a great extent. Luckily, GIMP supports plugins and there is this plugin available for this purpose.

Defenders of the somewhat unwieldy vi editor say, "Sure vi is user-friendly; it's just peculiar about who it makes friends with." Joe Brockmeier of openSUSE fame has now come out with a beginner's guide to Vim and what it does.

The Debian GNU/Linux project is looking at a development freeze in March next year for its next release, Squeeze, the project leader Steve McIntyre says.

One of those Powerful Ideas is to provide Sharp Tools, as opposed to the weak idea of canned lessons on individual topics that go no further. They were originally designed for the factory automation model of education. You know, everybody in an entire state or country gets the same lesson from the same textbook on the same day. Efficiency! Except when some students don't get a particular lesson, and there is no provision for helping them to catch up.

Synology America Corp. is shipping a four-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device, offering up to 8TB sharable RAID storage for home and small business users. The Linux-based DS410j is equipped with an 800MHz processor, a gigabit Ethernet port, two USB ports, and version 2.2 of Synology's DNLA-compliant Disk Station Manager software.

For over a decade, KDE has supplied Linux and Unix users with a graphical desktop environment and a suite of useful applications. It has become one of the most popular desktop environments and is the default on many Linux distributions. With the coming of KDE 4, developers promised native KDE applications running on Windows. While the current release is still not ready for production, as of KDE 4.3.3, it is coming closer and worth trying. What follows is a brief guide to getting KDE running on Windows.

The Mozilla Foundation survived 2008 fairly well despite the economic downturn, says chairman of the foundation Mitchell Baker in her blog. In it she's pretty detailed about its financial status and lays out the figures.

LXer Feature: 23-Nov-2009

There are many faces behind what goes on at the Linux Foundation: the officers and employees who run the day to day show, the Board of Directors who keep the ship on course, and of course, the volunteers who support, promote, and participate in the Foundation's activities. Among that number are those that act as the voice of the people themselves. The Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board is described as one that "collaborates with the Linux Foundation on programs and issues that affect the Linux community" and "fosters bi-directional interaction with application developers, end users, and Linux companies." The ten individuals are elected by the kernel community itself — half one year, half the next — and sit on the TAB for two years, with the possibility of re-election. Its chair — who will be elected at the Collaboration Summit next March — holds a seat on the Foundation's Board of Directors.

With the arrival of the first code of Chrome OS, also known as Chromium OS in its open source form, the H takes a deeper look at the browser-centric operating system. When Google announced Chrome OS, many people assumed Google was launching an assault on the desktop - going after Microsoft Windows and were just not saying that was what they were doing. Now Chromium OS, the open source branch of Chrome OS, has arrived The H has taken the source code and built it to see how it feels in practice.

Setting up proper wireless encryption is easier than ever on Linux. WEP is broken and has been for a long time, but WPA and WPA2 are still going strong. Eric Geier shows how to configure your Linux client to connect to a proper wireless encryption and authentication server.