Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The idea of memory compression—compress relatively unused pages and store them in memory itself—is simple and has been around for a long time. Compression, through the elimination of expensive disk I/O, is far faster than swapping those pages to secondary storage. When a page is needed again, it is decompressed and given back, which is, again, much faster than going to swap.

Due to a long succession of pleasing experiences and unfettered software freedom, Carla Schroder hereby nominates today, and every day, as Linux/FOSS Gratitude Day. You don't have to kiss a programmer, but you might take the time to thank some of the folks who have made all of this wonderful software freely available.

The NetBeans developers have announced the start of the NetBeans 6.7 Community Acceptance Survey and are asking users to provide feedback on the current release candidate. The survey is part of the Community Acceptance Testing program (NetCAT) for NetBeans. The goal of NetCAT is to get early feedback from users and the NetBeans community on the main features and quality of the product, before release.

The world of open source development could be divided if the European Commission (EC) succeeds in passing a law extending consumer protection rules to software, according to experts. The EC proposes software companies be held liable in the European Union (EU) for the security and efficacy of their products. David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT Research at Ovum, thinks this may lead to a situation boosting current open source vendors' business models, but making it more difficult for independent developers to thrive.

For an outfit that calls itself “the world's largest business software company”, the German software giant SAP is relatively little-known in the open source world. With 51,500 employees, a turnover of 11.5 billion euros ($16 billion) last year, and operating profits of 2.7 billion euros ($3.8 billion), SAP is clearly one of the heavyweights in the computer world. Given that huge clout, SAP's attitude to open source is important; and yet it is hard to tell whether it is really free software's friend or its foe.

The KDE release train continues to roll, delivering another beta release of KDE 4.3 to you today. The effort has shifted towards increasing stability and adding polish to the codebase so our users will find a well-working KDE 4.3.0 on their desktops when it is released in late July.

Novell is considering making a one-click "open-source app store" for its upcoming Moblin-based OS for netbooks. The scheme is intended as a selling point for average users largely unfamiliar with free software alternatives outside a Microsoft platform. According to PC Pro, Novell believes baking an open-source software repository into the SUSE edition of Moblin will help sway more netbook users to uncheck the Windows option when buying their small, cheap computer.

Although it wasn't explicitly planned this way, a whole lot of the changes made in the new kernel version have an impact on file systems and data storage. There are, however, also plenty of changes elsewhere, for example faster booting, more efficient compression algorithms and hundreds of new and improved drivers.

Firefox 3.5 was originally intended to be Firefox 3.1; a fairly minor update with small fixes and improvements. But it took on a life of its own, and major work was accomplished in a short time. Sean Michael Kerner investigates how these happy accomplishments came about.

The shift among local organizations toward open source software (OSS) is driving more IT professionals to undergo additional training to equip themselves with the right skills. For example, Yuma Tejima, telecom manager for Asia at Genesys Conferencing, was keen on the Certificate of Performance in Enterprise Linux Administration (Copela) because his employer was preparing to move from SCO to the Red Hat Linux platform.

Google has announced the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) which allows Android users to write and run scripts in Python, Lua and BeanShell on an Android phone. Scripts have access to many of the Android APIs and are able to start activities, send text messages, make phone calls and read location and other sensor information.

At Research In Motion's Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando last month, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of the BlackBerry maker candidly shared with ZDNet Asia's sister site, Silicon.com, about touchscreen devices, CIOs and the future of the BlackBerry.

The KDE and GNOME communities are happy to announce the Platinum sponsors of the upcoming Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Nokia's Qt Software and Maemo will be the main sponsors of the event, which will be held from 3rd to 11th of July 2009 in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, Spain.

LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation's brand new conference intended to draw "the best and brightest...including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts," is still several months away. What isn't several months away, however, is the deadline for Early Bird registration — if you want to catch that worm, you'll have to get to running.

Asus was a Linux netbook pioneer, but now it's a Windows shop all the way. So what happened, and why is their new "It's Better With Windows" ad campaign so bizarre? Bruce Byfield tries to find out.

LXer Feature: 08-Jun-2009

Queries are the database equivalent of filters in a spreadsheet. Just as a filter can limit and reorganize the information displayed in a spreadsheet, so a query limits and reorganizes the information in a database. Either can be an efficient way of finding the information you want, especially when you're dealing with thousands of records.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A young woman in a white cocktail dress sat in a chair with a purple shawl wrapped around her head. She wore high heels, bulky brown sunglasses and a surgical mask. Moments later, the shawl and mask were ripped off and she sprang into song. A model’s floral fingernails tapping a computer with Microsoft Multi-Touch software, one of many touch-screen devices shown. It was all part of a musical revue by Micro-Star International celebrating the release of a new laptop. The rather eccentric display hardly seemed out of place at last week’s Computex trade show — the annual computer industry gala held here in Taiwan’s capital city. This year’s show signified the computer industry’s move far beyond traditional desktop and laptop PCs into more exotic devices. If dancing girls and loud music at an exhibitor’s booth helped attract attention to these strange new computers — or explain them — all the better.

After Christian Ehrlicher announced that he would step down from packaging and bug fixing for KDE on Windows, some articles were written which suggest that KDE on Windows is on hold now that the main developer has moved on. Even though KDE on Windows is only a small project and from the loss of one developer will be felt, we are far from dead. The Windows port has not been a one-man-project and many other people are still involved. KDE on Windows will continue to be developed and packages will continue to be made.

On May 18, the Linux Foundation announced that it had sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute protesting some provisions in the ALI's proposed principles to be applied to the law of software contracts. That was likely the first that many LWN readers had heard of this particular initiative - or, indeed, of the ALI in general. Your editor, being a masochistic sort of person, has plowed through all 305 pages of the principles (which were made official by the ALI on May 20) with an eye toward their effect on free software. What follows is a non-lawyerly summary of what he found.