Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The headlines in the US media warble every day with dispatches of how the government wrestles with the question of providing better healthcare for the nation's residents. The debate now in Congress has proven to be a lengthy one, and there is little doubt it will be contentious right up to the passage of any legislation (and, most likely, beyond). But as the US watches this debate unfold, many constituents may not realize that steps have already been taken to improve the US healthcare system, both with recent legislation and with 30-year-old software code--code that one company is harnessing with open source practices to improve clinical care across the country.

By now, most readers will be familiar with the local kernel exploit recently posted by Brad Spengler. This vulnerability, which affects the 2.6.30 kernel (and a test version of the RHEL5 "2.6.18" kernel), is interesting in a number of ways. This article will look in detail at how the exploit works and the surprising chain of failures which made it possible.

Market research firm Foote Partners has updated its survey of the most sought-after IT skills (non-certified) and ranked Linux experience and skills as the second most sought after by US and Canadian employers.

According to six concerned CentOS developers, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone is poised on the edge of the abyss. In an open letter posted to the CentOS website and the project mailing list, six fellow developers accuse project co-founder Lance Davis of putting the entire project at risk by disappearing from everyday involvement without ceding control to others.

One of the common questions we get here at linuxjournal.com is how we produce our videos. Shawn produced a howto video on some ways of doing it. The following describes how I capture my videos and also the script that I use to add the Linux Journal logo watermark to it.

PortableApps.com founder John T. Haller has announced that his site for portable applications has reached its 100 millionth download milestone. PortableApps.com allows users to easily install various popular open source applications to a USB flash drive or external hard drive. Once installed, the applications can run completely from the drive and be used on any Windows computer.

Emacs, the extensible editor of the GNU project, is available in version 23.1. The release adds countless modernizations to the traditional program, such as font anti-alising and support for D-Bus and zeroconf.

In time for the X.Org 7.5 release (whenever that may come), David Airlie has put out new driver releases for nineteen of the X.Org video drivers. These aren't updates to the mainline ATI/AMD, Intel, or even NVIDIA drivers, but some of the drivers for less common graphics hardware.

It seems that the main Admin Lance Davis has all but disappeared..

A dispute between Adam[sic] Cox and Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list has led to Cox standing down as TTY subsystem maintainer.

Researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories said on Tuesday that they have successfully run more than one million Linux kernels as virtual machines on a single high-performance cluster.

The court proceedings concerning the bankruptcy of the SCO Group were finalised on Monday with a 12-hour marathon hearing. The judge's ruling is expected in about a week. A surprising aspect of the hearing was a controversy that developed around the role of SCO's Vice President Hans Bayer, the former CEO of SCO Germany. This was sparked off by the question of which of SCO's business divisions possess any economic value that could be salvaged via ordered bankruptcy proceedings.

What sounds like DRM is really a cool open source journalism tool. That's my take-away from Associated Press to build news registry to protect content — a press release that went up on 23 July. After you get past the opening paragraphs, which are pure paranoidese...

With System z mainframe revenues down 39 per cent - and MIPS mainframe capacity shipments off 20 percent in the second quarter - IBM is keen on boosting mainframe sales. And it wants to use Linux as a lever. Commercial Linux distributor Novell has a more than 80 per cent share of Linux revenues on IBM's mainframe platform. The company has been shipping its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 since the end of March, and it wants to get more mainframe shops to add SLES 11 to Integrated Facility for Linux engines.

This chapter is an excerpt from Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language , authored by Mark Summerfield, published in the Addison-Wesley Professional Developer’s Library, Dec. 2008, ISBN 0137129297, Copyright 2009 Pearson Education, Inc. For more info check out Summerfield's new Digital Short Cut: Advanced Python 3 Programming Techniques

Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve touched on Wubi here and there but have never really gone into detail on exactly what it can do and how it works. According to the website, "Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way…" That sums it up pretty well. You can use your Windows (98, 2000, XP, Vista) Control Panel to add/remove it as easily as any other Windows app. The key thing about Wubi (Windows based Ubuntu Installer) is that you do not have to do any partitioning. It simply creates a file in Windows that both systems treat as if it’s a separate partition. You can choose the size of that file when you install.

Last week I talked about some the advantages of Free/Open Source software for us end users. Today developers speak on why they like to use FOSS; I received so many excellent responses that I have split this into two parts, and the second part will run tomorrow.

Ingres has announced it is working with VectorWise to improve database performance through fully exploiting the capabilities of modern CPUs. They are planning to create Ingres/VectorWise, a new product which incorporates the new techniques, for release in mid-2010. VectorWise is a commercial spin off of the, Ingres funded, Amsterdam based CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) database research team. Intel are supporting the project with engineering expertise and hardware.

Proponents of the open source and proprietary software sectors have clashed over a proposal to support multiple standards for the country's e-government projects. Last year, the Indian Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MCIT) released a draft policy, mandating the adoption of freely available standards in the deployment of the country's e-government projects--estimated to be valued at over US$4 billion.

IBM announced that is has acquired Ounce Labs, which makes software to scan source code for security and compliance vulnerabilities.