Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One request that actually made it past the budget gods for FY10 was 60 convertible Classmate PCs (30 for each of two schools). These will replace aging stationary labs in the schools, freeing up needed space and allowing for redeployment of the older computers for individual classroom and student use. This leaves me with a question to answer, though: Do I use Windows XP Home or Edubuntu?

Google Inc.’s Android operating system, after making inroads into the mobile-phone market, may be running on portable computers within the next year, challenging the dominance of Microsoft Corp. Google, which owns the most popular Internet search engine, could use its brand name and community of developers to get the software onto low-cost notebooks, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner Inc. One chipmaker, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., is already working on designs for an Android computer.

Website encryption has sustained another body blow, this time by an independent hacker who demonstrated a tool that can steal sensitive information by tricking users into believing they're visiting protected sites when in fact they're not. Unveiled Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Washington, SSLstrip works on public Wi-Fi networks, onion-routing systems, and anywhere else a man-in-the-middle attack is practical. It converts pages that normally would be protected by the secure sockets layer protocol into their unencrypted versions. It does this while continuing to fool both the website and the user into believing the security measure is still in place.

These days, most people have at least one computer and a large collection of media files. The conventional practice for most people has always been to have redundant copies of their media collection on their various computers. While this system technically works, it is highly inefficient and creates the unnecessary task of keeping the media collection on each computer synchronized and up-to-date with the others. A far better solution is to keep all the media on one computer and stream it as needed to the other machines over the network.

Release engineering for a large project is always a tricky task. Balancing the needs of new features, removing old cruft, and bug fixing while still producing releases in a timely fashion is difficult. Python is currently struggling with this as it is trying to determine which things go into a 3.0.1 release versus those that belong in 3.1.0. The discussion gives a glimpse into the thinking that must go on as projects decide how, what, and when to release. It is very common to find bugs shortly after a release that would seem to necessitate a bug fix release. Ofttimes these are bugs that would have been considered show-stopping had they been found before the release. But what about features that were supposed to be dropped, after having been deprecated for several releases, but were mistakenly left in? That is one of the current dilemmas facing Python.

Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.

SugarCRM has long driven roughly 30 percent of its revenue through Sugar-on-Demand, its hosted offering. But in a recent TechTarget interview, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts pushes the envelope a bit on what it means to be open source and cloud-based..

Userful Corp. has won a deal to supply its Linux-based PC-sharing software to 357,000 Linux desktops in schools throughout Brazil. Userful's Multiplier software runs on top of any version of the open-source Linux OS and enables a single desktop PC to be shared by as many as 10 users, all connected by individual monitors, keyboards and mice. The massive deal, won in partnership with ThinNetworks and a number of local Brazilian PC manufacturers, is Userful's largest deployment by far. Including this deal, the Calgary, Alberta firm will now have contracts to supply more than 400,000 seats.

It's easy for people to pick at Windows for being prone to virus and malware attacks. It's almost a given belief that if you're running a PC with a Windows operating system, you're much more susceptible to attacks than users with other operating systems. But let's quickly look at the reasons for this. First, it isn't really Microsoft's fault. It isn't that Windows is technically inferior, it's that the majority of the world runs on Windows. This fact alone is very attractive for any virus coder or exploiter. As a virus writer, you'd want to attack the majority, not the minority.

[Hmm..are you sure it's just five? - Scott]

The good people over at Novell must be wondering what to do next after Red Hat and Microsoft inked a deal on server virtualisation interoperability yesterday. What will hit Novell really hard is the fact that Red Hat has not had to bend over as Novell itself did in 2006; there are no patent clauses in this deal at all, no question of money changing hands. In sharp contrast to the hush-hush nature of the Novell-Microsoft deal, Red Hat has clearly outlined the details of what its agreement with Redmond involves.

The Thunderbird email client is not a flashy showoff. However, it is a solid, reliable email client, it is not a malware magnet like MS Outlook, and it runs on both Linux and Windows. Migrating from Outlook to Thunderbird is a very sensible thing to do. It requires jumping through a few hoops; Eric Geier is your faithful guide in this two-part howto.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are now providing a way for web site developers to specify a preferred URL for any piece of content on a web site. The problem has been that sites may, legitimately, have the same content on different URLs. This causes problems for search engines which can't easily differentiate between these duplications. Now, a new type of "canonical" link reference can allow a page to express the preferred URL for a search engine to use.

Parted Magic has been updated to version 3.6 and includes bug fixes, updates and a number of new programs. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with 128MB of RAM. File systems supported include ntfs, fat, reiserfs, reiser4 and hfs+. LVM and RAID are also supported. The update to the open source live CD collection of hard disk management tools "offers a major overhaul in the way Parted Magic boots and behaves."

Last year, I decided to give Linux a try. Everything was going well, until I started working for a company that uses Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. There's simply no straightforward, reliable way to run Outlook on Linux. I tried Outlook Web Access, but the service strips code from HTML attachments, among other limitations. (The company I worked for prior to my current employer used Lotus Notes, which is probably the only e-mail program in the world more proprietary than Outlook. Organizations must get some huge benefit from using these closed e-mail systems, because they sure make life difficult for users.)

Earlier this year, Freescale announced it would enter the netbook market with its own set of chips based on the ARM architecture, claiming they would yield better battery life than the Atom-based netbooks of today. The company gave a little more info today, and among other things, they want to support Google's Android on their netbooks.

Open source technology has a role in aiding Singapore's quest to become a hotbed for the creation of innovative products and services, according to a senior government official. Through its 10-year Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) masterplan, Singapore seeks to create an environment where its people, the private and public sectors can collaborate on innovative next-generation ICT products and services, said Tan Geok Leng, CTO of the country's Infocomm Development Authority (IDA).

Popular musical artists including Peter Buck of REM and Youssou N’Dour are part of a new project to raise funds to put open source software tools in the hands of African doctors. Partnering with Grammy Award-winning artist N’Dour, global non-profit IntraHealth International is releasing a charity album called OPEN Remix. Artists on the album have donated remixes of N’Dour’s Wake Up song as part of the project.

For a long time now Microsoft has insisted that potential partners recognise its patent portfolio before signing interoperability agreements. But now Microsoft has stepped out of that box and signed an interoperability agreement with Red Hat that excludes any mention of patents. The agreement is aimed at improving interoperability between the two companies’ virtualisation products. The companies will join each other’s certification and validation programmes as well as provide technical support for mutual customers, as part of the agreement.

With about a month having passed since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 "Tydal", the first alpha development release to its successor is now available. Phoronix Test Suite 1.8 "Selbu" will focus on a number of underlying improvements and further polishing from where Tydal was left off. There will also be quite a bit of preparatory work for Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. Selbu is expected for release in the second quarter of 2009.

When we were in college, my wife (then, girlfriend) had the best answering machine greeting message, ever. When people called her, the answering machine would answer, “Hello?” and wait. Invariably, the caller would start talking as though they had actually reached a live person. They'd be talking about last weeks assignments, or a party next week. Then the other shoe would drop.