Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Although Dell didn't have much to say about Google's Chrome OS announcement last week, the PC maker is apparently looking closely at it. But for Dell--which was not listed as one of the PC makers working with Google on Chrome OS--it is just one of a number of Linux-based operating systems it is evaluating.

Hewlett-Packard Co., looking to take advantage of uncertainty surrounding the future of Sun products once it is acquired by Oracle, today unveiled a series of migration plans to entice Sparc users to switch to HP.

Bugs are a fact of life in the technology world, and the Open Source community is no exception. What is exceptional, however, is the open way these vulnerabilities are handled, as the developers behind Mozilla's Firefox browser have aptly demonstrated.

With all the recent heat generated about Mono and the C# language, it only seems appropriate to take a look at the issue from a programmer's perspective. David Siegel talks about how he came to choose C# for writing GNOME Do.

If you're coming fresh from Microsoft Excel, you might wonder where the Pivot tables are in OpenOffice.org Calc. The problem is, they're masquerading under the name of DataPilots. But, under any name, DataPilots are Calc's way of allowing you to quickly reorganize information in a range of cells so that you can gain a new insight into them. In a way, you could think of them as the spreadsheet equivalent of queries in databases. They aren't difficult to create, but they do take a little bit of thought to set up correctly.

Kenneth Wimer of the Canonical Design Team has announced that the team is seeking high quality desktop backgrounds from "anyone and everyone" for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" release. The team have created a Flickr photo group pool where users can submit or simply browse the proposed backgrounds. "Ubuntu would like to include a beautiful set of images for our users to choose from in our next release," said Wimer.

Emery Fletcher knows just as much about Google's ChromeOS, the reigning champion of blogware, as any other commentator in the whole world, and generously shares his baseless insightful insights with a grateful audience.

Skip-free audio and video playback is a fundamental expectation for many - if not most - Linux users. Given the importance of this feature and the increase in hardware performance over the years, one would think that the audio latency problem would have been solved some time ago. The recent posting of (and mixed reception for) the "RealtimeKit" mechanism shows that this issue remains open, though, and that we are still short of a consensus on how it should be solved.

The Luxembourg security specialists G-SEC have published details of a vulnerability in the majority of browsers which will either crash the browser or consume so much memory that it makes the computer virtually unusable. The trick is simple. Using JavaScript's DOM (Document Object Model), create a selection menu on the web page; a select element. Then assign to that select element's length attribute a very high value, as a result there is a continuous allocation of memory. The length attribute specifies the number of menu items the select element should contain, and according to the specification (and common sense) should be read only, but in many cases, it is writeable.

At the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Amarok developers Bart Cerneels and Nikolaj Hald Nielsen gave a talk about how a community-developed Free Software project like Amarok can work with businesses in a way that benefited both, without compromising on the spirit or openness of the project. One of the things that was touched upon was the recent release of the Palm Pre smartphone which relies on Apple's iTunes software for synchronising music with a computer. An interesting question asked was what would happen if Apple decided to block the Pre from using iTunes. Now, just over a week later, this is exactly what happened. Apple has indeed blocked the Pre from using iTunes with its latest update.

The inaugural meeting of the Online Gaming High Scalability Special Interest Group was a one day conference on the theme of "Should you bet on the Cloud". From the users point of view, an online gaming system seems simple but behind the scenes there is a high level of complexity, from ensuring response times, handling hundreds, thousands or more clients, ensuring the reliability of the entire system and managing the security of a system which may be handling virtual or real money. The question asked by the conference was can "The Cloud" help address those issues. The 180 conference attendees came from a wide range of businesses, from the obvious online bookies, poker and other game oriented companies to banks and financial institutions who have similar issues.

Specially crafted DHCP servers can take control of a PC if the PC is running the DHCP client supplied by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) (dhclient). This is the default set-up in Ubuntu, BSD and many other Linux distributions. According to an ISC advisory, the vulnerability is based on a buffer overflow that allows attackers to inject arbitrary code into a system and execute it at root level. The buffer overflow can be triggered in the script_write_params method using excessively long server-supplied subnet masks.

One of the GNOME projects that's in development that should premiere around the time of GNOME 3.0 is Zeitgeist, which is the system for tracking user activity and events and then logging it, so that later on the user can use the Zeitgeist tool to browse or find events and files on the computer. This project is described by the Zeitgeist developers as, "You worked on a file, but you cannot remember where you saved it? You visited a web page about basketball three days ago, but you cannot find the URL in your browser's history? No problem, this is where Zeitgeist enters the scene...

Google’s announcement last week concerning its plans to bring out a fully fledged operating system was inevitably going to put the cat amongst the twitterati. “Let’s see,” asked the pundits, “who else makes operating systems?” Of course the intention was to have the Microsoft marketing monster shaking in its boots, not least to stave off a similar intent by the latter as it launches a number of online services of its own.

There are a number of ways to extract a range of pages from a PDF file: there are PDF related toolkits for doing it, or you can use Ghostscript directly.

Mozilla has acknowledged that there is a critical JavaScript vulnerability in its Firefox 3.5 web browser and has confirmed that it's currently working on an update to address the problem. As a workaround, Mozilla advises users to disable the Just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler. To do so, users must first enter about:config into the browsers location bar and then set the javascript.options.jit.content setting value to "false". When making changes to the about:config settings, users will first see a warning message stating that "This might void your warranty" and that changes to the advanced settings can be harmful to the stability, security and performance of Firefox. To continue users must click a button marked "I'll be careful I promise!".

In the past three months, Oracle's acquisition Sun lost over one billion dollars in revenue. The spring of 2008 had stood at $3.8 billion, while the figure for 2009 was $2.6 billion. The loss was about 10 cents per share, with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) adjusting the loss to 30 cents per share. Sun's preliminary quarterly report falls short because the company wants to migrate its results into the annual report in August, their fiscal year having ended June 30.

The race to fast boot times is on, with MontaVista making the latest headlines. The embedded Linux vendor announced in the United States Tuesday its latest system is able to boot in one second, and released a video demonstrating a vehicle dashboard system going from cold boot into a "fully operational" state in that time.

It's getting to where a fellow can't enjoy a nice relaxing boot time these days. The latest perpetrator of the conspiracy: Linux application tool vendor MontaVista, which said today that it is demonstrating an embedded Linux system that boots in just one second. MontaVista's Linux demo goes from a cold boot into a sample, "fully operational" vehicle dashboard application in a single second, the company said. It will be showing off the speedy boot performance at the Virtual Freescale Technology Forum this week.

In 1996 when KDE was first announced, it had only a handful of developers and the project could manage the source code without using a revision control system. More and more developers have begun to contribute to KDE over the years, and while there has been some attrition, the total number of active developers working on KDE has been steadily growing. In order to get a pulse from the current developer community, Simon St. James and Arthur Schiwon produced and plotted two basic metrics that show the continued growth within the KDE community.