Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google isn't content with providing us with fast search and a fast browser: we need a faster protocol between servers and browsers. The search giant would like us to start forgetting about HTTP:// and learn to love SPDY://. Ars takes a look at the proposal as well as its strengths and weaknesses.

I'm surprised that more people in the Linux community aren't talking about Lenovo's smartbook, which it announced yesterday. Powered by a Qualcomm ARM Snapdragon processor and sold by AT&T, the new smartbook is Linux-based. Lenovo has had an up and down relationship with supporting Linux, and smartbooks may represent a good way for the company to get back on track with an open source platform.

China-based Menq has launched a smartbook/mini-netbook that runs on an ARM9-based Samsung S3C2450 processor, and offers WiFi, Ethernet, SD storage, and a 7-inch 800 x 480 display. According to one review, the Menq EasyPC E790 costs only $80, and though it ships with Windows CE, can also run Android.

Lanner Electronics is shipping an entry-level, Linux-compatible DVR for the surveillance market that records NTSC and PAL video using H.264. The VR-1208 offers a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, a gigabit Ethernet port, four USB ports, and dual 3.5-inch storage bays, and supports eight channels of D1 analog video.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you grew up with classic video game consoles like the NES and Sega Genesis. For years Windows users have been enjoying high quality game emulation software, but many of the Linux options have been buggy or incomplete. It’s time to take a look at where things stand when it comes to playing console games in Linux. Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve touched on console game emulation here and there, but never done a guide covering multiple systems. Today, we’ll show you how to run games for NES, SNES, Genesis, original Playstation, and Dreamcast. Before we begin, it’s important to note one thing right up front – many console manufacturers do not look kindly on emulation, and some emulators require proprietary software (like the game system BIOS) in order to run. Because of the legal grey area occupied by some of this software, there may be some files or programs for which MTE cannot provide links, such as the actual game files (commonly called ROMS).

A research group in the computer sciences faculty at North Carolina State University has written a prototype to prevent rootkits from manipulating kernel object hooks to do their damage.

After Cavium announced that it will acquire MontaVista for $50 million, analysts are now weighing in on the acquisition. Both Jay Lyman of The 451 Group and Bill Weinberg of LinuxPundit view the acquisition as a sign of a consolidation trend in embedded Linux, while Weinberg points to MontaVista missteps that led to sale.

Following previous reports that Dell's Mini 3i smartphone was merely a proof of concept, the computer giant has now confirmed that it's planning on releasing the device. Dell says that it's Android-based phone will feature a 3.5 inch capacitive touch screen display and that it will be launching this year in Brazil and China. Additional specifications have yet to be released, but, according to reports, the mobile will be available in 2G and 3G models.

The Novell-backed OpenSUSE Linux distro project today released the final OpenSUSE 11.2, which received a mostly positive, in-depth review from eWEEK. Meanwhile, Novell released its Mono Tools for Visual Studio for developing .NET applications for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X, says another eWEEK story.

Our Russian friends at Unigine Corp, who have their very impressive Unigine Engine that is multi-platform and delivers the best graphics on Linux and have said they like Linux very much, last month released Unigine Heaven. Heaven is the most-impressive tech demo / benchmark yet, but when released in October it only came out for Windows with its DirectX 11 renderer. However, as we exclusively shared, Unigine Heaven is coming out to Linux.

An experiment in Nicaragua shows just how powerful Open Source software can be in leveling the playing field. The second poorest country of the Americas now has one of the best software solutions for displaying agricultural data in the western hemisphere. It all started about a year ago. I was in Nicaragua doing anthropological research, when I was asked to give a talk at the yearly Debian Day in the capital city of Managua. I spoke on Latex, which really had nothing to do with agriculture, but afterward Denis Cáceres of Debian Nicaragua approached me.

What the heck does ?€œ mean? Why do we see these, and what be done about them? Akkana Peck explores the mysteries of character sets and encodings.

Not content to dominate search and online advertising, two operating systems, and cross-platform browser, Google is now getting into the programming language business as well. Yesterday Google announced Go a brand-new systems programming language. Why does Google need Go? According to the FAQ on the site, Google saw a gap in the existing systems programming languages, and the company decided it was "worth trying again with a new language" that has taken ideas from other systems programming languages as well as scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.

Lerdorf announced his departure via the popular Web2.0rhea service Twitter. "Feels a bit odd to be unemployed. Probably crazy to leave the best job I have ever had," he wrote, "but after 7+ years it was time for something new." Twitter is also where Lerdorf voiced his opinion of Yahoo!'s search pact with Microsoft back in July. "As lame as I feared," he said. "Time to find a new job." Yahoo! told The Reg Lerdorf had resigned to pursue "other opportunities.' And Lerdorf told us: "There is no juicy story here. I was there for over 7 years. It is a great place to work, and like I said, I am probably crazy for leaving. It was just time to try something different."

We, the developers of the Proteus Intelligent Processes (PIP) Project, are pleased to announce the availability of source code for tools related to the clinical decision support guidelines model, Proteus under an open source license (EPL). The open source development effort will now proceed in the PIP project.

Google has announced Go, a new, experimental, open source language which it says combines the development speed of dynamic languages such as Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. The new language has its roots in a discussion beween Rob Pike , Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer in 2007. Frustration with exisiting languages for systems programming drove them to consider what a new language, that addressed systems developers, would look like. By January 2008, Thompson had begun work on a compiler and since the middle of 2008, Go has become a full time project and has been taking contributions of ideas and code from within Google.

After a delay of several weeks, Nokia is finally shipping its Maemo Linux-based N900 smartphone for 500 Euros ($750), says eWEEK. Meanwhile, a research note supports rumors of an upcoming Maemo-based, mass-market smartphone designed to compete directly with the iPhone, says an industry report, and LWN.net reports on last month's Maemo Summit.

The alliance between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Corp. continues to bear fruit three years after it was first signed, say the two companies -- one the world's largest proprietary software vendor, the other one of the largest open-source companies. Once outright enemies on the opposite sides of an anti-trust lawsuit, Microsoft and Novell bridged that divide when they signed a controversial deal that included co-marketing arrangements as well as patent protection from Microsoft for Linux users.

When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

Like a number of Asian countries, Japan has, in the past, had a reputation for being a great consumer of Linux: Japanese companies have been happy to make use of it when it suited them, but contributions back to Linux have been relatively scarce. The situation has changed over the years, and Japanese developers are now a significant part of our community. We get a lot of code from Japan, and, increasingly, ideas and leadership as well. Japan is pulling its weight, and, possibly, more than that.