Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The first Lifehacker post hit the tubes four years ago today. Since then, we've published thousands of tips, tricks, guides, and tools to streamline your life. Here's a brief history of Lifehacker, 2005 to 2009. Below, we've taken a look back at all of our posts from 2005 to present and pulled out the five most popular posts of each year. Not all of them remain entirely relevant today, but they provide a nice overview of where we've been in the past, and hopefully may even introduce you to some older Lifehacker content that only our most dedicated readers may recognize.

It is with great pleasure that we publish this interview with Dario Freddi, the developer known as drf in the KDE community. For those who do not know, Dario dedicates his time to many aspects of KDE 4; PowerDevil for example, the power manager that has debuted in KDE 4.2, is the result of his hard work. Other projects which he contributes are Arch Linux and the Chakra Project, DeviceSync and PolicyKit-KDE! You can find much interesting information in his blog and in the various links here and there in this interview which comes from KDE Italia from last December.

Linux's gains are Microsoft's losses, and there were both aplenty in the past week, despite the best efforts of the Redmond crowd to tamp down enthusiasm for free OSes. Bloggers across the FLOSS world are speculating over what they see as a building storm headed straight for western Washington.

The TriSano team is proud to announced that TriSano™ 1.0 FINAL has been released. The next generation of disease surveillance and outbreak management has begun to arrive. You can download it and take it for a spin. The TriSano™ 1.0 Release Notes have a lot of good information on the details.

One of the many great things about Linus is that he doesn't bottle it up: he speaks his mind on things that matter to him, without worrying overly about what others might say as a result. And when he mentioned in the course of an interview that he had switched from KDE to GNOME, others soon had plenty to say on the subject. But I don't want to revisit those arguments about which is better today: instead, I want to explore the possibility that Linus decided to jump to GNOME at precisely the time when KDE could soon leapfrog it in important ways.

Recent developments in the OpenChange and KDE open source projects are set to bridge a “missing link” in messaging and groupware compatibility from Microsoft's Exchange to open source clients. Many open source groupware suites lay claim to this holy grail of interoperability, but the software to synchronise address book, task and calendar information with Exchange is sold as a proprietary extension.

Suggest that Microsoft's Windows operating system will one day become open source, and knowledgeable observers will give you a baleful look--maybe even laugh in your face. "I had to chuckle," says Forrester Research analyst John Rymer, in response to my query on the subject. "No, I don't think Windows will ever become open source code." OK, so Windows will never become an open source project in the same vein as Linux, with 2,000 developers worldwide submitting code. Microsoft has enough trouble with its own developers submitting code, never mind all those outsiders. And I'll concede that some Windows source code probably will never see the light of day.

Intel isn't exactly known for its dalliances with operating system software beyond that belonging to Microsoft, so it's a pleasant surprise to find out that its first Linux OS is ready and raring to go. Almost. The company's Moblin project has borne fruit about a year and a half after it began, with the introduction of the first alpha release of the open-source OS based on Linux.

If there is one Web addiction that I have not been able to tame, it's collecting add-ons for Firefox. I currently have 43 add-ons actively running in my browser, and I have an additional two that I use in Thunderbird. As a staple of the Web experience, browsers have come a long way. When Firefox began allowing developers to create add-on applications, browser usability was greatly improved.

One of the biggest selling points for Linux is its scalability. At one end of the scale, Embedded Linux is everywhere from the vehicle management system in your car to the smartphone in your shirt pocket. At the other end of the scale, 439 of the top 500 supercomputers run on Linux. A Linux distribution can be seen as modular, and most of the parts that comprise a distribution can be separated into high level building blocks that can be arranged to make up the components of a specialised subset. For instance, that can be a dedicated server system, or a desktop arrangement that fulfills a specific set of user requirements for graphical or office work or a developer workstation.

With over 180,000 open source projects in its repository, SourceForge.net has a lot of files it needs to track and serve. It can become a challenge to manage all those downloads. For the most part, Sourceforge relies on a system of globally distributed mirror sites that help to deliver open source application files and programs to users.

PureWave Networks is using Linux, a Freescale processor, and an off-the-shelf middleware package from Enea to create its next generation of WiMAX base stations. Due later this year, the base stations will aim to bridge the gap between macro and pico WiMAX stations, says the company.

The next two releases of Silverlight will take Microsoft's media player in completely new directions, the technical executive in charge has promised. The corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division Scott Guthrie told the company's Channel 9 "whole new areas you can't do today will start to open up" with Silverlight 3 and 4.

Don't be alarmed if it looked like the entire internet was infected with something earlier this morning—Google apparently tagged every search result, including its own sites, as something that "may harm your computer." The glitch seems to be fixed now (11:50 a.m., EST), and the tips we received from watchful readers came in between 9:52 and 10:20 a.m. EST. We'll update if any official word on what happened comes out of Mountain View.

[Apparently I missed the whole thing.. - Scott]

We've all been there: You're tracking down some evil bug, and you have the sudden chilling realization that you're going to have to re-factor an enormous chunk of code to fix it. You break out in a cold sweat as you run a quick grep over the source base: hundreds of lines of code to change! And the change is too complex to do with a script because it depends on the calling context, or requires adding a new variable to every caller.

NVIDIA has already released quite a few Linux drivers this year already that improve their VDPAU support and stabilize their OpenGL 3.0 implementation. Yesterday AMD had then released its first proprietary Linux driver of 2009 that brought OpenGL 3.0 support. While both sides are off to a good start, what else do you want to see from them and their drivers in 2009?

Linux Australia assert they are the peak body for Linux user groups around Australia and represent some 5,000 Australian Linux users and developers. Yet, the 2009 elections roused a mere 66 voters. Why didn't people vote? (And, in a related incident, why can't I please all the people all the time?)

The next two releases of Silverlight will take Microsoft's media player in completely new directions, the technical executive in charge has promised. The corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division Scott Guthrie told the company's Channel 9 "whole new areas you can't do today will start to open up" with Silverlight 3 and 4.

A former Unix engineer for Fannie Mae was indicted for planting malicious code on the corporation's network that was to 'destroy and alter' all of the data on the company's servers this Saturday.

Simon Phipps is a natural when it comes to speaking. The man has a good turn of phrase, is skilled in the art of repartee, and can engage an audience very well. Sun's chief open source officer was one of three keynote speakers at the recent Australian national Linux conference. He spoke to iTWire soon after he had given his keynote.