Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In December, General Patent Corp. announced it was working on behalf of Worlds.com to enforce its patents on "Scalable Virtual World Chat Client-Server System" and "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space," which date back to 1995. "Therefore, it would seem that General Patent Corporation and Worlds.com are taking the position that the above-referenced patents cover the idea of the computer architecture for a three-dimensional graphical multi-user interactive virtual world system. If so, this announcement is arguably a very thinly veiled notice to the virtual world industry that infringement suits are forthcoming for those companies who do not enter into a licensing deal with General Patent Corporation and Worlds.com."

Six projects, two days and one cause: creating open-source software to improve the lives of members of the disabled community. Over the weekend, 40 students participated in “SS12: Coding for a Cause” and created software to enhance the lives of disabled persons. Teams of UCLA students competed for prizes donated by the program’s sponsors: Mozilla, Google, Cisco – a networking equipment supplier – and Lockheed Martin, a global security company.

Much of the attention of the healthcare industry over the past several weeks has been focused on Washington and the various proposals before Congress to boost the faltering economy, including spending billions of dollars subsidizing health information technology. Meanwhile, another healthcare IT issue carries a lower profile but will have direct impact on the largest, integrated healthcare delivery organization in the country—the 153-hospital, 731-clinic Veterans Affairs Department healthcare system.

A developer of open source VoIP recording software is readying an embedded VoIP recording appliance. The OrecX VoIP Recording Appliance combines OrecX's Oreka TR Total Recorder application with a 1U, Linux-based, rack-mounted server aimed at the small-to-medium business (SMB) call-handling market, says the company.

SugarCRM, the open source customer relationship management software vendor, is giving its user base a sneak preview into its next generation of products. At its third annual SugarCon gathering Monday, the company previewed new CRM features, including an improved Web services framework, additional Cloud Connectors, and mobile customization features.

The first two days at linux.conf.au are dedicated to "miniconfs," which cover specific areas of interest. The 2009 event in Hobart, Tasmania included a miniconf for mobile Linux; your editor attended a few talks there. As might be expected, there is a lot going on with mobile Linux, and a lot of interest.

UK-based online lingerie and nightwear retailer figleaves.com has turned away from Microsoft and to virtualisation and open source software to revamp the technology platform that will support its upcoming ecommerce site. The decision to move to Red Hat Linux and VMWare technology on HP hardware was taken in May last year when the company chose to implement a new ecommerce suite from ATG. Speaking to ZDNet.com.au sister site silicon.com, figleaves.com chief of technology Peter Pedersen said the retailer had outgrown the old system.

The Debian Installer team has released a second "release candidate" installer for Debian 5.0, codenamed "Lenny." In announcing the release, maintainer Otavio Salvador offered few clues as to when Lenny might finally ship, however.

Facing malware is a way of life in the digital world, and the pressure on everyone from home users to corporate giants to do all they can to minimize its damaging effects is immense. Just how much pressure there is was made quite clear on Saturday morning, as a routine update to Google's list of malware sites went horribly wrong, labeling every site in the company's database as dangerous and rendering the service unusable.

The so-called failure of Windows Vista has been heralded far and wide by industry watchers and assorted Microsoft haters. Microsoft was caught flat-footed without an operating system when the netbook phenomenon hit. Can Redmond can turn it around with Windows 7?

Bruce Allen is perhaps the world's best do-it-yourselfer. When he needed a supercomputer to crunch the results of gravitational-wave research, he built one with his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. That was in 1998, and since then he's built three more supercomputers, all in pursuit of actually observing gravitational waves, which theoretically emanate from black holes orbiting each other and from exploding stars but have never been directly observed.

We rightly celebrate how open source opens markets. But it can also close them. Take WiFi. It is still assumed by many property-owners that they can, and should, control what is done with electromagnetic spectrum within their properties. Because WiFi is low-power, high-frequency waves that attenuate quickly, someone with a substantial footprint can make this dream come true.

The 9th Free and Open Source Developer Meeting (FOSDEM) scheduled for the 7th and 8th of February, is expecting 5,000 open source developers to attend at the University of Brussels. The keynotes this year will be from Mark Surman, the Managing Director of the Mozilla Foundation, Bdale Garbee, the secretary of the Debian project and Leslie Hawthorn (Google – Summer of Code). The event tracks include collaboration, software development, security, kernel, distributions and systems. Ext4's history, features and advantages will be discussed by developer Theodore Ts'o. Other speakers include Max Spevack from the Fedora Project and Rob Savoye of the Gnash project.

Infragistics is today expected to open an online community for creating and storing patterns to build rich interfaces using Microsoft and other technologies. Called Quince, this is a free patterns catalogue and "community resource" to help those building user interfaces, from the look and feel through to the workflow. You will be able to search templates, get updates via RSS, rate patterns, and submit patterns using a pre-designed template that outlines important information you should include.

Asus is taking pre-orders for a netbook based on Intel's second-generation netbook platform, the secret-shrouded N280/GN40 chipset. Early product specs confirm that the second wave of netbooks are likely to offer faster graphics and lower power use, along with room for much, much larger batteries.

Much of the reader feedback to "Why Windows Must Go Open Source" is saying, "No way." But part of my hypothesis is the fact that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) as a developer culture is much less averse to such a move than Microsoft as a business culture. Consider the Windows Template Library, code that's now part of Google's browser, Chrome. Microsoft's Windows Template Library is a light version of Windows Foundation Classes, which provide an efficient way for calling user interface services out of the Windows API set. A browser needs to make use of certain Windows functions for its own operations to succeed as a window on the Web. WTL makes those services available.

SugarCRM has fundamentally overhauled the web services framework and has now added a REST (Representational State Transfer) interface that will allow for easier development of the services based upon Sugar data. Another new feature is a CSS based themes framework, which will allow developers to create new themes, without writing any code. The new Mobile Studio Editor will help to optimise SugarCRM for mobile devices with pre-built layouts and views for specific mobile use.

Have you ever woken up in the morning and said to yourself, “today is the day that I'm finally going to backup my workstation!” only to find out that you're a day late and about 320Gb short? Well, that's about what happened to me recently, but don't worry, the story has a happy ending. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

Bruce Byfield reports that Linus Torvalds may have switched too soon from the KDE 4 desktop because of usability problems. Less than a week after he made his off-hand comments, KDE 4.2 has been released, adding many of the customization settings that Torvalds and others complained were lacking in the KDE 4 series.

A great deal is being made of the fact that Linux creator Linus Torvalds has switched from using the KDE desktop to using GNOME, something he did many months ago, and something he mentioned in passing during an interview last month. Microsoft TechNetWhat New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 The latest person apparently trying to cash in on the seemingly eternal mine-is-better-than-yours angle of the two desktop environments is the usually sober Glynn Moody, with the opinion that Torvalds may have switched too soon, before KDE 4 became more usable and revealed why it is a much better environment than GNOME.