Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The first of a series of events that will bring together implementors of OASIS OpenDocument Format/ISO 26300 to unilaterally test and discuss implementation issues of ODF with each other. All ODF implementors and/or those looking into the matter are invited to participate in this event on behalf of the Netherlands government and OpenDoc Society. The aim is to provide a low-level hands-on interoperability testing environment in which vendors and community members can fine tune the interoperability capabilities of their ODF implementations and make test cases, recommendations and create best practices for implementors.

If the trustee is successful, and given the way the relevant law reads, he should be, everything SCO has so desperately been trying to sell in order to feed their litigation habit will instead be sold in order to pay off their creditors - a thought we're sure chills old Darl McBride's cold, black heart right to the core. SCO, of course, says they plan to oppose the motion and present a new reorganization plan, but given the success their previous plans have had, we suspect the effort will be a lot like stretching out chewing gum to stop a 747. The hard-working guys at Groklaw, as always, have the text of the Trustee's motion along with commentary, as well as the whole lurid story for anyone who has managed to miss the three-ring circus.

Sun Microsystems Inc, a hardware maker that Oracle Corp is buying for more than $7 billion, may have broken a U.S. law prohibiting companies from bribing foreign officials, Sun said in a regulatory filing on Friday. "We have identified potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the resolution of which could possibly have a material effect on our business," Sun said in a 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said Oracle was aware of the matter before it agreed to buy Sun.

The Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor MP, today announced a bold and substantive “ Teacher Laptop Initiative”. This is part of a critical strategy to take forward the objective of improving Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning. The initiative aims to ensure every teacher owns and uses a laptop, by providing them with a monthly allowance which will cover the purchase costs as well as the costs of connectivity. The details of the initiative are attached [PDF].

[They will buy you a laptop, as long as it has "XP or higher" on it - Scott]

Coreboot.org released an almost-final 0.90 version of open source BIOS flashing firmware it says was nine years in the making. Flashrom offers Linux and UNIX users a BIOS flashing mechanism they can call their own, with support for 150 flash-chip families and 75 chipsets, Coreboot.org says. By its very nature, BIOS firmware is operating system-independent, since it loads before a computer's OS in order to identify, test, and initialize the device's processor, memory, graphics card, and peripherals. But, updating a BIOS to incorporate bug fixes and other improvements requires booting a computer into an operating system, then using the latter to run BIOS flashing software.

The release two weeks ago of WINE 1.1.20 brought some cleaner Direct3D code, but there really was not much to get overly excited about. The release of WINE 1.1.21, however, is different. With the release today of WINE 1.1.21, work is now underway in supporting Shader Model 4.0 in this open-source project atop Linux and other operating systems. Shader Model 4.0 is the shader language that is used by version 10 of Direct3D.

The saga of SCO v. Linux, known variously as SCO v. Novell, SCO v. IBM, SCO v. Everybody and their Mother, may be coming to a close. Yes, we know this comes as a shock — if anyone needs a moment to compose themselves, or, you know, dig out a case of Dom, we'll wait — but it may well happen faster than any of us ever expected.

Last month the US Election Technology Council (a trade association of US voting system manufacturers) released a white paper on open source and voting systems titled "Open Source - Understanding its application in the voting industry". The report came to the conclusion that the use of open source software for democratic elections is probably a bad thing - although the reasons given were less than convincing.

MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), the efficient, open industry standard for video encoding, has made huge strides to become the industry leader in all areas – it plays on mobiles and MP3 players, it's used by HDTV and Blu-ray Discs, and cameras and HD camcorders record in it. H.264, currently the most efficient video compression algorithm, is also, since Adobe integrated the codec into its Flash Player, used for web videos and now Microsoft is also adding H.264 to Silverlight 3. Nevertheless, there is one important snag with H.264 – from 2011, license fees will be required from sites streaming video using this technology.

PC users who want to have an Ubuntu machine without eighty-sixing Windows completely often configure their systems to run both -- though a reboot is sometimes required. Not so with Portable Ubuntu. The app starts up an instance of Hardy Heron within Windows on demand. Though its window frames and menu bars appear the same as those of the user's Windows setup, it's Ubuntu through and through.

South Africa's newest GNU/Linux distribution, Kongoni, yesterday released its first alpha release for the upcoming 1.12.2 release. Kongoni - the Shona word for Gnu - is a desktop-focused distribution with significant inspiration from BSD-Unix systems. Codenamed Sophocles, Kongoni 1.12.1 is based on Slackware 12.2 with the latest upstream patches and also features KDE 4.2.2 as well as the latest stable releases of most common desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org.

Compared to its predecessors, OpenOffice 3.1 offers a whole range of new features. Instant eye catchers are the improved anti-aliasing for graphics, better chart functionality, and the new text highlighting in Writer. However, inconspicuous new features like custom document property fields and the OpenOffice User Feedback Program are just as interesting. With half a million new lines of code, the OpenOffice developers have invested considerable time and effort in improving the office suite's anti-aliasing capabilities. Pixelated drawings, charts and characters are now a thing of the past: compared with previous versions, the latest edition sports noticeably smoother edges.

At Phoronix we have tested out Ubuntu 9.04 quite extensively with a variety of different hardware and have delivered numerous benchmarks, but we had not looked closely at running the Jaunty Jackalope with older hardware. In this article though we have done just that and carried out a number of Ubuntu 9.04 tests using an older VIA-based PC.

Reports start to appear in the press about the ODF support quality enabled by the Service Pack 2 inside Microsoft Office 2007. I could say that I’m not surprised, but I somewhat had also expected the contrary. Unfortunately it seems we have here a poor implementation of ODF. If further reports confirm it (and I have no serious doubt they will), we will have the case of a monopolistic vendor messing up its own implementation of an open standard and have no viable excuse for doing so.

Oracle Corp Chief Executive Larry Ellison shook up Silicon Valley last month when he made a surprise move to enter the hardware market by acquiring computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. Some analysts speculated that Oracle, the world's largest database software maker, actually wants Sun's software assets and that it might eventually sell off the hardware business. Below are Ellison's comments on his rationale for buying Sun and strategy for turning around the struggling company. Ellison supplied his answers to Reuters questions via email.

The announcement a few weeks ago of the preliminary plans for GNOME 3.0 catapulted the GNOME Shell and GNOME Zeitgeist into the spotlight. Previously little-known, these programs are now identified as the basis of a new user experience in GNOME 3.0. Meanwhile, both are in their early stages, and few have tried them, with the result that they are surrounded by question marks. What exactly are these programs? What vision do they share in common? Most importantly of all, are they capable of bearing the expectations placed upon them? Any answers to these questions must be tentative, because both projects are in rapid development, and certain to change dramatically by the time GNOME 3.0 is released. All the same, those in search of preliminary answers can find them with a bit of quick compiling.

Settlers on a long-forgotten Sun-Microsystems middleware island are expected to turn to open-source in greater numbers rather than stick with new master Oracle. News of Oracle's potential acquisition has acted as a catalyst for early users of the Sun ONE application server to finally review their increasingly dated web and back-office systems and to move rather than risk a licensing hike. Red-Hat services firm Freedom OSS, which has already been migrating Sun ONE customers to JBoss, told The Reg it expects a four-fold increase in business as a result of such reviews. The company currently moves between 10 and 15 organizations a year off Sun ONE to JBoss.

Novell is swearing its oath of fealty to the Moblin variant of Linux for mobile computing devices, based on Intel's Atom low-powered processors and, soon with the Moblin 2.0 release, netbooks. Intel launched the Moblin project back in July 2007 and got Moblin 1.0 into the field in April 2008, concurrently with the launch of the Atom processors. These are cut-down variants of the old Pentium-style processors that consume very little electrical power (4 or 8 watts in the current 1.6 GHz single-core and dual-core chips) and yet provide enough computing power to be useful in many kinds of devices.

UC Berkeley Extension will start offering a course (1 credit) titled "Open Source Fundamentals and Strategies". LJ contributing editor Ibrahim Haddad developed the course for UCB and will be teaching it.

There are awards, and then there are awards. The Oscars may hold audiences captive for a night, but the Nobel Prize is an award forever. The Open Source community has its share of awards as well, and award season would appear to be upon us, as two of the largest have opened nominations.