Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

atop is a handy top-like program that shows system load information in a separate section on top of process information; Juliet Kemp gives us a tour of this useful utility.

A week after adding API access to its Amazon-esque cloud, Rackspace has now open-sourced these APIs. On Wednesday, the company said it had opened up the specs for both its Cloud Servers APIs and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Meant to encourage the development of open standards for all so-called infrastructure clouds, the move is in stark contrast to Amazon's much-discussed silence over its own API philosophies.

Adobe has used the Open Source Conference (OSCON), currently taking place in California's San Jose, to announce a new strategy for its Flash Platform. Some people are questioning Adobe's motives.

Microsoft was in violation of the GPL (General Public License) on the Hyper-V code it released to open source this week. After Redmond covered itself in glory by opening up the code, it now looks like it may have acted simply to head off any potentially embarrassing legal dispute over violation of the GPL. The rest was theater.

Many a vigorous debate has been fought over any possible legal threats that might be inherent in Mono. Now that Microsoft has extended its Community Promise to cover select parts of the C# programming language, which is what Mono is built on, it is being hailed as evidence that Mono is safe. Bruce Byfield tries to answer the question, is it really?

The real-time web is shaping up to be the next online revolution, and as we saw during our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, it’s already begun. But there are still some things that are holding us back — for one, many services still aren’t actually real time, they’re just something close to it. That may work well enough for sites like Facebook, but as we begin to see more innovation on this front, there’s likely going to be much more demand for technology that is truly real time. Groovy Corp, a database software marker partially owned by Intel, thinks it has the answer: a relational data management system called the SQL Switch, which it says will make true real-time both affordable and feasible.

LiVES is a video editing and VJ tool for Linux and BSD systems and today it celebrates its version 1.0 birthday. LiVES provides realtime video performance and non-linear editing for all classes of video editors and VJs (VJ is the Video equivalent of a DJ).

The management interface of the current stable version of DD-WRT, the free router firmware, suffers a vulnerability that lets attackers run programs with root rights on the router. The vulnerability, described at milw0rm and in the DD-WRT forum, is caused by inadequate handling of meta-characters in the query string in DD-WRT's httpd web server. The server will then run programs even when no session is running.

I am a Linux geek. There I said it. Actually, I am kind of proud of being a Linux geek. I slogged through the bad old days to get here. It seems like every day something new shows up that makes me glad that I chose Linux as my tool of choice.

Free software may be becoming more attractive to businesses, but even though using the software is free, chances are they'll still need to hire some technical assistance from time to time. Open source tech support experts sometimes need a few different skills than their proprietary counterparts, but their salaries are often quite similar -- if not better.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC3, a release candidate of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.

Opponents of SQL had their hands strengthened when Google's SQL-free technique, "Map/Reduce", showed it could search databases measured in petabytes. They look on relational databases as antiquated, a technique that can't cope with today's quantities of data or meet the requirements of full-text searching. Rather than relations, they rely on key-value pairs.

A lobbying group has been launched by more than 70 companies, academic institutions, and communities, to promote open source software as a "transparent and cost-effective option" for U.S. government agencies. "Open Source for America" counts AMD, Canonical, Google, Novell, Oracle, and Red Hat among its members.

S2 Games may not be as well known as id Software or Epic Games, but what distinguishes them from most of the other game companies is that they actually support Linux. With S2 Games' Savage 2, for example they provide a Linux-native game client. S2 Games is hard at work on another title, Heroes of Newerth, and that too will be supported on Linux. In fact, it's already running on Linux and Linux gamers will likely find a native client binary around the time of the game's release on Windows (read: it won't be released months or years later, like what we frequently find with Linux ported titles). Sound pretty great, but too impatient to wait for the game's release? Well, come play it with us right now! And for free!

More than 70 organizations and individuals have joined to form a "unified voice" encouraging the U.S. government to support and participate in open source software.

Back in 2003, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, dismissed GNU/Linux as a "great environment for the hobbyist" but not for the enterprise. The relative success of Linux on Sun's chosen ground, and the subsequent decline in the fortunes of Sun have proved McNealy's assessment to be wrong, but Linux undeniably has its roots and inspiration among hackers and hobbyists.

Adobe has announced that it has open sourced two of its Flash player platforms. Adobe's core technologies will remain proprietary. On Tuesday Adobe launched the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), a rich media player platform. OSMF was previously part of a project codenamed Strobe. Adobe also open sourced the Text Layout Framework (TLF), a typography platform for Web apps.

An objection from IBM lodged with the bankruptcy court has opened up a surprise new front in the SCO Group liquidation hearing. According to IBM lawyers, in 2008 SCO boss Darl McBride made personal payments to Steven Norris via an intermediary, for searching for further investors willing to invest in SCO. Money was also paid by SCO's German subsidiary SCO Deutschland, with which Norris is reported to have signed a consulting contract.

Microsoft has again released code under GPLv2, this time the Live Services plugin Moodle. Microsoft's contribution follows close on the heels of the release of its Hyper-V driver to the Linux kernel under GPLv2. The free Live Services Moodle educational website builder for teachers and students can now be tied in with the Live@edu service for email, calendars and IM.

Some months back I developed some pyuno code for converting spreadsheets into CSV files from the command line. Pyuno being the Python interface to the OpenOffice runtime. One of the enhancement suggestions I got was to add the ability to extract all the sheets and/or a specific sheet rather than always extracting the first sheet. The following update to the code does just that.