Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, will help the company gain some search share against Google and has features that users will find helpful, but it is in no way a quick fix for the company's poor position in the search market, analysts said. As expected, on Thursday Microsoft revealed a rebranded and expanded search engine, which it's promoting as a "decision engine" aimed at helping people better organize search information and find what they're looking for more quickly. The news came after months of speculation about what Microsoft would call its next iteration of Live Search and what new features it would have.

Svartalf, a member of the Phoronix Forums and developer for Linux Game Publishing, recently asked our readers on the forums to provide a wish-list of games they wished to see ported to Linux. There ended up being an outpouring of interested Linux gamers with more than 1,120 replies! Svartalf shared that "[the] effort that actually did much more than I'd hoped for" and "as it stands, we've got one on contract (stalled though...) and one complete game as a result of this thread."

Linux, as a standalone operating system, is much more secure than most operating system. Anything though that works with the Internet is vulnerable to attacks on the Internet infrastructure. Recently, though, attacks against the DNS (Domain Name System), the Internet's address system, have become more common. To help secure your connection to the Internet, Fedora now includes DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) by default. Since I use Fedora, and its relatives RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and CentOS for some of my Internet servers, I really appreciate this added level of security.

NComputing announced a partnership with the United Nations to bring 1,000 Linux-based NComputing desktops to schools in developing countries, says the company. NComputing also announced that several electric utilities in the U.S. and Canada have qualified its "one-Watt" devices for purchase rebates and rate discounts.

Pure, unadulterated FOSS is, of course, free to distribute as one pleases. What happens, though, when a private company grabs a piece of FOSS, adds a little of its own secret sauce to the mix, and creates a new application? How free is the software then? The answer depends in part on the license under which the original application operated and what exactly you want to do with the newly created software.

It appears that great minds think alike (or in the case of open-source software and the close-ties between Google and Mozilla, share-alike). Within a week of each other both Mozilla and Google have announced new initiatives to allow for extensions to their browsers to be written using regular HTML / JavaScript and CSS, greatly lowering the bar for developers to join in. Strap on your Mozilla Jetpack and take a peek at extensions for Chrome.

The Eclipse Foundation has published the results of the global Eclipse Community Survey 2009 in The Open Source Developer ReportPDF. The Foundation held the survey from mid-April to mid-May in order to get developer feedback on the tools and software that they use. The organisation wanted to learn how the respondents used open source software and how they interacted with the Eclipse community. Nearly 1,500 participants took part in the Foundation poll, of which 27.8 per cent were from Germany, followed by 15.7 per cent from the United States. Only 0.6 per cent of participants were from the United Kingdom. Approximately 80 per cent of the respondents worked for companies that are not members of an open source consortium.

With the release of the KDE 4.3 beta, the project is returning to incremental releases, and concentrating on customization and ease of use on the desktop, the panel, and system settings. Bruce Byfield takes an in-depth look.

Web, scripting, and open-source have been boosted in the next version of the ever-popular IntelliJ IDAE, released this week in early access. Codenamed Maia, and due this fall, IDEA 9 wraps in features designed to keep the charged-for Java development environment in the running against free tools based on Eclipse.

Plymouth, a project spawned by Red Hat to replace RHGB in Fedora with a much cleaner boot splash program that leverages newer technologies like kernel mode-setting, will not be finding its way into Ubuntu. Originally, it was considered that Plymouth could replace USplash in Ubuntu 9.04, but then Canonical and other developers decided to push that transition off to Ubuntu 9.10. They planned to integrate Plymouth in Ubuntu 9.10 (and offered up a PPA) to provide a clean, professional boot experience. However, this week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona that decision has been reversed. Plymouth will not be finding its way into Ubuntu.

Reports of the Linux netbook's death at the hands of Microsoft have been greatly exaggerated. A flood of Linux netbook news will be made next week at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, but, after Intel announced the beta of Moblin 2, HP has decided not to wait and made an important Linux netbook announcement this week. HP announced that it was releasing a new netbook, the HP Mini 110, that runs Ubuntu Linux 8.04 with HP's easy to use Mi (Mobile internet) desktop interface. It will also be available with XP Home, but, for once, the Linux powered model looks to be the more compelling buy even if you don't care for Linux.

The Linux Chromium alpha is shaping up nicely. Despite the missing features and rendering glitches, it is relatively usable and maturing at a reasonable pace. The developers still have a lot of work to do, but the portability challenges no longer seem insurmountable. Users who want to test the latest version of Chromium on Ubuntu can take advantage of Fabien Tassin's daily build package archive.

I was hugely entertained by the latest piece of Microsoft spin: apparently the recession is putting a dampener on migrations to open source. Of course, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan put it: "The government has run out of our money." Nevertheless, I agree with Brown that this is an international crisis and one that demands an international response, even though not all countries are in the same dilapidated condition as the United Kingdom.

What would e-mail look like if it were invented today, rather than several years ago? Meet Google Wave, a preview application shown off Thursday at the Google I/O conference. The Google Wave site is now up and running, although access to the application will be restricted. Google Wave was developed by the Google Maps team, led by Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens. "One of the best times of my life was in 2005, just after the launch of Google Maps, when developers started doing crazy things with the APIs," Rasmussen said, adding that he hopes developers will do the same with Wave.

Ext3, the default Linux file system for many years, is definitely starting to show its age. Modern mass storage devices are approaching its limits and block-based data management is no longer adequate for modern file sizes. High time for an update!

At its I/O conference yesterday (27th of May) Google gave developers a preview of a new communication and collaboration product called Google Wave. Google will invite selected programmers to contribute to this project even before the software is released and plans to make Wave freely available as open source software in a few months.

An I/O controller is a system component intended to arbitrate access to block storage devices; it should ensure that different groups of processes get specific levels of access according to a policy defined by the system administrator. In other words, it prevents I/O-intensive processes from hogging the disk. This feature can be useful on just about any kind of system which experiences disk contention; it becomes a necessity on systems running a number of virtualized (or containerized) guests. At the moment, Linux lacks an I/O controller in the mainline kernel. There is, however, no shortage of options out there. This article will look at some of the I/O controller projects currently pushing for inclusion into the mainline.

It's been the better part of a year since the Large Hadron Collider — the massive particle accelerator operated by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) — was in the headlines, and even then it wasn't good news. The LHC has suffered from everything from poor craftsmanship to hackers to death threats from a paranoid populace — but it looks like the Device of Doom or Discovery will be back online and launching us into the future, or oblivion, by the time Santa makes his annual appearance.

In part 1 ace coder Akkana Peck taught us how to use Python and PyGTK to bring up a window and draw lines and circles. Today we'll expand on that humble beginning and draw some pretty graphics.

At its I/O developer conference held in San Francisco this week, Google has presented a range of new products and promoted a web-based programming model as the future of software development. The new products include Google's Web Elements, which allow web developers to integrate Google products like Calendar, Maps, Custom Search or News into their web pages, simply by copying and pasting a few lines of code.