Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this phone interview that took place in front of an audience at OOPSLA 2008, Guy Steele spins a yarn with John McCarthy, the father of Lisp, attempting to find out some details surrounding the language inception in the 50’ and its later evolution.

There are several paths that Oracle could take to fully utilize the assets they are acquiring from Sun to become more dominant. The most obvious is to simply become a platform vendor and sell off the hardware to HP, Dell, or Lenovo in exchange for cash and a stronger strategic relationship with the company they chose. The most powerful result would come with HP. And - combined with a reinvigorated Unbreakable Linux, Oracle and HP could effectively take control of much of the corporate market. However, what if Oracle wanted to make a play to become as strong as IBM was when it was at its peak? Could they parley this acquisition into something vastly greater? Let's explore that today.

I've been writing Linux guidebooks for some time, and it's fair to say that most people who buy my books are Windows users looking to make the leap to Linux (or perhaps just wondering what the fuss is about). Because of this, I've heard a lot of excuses why people quit Linux, and return to Windows. I'm happy to say that the excuses are getting far less common nowadays, compared to 2003, when I wrote my first book. But I still hear 'em. Here are the top seven reasons I've come across. No doubt you've heard them too.

It’s the most secure distribution version of Windows XP ever produced by Microsoft: More than 600 settings are locked down tight, and critical security patches can be installed in an average of 72 hours instead of 57 days. The only problem is, you have to join the Air Force to get it. The Air Force persuaded Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide it with a secure Windows configuration that saved the service about $100 million in contract costs and countless hours of maintenance. At a congressional hearing this week on cybersecurity, Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, shared the story as a template for how the government could use its massive purchasing power to get companies to produce more secure products. And those could eventually be available to the rest of us.

In the Linux and FOSS worlds we've been complaining for decades about vendor lock-in, platform and service silos, walled gardens and other annoyances. So now I'm wondering what scholarship has been devoted to these practices.

For Linux users who don't need absolute top-notch 3D performance, Intel is considered the preferred graphics solution, not least because the company develops its drivers as open source within the framework of the X.org project. However Intel’s drivers are currently in a state of some disarray.

It has been a while since last talking about OpenSolaris 2009.06 at Phoronix, but this weekend we decided to fire up Sun's latest build based upon the SXCE 111a build available from Genunix. Enclosed are a few screenshots and other information about this Sun community operating system that should be officially released within a month.

Google and the members of the Open Handset Alliance have been sued for $94 million for trademark violation. The case is being brought by Erich Specht and Android Data Corp, who were granted a trademark on "Android Data" in 2002. Android Data Corp is a small private company based in Palantine, Illinois. In 2007, Google applied for the Android trademark, just before launching its mobile phone operating systems. In February 2008, the PTO rejected that application citing the Android Data trademark. Google appealed, saying Android Data had lost it's claim due to inactivity, but the PTO rejected that and other appeals and suspended Google's application in November 2008.

One might think that the ext3 filesystem, by virtue of being standard on almost all installed Linux systems for some years now, would be reasonably well tuned for performance. Recent events have shown, though, that some performance problems remain in ext3, especially in places where the fsync() system call is used. It's impressive what can happen when attention is drawn to a problem; the 2.6.30 kernel will contain fixes which seemingly eliminate many of the latencies experienced by ext3 users. This article will look at the changes that were made, including a surprising change to the default journaling mode made just before the 2.6.30-rc1 release.

The next Portland State Aerospace Society rocket, scheduled for first launch this summer, will have new hardware, including a switch from CAN to USB.

The Open Invention Network, an industry organization that protects Linux by acquiring and licensing open-source patents, is taking Microsoft to task over three patents related to its now-settled lawsuit against in car GPS device maker TomTom. Microsoft sued TomTom in February for allegedly infringing on eight of its patents, three of which pertained to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. At the time, Microsoft officials said the suit wasn't the start of a patent enforcement campaign against Linux, but didn't rule out further lawsuits.

Financial troubles are an ever more common reality as the economic climate continues to venture through the monsoon season, and not-for-profit organizations are no exception. Such appears to be the case for the GNOME Foundation, the forces behind the venerable GNOME desktop, as the organization's 2009 budget is finalized and thoughts — and worries — turn to 2010.

Linux comes with bales of great utilities that show you exactly what is happening on your system. The popular lsof command not only lists open files and who is using them, it also reveals who is connected to your computer, and on which TCP/IP ports.

The discovery that Windows 7 will use desktop virtualization so you can run Windows-XP-compatible applications caused almost as much excitement as the news the Windows 7 Release Candidate would ship this week and next. The planned Windows XP Mode will, theoretically, let you keep on running your existing applications on a brand-new Windows 7 machine, even if the applications themselves don't yet run natively on Windows 7.

Project Renaissance of OpenOffice.org opened up proposals for "Access Functionality" design changes for its office suite on April 20, 2009. The Impress presentation application was chosen as the Guinea pig. Deadline for submissions is just around the corner: May 4, 2009.

Well over a year ago we shared that two new PC action games were being ported to Linux. These games were Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor, but throughout 2008 updates on the Linux clients status were bleak. This February we then learned that LGP has been working on Shadowgrounds: Survivor for Linux, while work on the original Shadowgrounds port to Linux seemed to have been dropped. A month later we were then playing Shadowgrounds: Survivor on Linux through a closed-beta program at Linux Game Publishing.

A presentation on CouchDB given at the recent Golden Gate Ruby Conference by Matt Aimonetti, a member of the Rails Activists, has triggered controversy within the Rails community. The presentation in question was titled "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform like a Pr0n Star" and was themed throughout with sexually suggestive images. Complaints and expressions of discomfort with the content began to appear on blogs in the days following the conference.

Doctors tend to restrict their writing to journals that target their peers rather than to publications meant for consumption by the general public. For the most part, they have shunned Wikipedia, with its open editing policy. However, a recent study suggests that more professional participation on Wikipedia could be of great benefit to the public.

It would seem that George Orwell might have been more prophetic than we perhaps gave him credit for. Currently, our televisions cannot watch us, but at the rate things are progressing, it is only a matter of time. After all, most PCs now come with web cams and certainly 90% of cell phones.

According to Net Application's Market Share service, Linux has achieved a one per cent market share of desktop, or client, operating systems.