Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The mobile industry is becoming interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smartphone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from using one. How did this come about? In a word: competition. When the iPhone arrived on the scene, users scrambled to get their hands on it, and competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. It has taken a while, but the competition has arrived. Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold--they are all outstanding entries into this market. But two of those entries will, in my opinion, outshine the rest for one simple reason--open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? Here are 10 reasons.

Last week VIA re-released their Chrome 9 DRM in hopes of pushing it into the mainline Linux kernel. However, the only user of this DRM code at present is their Linux binary graphics driver and VIA Technologies has no intentions of providing an open-source Chrome 9 3D driver. However, within a month or so, VIA claims to be releasing a new 2D driver that can use this DRM to some extent. This whole situation with VIA has reignited the discussion over what to do when a company is interested in pushing an open-source DRM driver into the mainline Linux tree, but it's really only used by closed-source user-space drivers.

Microsoft dropped a mini-bombshell on Monday, announcing that it is contributing thousands of lines of code for inclusion in Linux. But lest anyone think Microsoft suffered a massive head trauma over the weekend, the code it is releasing isn't really about helping Linux compete better with Microsoft. The drivers are really geared at making Windows a better host for Linux.

Microsoft Corp.'s move to release three of its drivers to Linux, however technically modest it may be, could put pressure on other closed-source vendors to follow suit. The uneven availability of drivers for Linux has long contributed to the open-source operating system's forbidding reputation among non-techies, and -- despite its free price tag -- to its slow growth. According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, a longtime Linux developer for Novell Inc. and the head of the Linux Driver Project, Linux today "supports hundreds of thousands of drivers."

Microsoft is embracing cancer to help ensure Windows survives server-room consolidation. The company has released 20,000 lines of Windows kernel code under version two of the GPL. Microsoft called the license it once hated "the community's preferred license". How things have changed. Back in 2001, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie described the GPL as a threat to users' intellectual property and the independent commercial software sector.

KDE announced today that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion-based revision control system. "This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world." The 500,000th commit took place on January 19th, 2006, and the 750,000th commit 23 months later on December 18th, 2007. In contrast, only nineteen more months were required to reach the 1,000,000 commit milestone.

When I took Calculus in college, my Professor would give us substantial partial credit for test problems that we got wrong for minor arithmetic errors, and rightfully so, too. Sometimes even simple-sounding problems resulted in a full page, or more, of calculations. Simply changing a -1 to a +1 early on in a problem could be completely devastating.

Zeroshell can manage simple VPNs, and more complex bonded VPNs for higher throughput and redundancy. Follow Eric Geier as he bores secure Linux VPN tunnels through the big bad Internet.

I am always surprised by Nicholas Negroponte, he really keeps me on my toes with his pronouncements, and today is no exception. In an interview with Vivian Yeo, where he proudly trumpets his success in selling XO laptops, he also says that the Sugar Learning Platform was OLPC's biggest mistake. Let's start off with the good news. Negroponte tells us that over 900,000 laptops are in the hands of children from 31 nationalities. He claims another 230,000 are being shipped, with a backlog of 600,000 XO's. OLPC Peru is the bulk of the laptop sales, with 350,000 deployed and a commitment for 2.2 million total XO laptops.

Wikipedia’s decision to support Ogg Theora for video uploads may be the last chance to break the proprietary video monopoly embodied in H.264. Microsoft, Google and Apple have all built H.264 support into their products because it readily adapts to Digital Rights Management, without which studios and other video rights owners have been unwilling to make content available online.

In their recent Mozilla Labs "Design Challenge Summer 09" competition, Mozilla posed the question – "How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?". Out of the 128 submitted concepts, four "Best in Class" honors were chosen and a "People's Choice" award was bestowed. The peoples choice award went to Faber Ludens for his CubeZilla concept, in which sites can be arranged into equal segments on each face of a cube and rotated, in a similar way to a Rubik's Cube.

There’s no question that Ubuntu dominates the desktop-Linux world. With commanding market share and a huge user community, it’s by far the most well supported and documented open-source platform in the desktop world. On servers, however, the situation is different–and Canonical needs to address it if it wants to become a real player in the server market.

KDE and GNOME developers drafted a secret storage API designed to be a common interface for desktop applications that need to store passwords and other confidential data.

The hype over this operating system has been so heavy that failure would be a heavy blow. Google introduced Chrome OS July 7, promising a lightweight, Linux-based operating system for netbooks that will enable speedy Web applications. The move was a major shot at Microsoft, whose Windows desktop operating system Google intimated was antiquated. We at eWEEK have already provided 10 reasons why we are excited about Google's Chrome OS. But in the tradition of weighing the cons with the pros, there are some concerns about the new Chrome OS as well.

Canonical developer Karl Fogel has announced that the open sourcing of Launchpad has been delayed. Originally, Launchpad, the software and site that drives Canonical open source and project collaboration, was to go open source on the 21st of July. Canonical now say this will be at some time in "July / August 2009".

Old dogs may struggle with new tricks, but they seem to be able to figure out new licenses. In a shocking move, Microsoft announced Monday the release of Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC). The news reflects Microsoft's continued interest in lobotomizing its virtualization competition through low prices, but also the recognition that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat, Novell, and others in the open-source camp.

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2009

Establish, connect, and empower an active community of open source software (and hardware) developers across the military-industrial complex of the United States of America.

Book burning, at least in modern democracies, is supposed to be something of the past. Indeed, with books taking to devices like the Kindle, burning would seem an unlikely, if possible, exercise. That may or may not be quite so, however, depending on how you read last week's news.

Wikipedia users will be getting new tools for uploading, editing, and viewing video very soon. According to a Beet.TV interview with Erik Moller, who is the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, these features will be made available shortly. What's interesting, however, is the Web encyclopedia's choice of video formats and how it fits into a fracas in the browser world.