Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Adobe Systems has open-sourced two pieces of Flash technology to build community buy-in around its media player. Today, the company announced the release of the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and Text Layout Framework (TLF) under version 1.1 of the Mozilla Public License. TPF is an ActionScript library that's been built on Flash Player 10's text engine and Adobe AIR 1.5, providing typographic and text layout for the web. It's been used in the NYTimes.com Reader 2.0 and Boston GlobeReader.

Vietnamese Linux technology firm Hacao has released a netbook, along with a new bilingual (English/Vietnamese) release of its Hacao Linux 2009 CE distro. The Hacao Netbook is based on an Intel Atom-based MSI Wind, and offers a 10-inch screen and 160GB of storage.

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.

Over the last few years KDE has seen increased involvement of students and university researchers. While many universities still feel uneasy about working with Free Software, the open and welcoming attitude in the KDE community has already brought several scientific research projects to life. A prime example is of course the Nepomuk project, officially finished but still very much alive within the Free Software- and scientific communities. Furthermore, many involved contributors make use of scientific research papers while looking for inspiration to solve the more complex problems involved in writing software. The Free Software community also contributes in a practical way to science: the Avogadro project, grown out of the KDE educational application Kalzium develops an advanced molecular editor designed for use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. Last Akademy, an initiative was developed by Celeste Lyn Paul to bring KDE and science even closer.

Today's low-end PC hardware is like the supercomputers of yesteryear, and yet it can feel like you're still struggling with an old 386. Akkana Peck shows how to use the ps and top commands to find CPU and memory hogs on your Linux computer.

Making the best use of available memory is one of the biggest challenges for any operating system. Throwing virtualization into the mix adds both new challenges (balancing memory use between guests, for example) and opportunities (sharing pages between guests). Developers have responded with technologies like hot-plug memory and KSM, but nobody seems to think that the problem is fully solved. Transcendent memory is a new memory-management technique which, it is hoped, will improve the system's use of scarce RAM, regardless of whether virtualization is being used.

A security researcher has released zero-day code for a flaw in the Linux kernel, saying that it bypasses security protections in the operating system. The source code for the exploit was made available last week by researcher Brad Spengler on the Dailydave mailing list. According to the researcher, the code exploits a vulnerability in Linux version 2.6.30, and 2.6.18, and affects both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The 2.6.18 kernel is used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Renaissance Project team, part of the User Experience Project (UX) at OpenOffice.org, have announced that the Renaissance prototyping phase that began on the 12nd of June, will end on the 24th of July. The goal of the prototyping is to build "a flexible framework for mid-fidelity prototyping to test promising UI designs with real users".

A software company based in Redmond, Wash. has released 20,000 lines of code under GPLv2 for three Linux device drivers. Microsoft says its first open source Linux code contribution is designed to speed the performance of the operating system when it's run in a Hyper-V virtual machine.

The mobile industry is becoming interesting. We have finally reached a point where the smartphone is actually smart and the average user can gain serious benefits from using one. How did this come about? In a word: competition. When the iPhone arrived on the scene, users scrambled to get their hands on it, and competitors scrambled to make a device that would have the same appeal. It has taken a while, but the competition has arrived. Android phones, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold--they are all outstanding entries into this market. But two of those entries will, in my opinion, outshine the rest for one simple reason--open source. Why is open source going to help raise these phones above the competition? Here are 10 reasons.

Last week VIA re-released their Chrome 9 DRM in hopes of pushing it into the mainline Linux kernel. However, the only user of this DRM code at present is their Linux binary graphics driver and VIA Technologies has no intentions of providing an open-source Chrome 9 3D driver. However, within a month or so, VIA claims to be releasing a new 2D driver that can use this DRM to some extent. This whole situation with VIA has reignited the discussion over what to do when a company is interested in pushing an open-source DRM driver into the mainline Linux tree, but it's really only used by closed-source user-space drivers.

Microsoft dropped a mini-bombshell on Monday, announcing that it is contributing thousands of lines of code for inclusion in Linux. But lest anyone think Microsoft suffered a massive head trauma over the weekend, the code it is releasing isn't really about helping Linux compete better with Microsoft. The drivers are really geared at making Windows a better host for Linux.

Microsoft Corp.'s move to release three of its drivers to Linux, however technically modest it may be, could put pressure on other closed-source vendors to follow suit. The uneven availability of drivers for Linux has long contributed to the open-source operating system's forbidding reputation among non-techies, and -- despite its free price tag -- to its slow growth. According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, a longtime Linux developer for Novell Inc. and the head of the Linux Driver Project, Linux today "supports hundreds of thousands of drivers."

Microsoft is embracing cancer to help ensure Windows survives server-room consolidation. The company has released 20,000 lines of Windows kernel code under version two of the GPL. Microsoft called the license it once hated "the community's preferred license". How things have changed. Back in 2001, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie described the GPL as a threat to users' intellectual property and the independent commercial software sector.

KDE announced today that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion-based revision control system. "This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world." The 500,000th commit took place on January 19th, 2006, and the 750,000th commit 23 months later on December 18th, 2007. In contrast, only nineteen more months were required to reach the 1,000,000 commit milestone.

When I took Calculus in college, my Professor would give us substantial partial credit for test problems that we got wrong for minor arithmetic errors, and rightfully so, too. Sometimes even simple-sounding problems resulted in a full page, or more, of calculations. Simply changing a -1 to a +1 early on in a problem could be completely devastating.

Zeroshell can manage simple VPNs, and more complex bonded VPNs for higher throughput and redundancy. Follow Eric Geier as he bores secure Linux VPN tunnels through the big bad Internet.

I am always surprised by Nicholas Negroponte, he really keeps me on my toes with his pronouncements, and today is no exception. In an interview with Vivian Yeo, where he proudly trumpets his success in selling XO laptops, he also says that the Sugar Learning Platform was OLPC's biggest mistake. Let's start off with the good news. Negroponte tells us that over 900,000 laptops are in the hands of children from 31 nationalities. He claims another 230,000 are being shipped, with a backlog of 600,000 XO's. OLPC Peru is the bulk of the laptop sales, with 350,000 deployed and a commitment for 2.2 million total XO laptops.

Wikipedia’s decision to support Ogg Theora for video uploads may be the last chance to break the proprietary video monopoly embodied in H.264. Microsoft, Google and Apple have all built H.264 support into their products because it readily adapts to Digital Rights Management, without which studios and other video rights owners have been unwilling to make content available online.

In their recent Mozilla Labs "Design Challenge Summer 09" competition, Mozilla posed the question – "How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?". Out of the 128 submitted concepts, four "Best in Class" honors were chosen and a "People's Choice" award was bestowed. The peoples choice award went to Faber Ludens for his CubeZilla concept, in which sites can be arranged into equal segments on each face of a cube and rotated, in a similar way to a Rubik's Cube.