Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is denying that a list posted on Wikileaks.org is the same list it maintains of sites believed to be hosting harmful content such as child porn and malware. The official blacklist is a closely guarded secret.

There are many criticisms that one can make of the applications offered by the free software community, but lack of choice is generally not one of them. Our community thrives on competition while our licensing makes it hard to keep secrets from competitors. A recent episode in the Puppet community shows that, while this competition can sometimes take unwelcome forms, there is often little to do but to welcome it anyway.

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for July to December 2008. This document includes reports of the board and the Marketing and System Administration working groups, details of the KDE e.V. activities of the last two quarters of 2008, financial information, and future plans. All long-term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V.

New Mexico LinuxFest! New Mexico's premier free open source software conference and expo. Coming November 2009

X Input 2, a major rework to the X.Org input extension, is a step closer to reality. Originally it was hoped that X Input 2 would be ready for X Server 1.6, but that didn't end up happening and also resulted in Multi-Pointer X being disabled in this latest X Server release. This morning, however, Peter Hutterer (of MPX fame) has his first working X Input 2 implementation.

Sun's complex software licenses are reportedly one area of interest in the due diligence. Both companies are big supporters of Linux -- an open-source software platform, but IBM is concerned if any of Sun's licenses conflict with its own, according to the report. Another reported area of interest is Sun's 2004 agreement with Microsoft Corp., a 10-year deal under which Microsoft paid $700 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit by Sun and another $900 million to resolve patent issues between the two companies.

The Internet Archive organization plans next week to announce the opening of a new data center to house two petabytes of information for its Wayback Machine, the digital time capsule that stores archived versions of Web pages dating back to 1996. For example, this is what Computerworld's Web site looked like in 1997, what Google looked like in 1998 and what CNN looked like in 2000. The Wayback Machine houses 85 billion Web pages archived for more than a dozen years, which amounts to three petabytes of data, or about 150 times the content of the Library of Congress. Only five years ago, the Wayback Machine contained about 30 billion Web pages. It is expected to continue to grow by 100TB of data per month now that it's live.

KDE is about the community, rather than the product. It is not all about the code: there are many other ways in which people can be part of KDE, and a very simple way is to connect with other people. In an effort to bridge the gap between users and developers, the KDE Community Forums have launched a new initiative to coordinate feature requests. A new "Brainstorm" section has been created in the KDE Community Forums: users are encouraged to post requests there.

Sometimes open source ideals make for the strangest–and most wonderful–bedfellows. We met Dr. Vandana Shiva–physicist, scientist, environmentalist, and activist–several years ago. Her work saving seeds and protecting traditional knowledge in the farming industry parallels the openness, transparency, collaboration and freedom of open source ideology. Her simple, clear explanation of why knowledge should be shared–and the devastating results should it be hoarded–is part of the essential truth that makes the work we do so incredibly important. But don’t take our word for it.

The devices we use to access the internet are growing smaller and smaller, with more and more users turning to mobile devices to get their web fix on the fly. Nearly everyone in the browser market is scrambling to get their own mobile offering up to snuff, and Open Source heavyweight Mozilla is no exception.

Everyone is writing "Foo Best Linux Application" lists all full of good Linux apps, so here are my own 7 Best Excellent Linux Apps You May Not Have Been Introduced To Yet. They are presented in no particular order or categorization, they're just good applications I've been using and enjoying, all 100% genuine Free/Open Source software and not crusted with any proprietary baggage.

Thanks to the installation script by Ignacio Valdes and the patch by Kevin Toppenburg for his GUI Configuration tool, I was able to install WorldVista on a Moka5 virtual machine based on PCLinuxOS-2007. I did this for my own interest, and I know there are other demos and virtual appliances available for VISTA, but Moka5 makes it very easy to install and run a pre-configured WorldVista server, so I thought I'd share it, in case anyone else is interested. I also have some links to a pre-configured version of the CPRSChart and GUIConfig front ends that should be able to connect to the server if run on the same machine hosting the Moka5/PCLinuxOS-2007 virtual machine.

Earlier this week Google had published their list of 2009 Summer of Code projects and FFmpeg was among them. Last week we published an interview with the FFmpeg developers where we learned more about their v0.5 release and other topics like OpenCL, Blu-ray, and multi-threading. Since running that interview, where it was found that Blu-ray wasn't actively being worked on due in part to a lack of hardware, a number of readers have stepped up and offered Blu-ray drives and media to help developers, which may result in Blu-ray support coming sooner rather than later.

If IBM actually were to buy Sun Microsystems Inc., the world's largest maker of Unix servers would take over the No. 2 vendor. Unix servers may not be getting as much attention as Sun's Java and MySQL technologies are in merger-speculation land, but it is the Unix market that could put the prospective deal on the radar of regulators. An acquisition of Sun would give IBM nearly two-thirds of the worldwide Unix server market, according to research firm IDC. IBM sold $6.4 billion worth of Unix servers last year, for a 37.2% market share, while Sun's sales amounted to $4.8 billion, for a 28.1% share, IDC said. Trailing behind in third place was Hewlett-Packard Co., with $4.6 billion in sales and a 26.5% market share; after HP, the rest of the vendors counted by IDC had single-digit shares at best.

I was pointed recently to Zappos as a near-perfect example of a company that brings the principles of open source to business. Its site is inventive and fancy (as you'd expect a clothing retailer to be), but not a triumph of design over utility. What's more, it's fast. I can check Web site responsiveness with some confidence, because our little apartment near Boston has 20Mb/s symmetrical service from Verizon FiOS (that's fiber, and pretty cheap, considering), and the speeds I get at the office I share at Harvard are more than twice that.

The Netfilter development team's Patrick McHardy has released an alpha version of nftables, a new firewall implementation for the Linux kernel, with a user space tool for controlling the firewall. nftables introduces a fundamental distinction between the user space defined rules and network objects in the kernel: the kernel component works with generic data such as IP addresses, ports and protocols and provides some generic operations for comparing the values of a packet with constants or for discarding a packet.

Sun Microsystems has began the deployment of South Africa's largest supercomputer, a 27Teraflop system that runs a suite of open source software. The system is the second phase of a multi-million rand project that was awarded to Sun last year and will be housed at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.

A bunch of Microsoft Windows users were asked just why don't they use Linux. What's wrong with Linux? What needs to change to entice them? And I'll tell you! The results are a list of gripes and grievances and make an insightful collection of matters that really need to be fixed or better explained.

Server maker Sun Microsystems has a new Linux partner for its "Niagara" family of multicore processors and their related servers: Wind River Systems. Sun has plenty of sway with telecom companies and the network equipment providers that make the switching gear they use. But since the dot.com bust, Carrier-Grade Linux has been on the rise, and Solaris has been on the wane. That's why Sun has been keen on getting a Linux distro ported to the Niagara chips and having some sort of commercial support for them.

Despite the UK governments continued insistence that it is in favour of open source, in practice the opposite seems to be true. Many officials and departments are still highly resistant and display a remarkably hostile and dismissive attitude to open source. The H asked Richard Hillesley to examine the evidence.