Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Freescale Semiconductor says it is now accepting orders for a hardware/software platform for developing Android applications on Power Architecture PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors. The initial MPC8536E-ADK Android platform, which combines an Android runtime developed by Mentor Graphics and a board based on the PowerQUICC III MPC8536E, appears to be the first Android port to the PowerPC.

Open source word processing program AbiWord has a new release this week that sports several new features and a slew of bugfixes. AbiWord, long overshadowed by OpenOffice.org, is a fine multi-platform application in its own right and the new goodies in version 2.8.0 bring even more to the table. These days, collaboration is king and AbiWord 2.8.0's new collaborative capabilities are pretty spiffy. Now, when multiple authors edit the same document, AbiWord can tell the writers apart. Each author's text appears in a different color, making it easy to distinguish who's writing what. Collaboration is even easier now, thanks to the new Web service, AbiCollab, which lets users store and share documents online.

Amazon Web Services has introduced Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a web service intended to make it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud. According to AWS, Amazon RDS provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing users to focus on their application and their business. There are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

On October 9 through 11, a dozen developers gathered in the Nokia Offices in Munich to bring the vision outlined in Dan Leinir's blog about the "Future of Game Development in KDE" to life. After three days of hard work, the developers joined hundreds of other Qt developers for the Qt Developer Days 2009 (thanks to free tickets provided by Nokia). Read on for more!

Red Hat Inc. has invested an unspecified amount in open-source database vendor EnterpriseDB Inc., a sign that the Linux vendor may be worried about the implications of Oracle Corp.'s takeover of MySQL through its pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. The announcement was made in a statement posted Tuesday by the Westford, Mass. database vendor. Neither EnterpriseDB nor Red Hat immediately responded to requests for comment.

In a move that is likely to be seen as an attack on yet another industry, Google on Wednesday introduced a free navigation system for mobile phones that offers turn-by-turn directions. Analysts said that Google’s free service, if successful, could erode the sales of GPS navigation devices made by companies like Garmin and TomTom and of navigation services offered by cellphone carriers. “There’s no doubt that those guys are going to be disrupted,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst with Opus Research.

Web application development reached a new paradigm with the release of Ruby on Rails back in 2004. Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson has since been at the helm of one of the most successful and popular open source software development projects. Ruby on Rails, or just Rails, has allowed thousands of developers to create complex applications rapidly in a consistent manner. This level of consistency and re-use of code Rails helped pioneer has also given rise to the concept of a Web application framework, where components are used for common tasks like database connectivity.

Mobile WiMAX provider Clearwire Communications has announced plans to offer service in eight additional U.S. cities during the fourth quarter, for a total of more than 25 markets by year's end. In related news, Clearwire demonstrated international roaming via Aicent's WRX (WiMAX roaming exchange), and the Maravedis analyst firm said WiMAX subscriptions are increasing 74 percent year-over-year.

Microsoft has announced that it is offering documentation on the format of Outlook data files, known as PST files, under its Open Specification Promise, making the format free to use without licence or patent issues. In the past the file format, which is used to contain the email, calendar, contacts and other Outlook generated data, had to be reverse engineered to gain access to the information.

The future smartphone market will be driven by operating systems and user demand for functionality and "experiences" the phone can provide, according to industry analyst In-Stat. In a report released Tuesday, the research firm projected that there will be some 412 million smartphones worldwide by 2014, where over 250 million units will be equipped with accelerometers.

"Is it here to stay?" has to be one of the most common questions enterprise users ask when considering Open Source options for their business needs. It's a legitimate concern with any product, Open Source or not — who wants to deploy a mission-critical service one day and be told it's no longer in development the next? In a time when the corporate side of Open Source is a bit up and down, spreading strategic support around is itself mission critical.

You can have Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft's trust-no-one innovation, or you can have the advance KDE desktop, all full of polish and useful functionality. Bruce Byfield compares the two.

Microsoft proved that one thing Windows 7 won't install is a sense of humour yesterday, by hastily pulling out of its sponsorship of a Family Guy/American Dad variety special. The vendor announced two weeks ago that it would blow some of its Windows 7 marketing budget on "an upcoming television event devoted to the comedy of Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show".

The folks at open source collaboration platform MindTouch conducted a poll recently to get a sense of who open source executives think are the most influential people in the industry. More than 50 execs were polled from Europe and North America and no one was allowed to vote for anyone in their own company. The results were ranked according to the effect each nominee has on the open source industry, and some of the winners may surprise you.

With all the hubbub about Snow Leopard and Windows 7, there's another operating system out there you may not have noticed that's getting a significant update: Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu backer Canonical plans to release its "Karmic Koala" version on Thursday, and both the desktop and server versions of the open-source operating system take significant steps toward cloud computing. The concept of moving work away from the computer in front of you and into the network does have some merit, but cloud computing is today's fashionable buzzword, and Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth is sensitive to its overuse.

Psystar and Apple continue to battle it out, and things are coming to a head next month. They are fighting on two major fronts, and both will be the subject of oral argument on November 12. It looks like we will see an end, one way or another, of much of the first Apple-Psystar litigation. Psystar, I gather, would like this to be the end of this litigation, period, and then it will be on to Florida, I assume, for the second, the one over Snow Leopard, which Psystar has already been infringing, from Apple's point of view. Psystar has said it will accept an injunction of just Leopard, since it claims it isn't selling it any more anyway, and a nominal fine. All the rest of Apple's claims, it argues, are then moot.

Much of the realtime scheduling work in Linux has been based around getting the best behavior out of the POSIX realtime scheduling classes. Techniques like priority inheritance, for example, exist to ensure that the highest-priority task really can run within a bounded period of time. In much of the rest of the world, though, priorities and POSIX realtime are no longer seen as the best way to solve the problem. Instead, the realtime community likes to talk about "deadlines" and deadline-oriented scheduling. In this article, we'll look at a deadline scheduler has recently been posted for review and related discussion at the recent Real Time Linux Workshop in Dresden.

What's new in the open source world? We've put together a list of software that was first released (or first made open source) in the last couple of years. While many of these apps are still early in the development process, they're all usable, and in fact, have all acquired fairly substantial user bases in a short time. What do they have in common? While the apps on our list cover a gamut of categories, we did uncover a few trends. First, a number of the most successful new open source projects relate to mobility.

Many Linux users pride themselves on being highly technical geeks. And, while that's great for finding people to contribute code patches to projects, it means that a lot of first-time Linux users get branded a "newbie" and are made to feel stupid when they ask fundamental questions about things we take for granted. To be blunt, that situation sucks. If people have honest questions about Linux, we need to be helping them find answers, and we need to do so without sarcastic comments, without "RTFM" and without telling people "just use Google."

IBM recently announced they are pairing up with Cannonical and Red Hat to develop a Windows 7 alternative (see “IBM Client for Smart Work“). This pairing makes perfect sense as IBM has been a supporter of open source and Linux for some time now. Not only that but IBM released their office suite, Lotus Symphony, a few years ago. Back when this suite was released I did some technical journals on it only to find it difficult to install, rather buggy, and not well supported. That was then, this is now.