Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Are Flash cookies dangerous? Of course they are-- to your privacy and personal data security. Carla Schroder shares some additional helpful information submitted by readers on what Flash cookies really do in part 3 of this series, and more cool Linux ways to manage them.

More than 50% of IT executives in a recent survey said that they were planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. "As organisations fight to cut costs and find value in this tough economic climate, Linux adoption will accelerate," said Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell South Africa.

A plan by IBM to launch an industry-wide 'open' cloud computing strategy has seemingly backfired amid accusations of closed deals. Google pulled out after signing up and Amazon said it would not get involved. Microsoft criticised the plan, saying it was given two days to sign up to a "secret" manifesto with no input.

Free and open source software is all about sharing so, prompted by a reader who emailed me last week to ask about books on Linux, I spent some time over the weekend doing research. The result is a short list of books that users - from newbies to gurus - can download and read at their leisure. There are many more books than just these available online but, although many publishers provide versions of their books for reading online - notably Open Books from O'Reilly which is well worth checking out - I chose to limit the list to books that could be downloaded in full. I also chose a wide range of books, from introductions to Linux, books on implementing open source in schools and in Africa, to books that defined the evolution of free software.

If Red Hat has done this well for themselves -- not just financially, but in terms of clout, respect, and being a consistent leader in their industry -- what could compel them to think they could do better by being bought? As Jim Whitehurst himself put it, Red Hat benefits by being an island (or, rather, a "Switzerland") unto itself. Being someone else's property wouldn't give them any particular advantage that they don't already have or which they can't grow on their own -- the right way.

Microsoft Corp and Dutch navigation device maker TomTom NV said on Monday they had reached a settlement after more than a year of squabbling over software patents.

While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji's role is to make sure open-source programs in use can work in conjunction with Microsoft software. That way, just because a company is using the MySQL open-source database, it will not feel compelled to put it on top of the Linux operating system.

Microsoft is criticizing the drafting of what it has characterized as a secret "Cloud Manifesto" that sets guidelines for interoperability among cloud-computing networks. In a blog posting attributed to Steven Martin, Microsoft spilled the beans on a document it said has been drafted privately and that it was asked to sign without revisions. "Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed 'as is,' without modifications or additional input," according to the post.

The chattr (change attributes) command allows you to view and change the attributes of the ext2 and ext3 filesystems, such as setting the immutable bit, synchronous writes, and append-only. Juliet Kemp shows us how.

What was Richard Stallman's greatest achievement? Some might say it's Emacs, one of the most powerful and adaptable pieces of software ever written. Others might plump for gcc, an indispensable tool used by probably millions of hackers to write yet more free software. And then there is the entire GNU project, astonishing in its ambition to create a Unix-like operating system from scratch. But for me, his single most important hack was the creation of the GNU General Public Licence.

An electronic spy network, based mainly in China, has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world, Canadian researchers say. They said the network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries. They included computers belonging to foreign ministries and embassies and those linked with the Dalai Lama - Tibet's spiritual leader.

[An entire article about computers and hacking and not one single mention of what OS they were running? Interesting.. - Scott]

When it comes to gaming, the most popular platform isn’t the Nintendo Wii, but Flash, the interactive browser plugin that now boasts 99 percent market penetration on nearly a billion PCs. (Flash game advertising network Mochi Media currently counts 100 million players across its system alone.) That huge audience has led to a lot of games, but most of them are rudimentary at best, the product of amateur enthusiasts working with limited resources. That’s why I was excited to hear about PushButton, a Flash game engine from a team of seasoned game developers that’s free, open source, and associated with an innovative revenue model that should help spur its adoption.

The merge window for the Linux 2.6.30 kernel is now open and Linus has already accepted a horde of new patches for this next quarterly Linux update. Among what has been pulled in so far is the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support for a new Intel chipset. This new Intel IGP is described by Intel's Shaohua Li as "a G33-like desktop and mobile chipset." The patch adds in two new product IDs (0xa001 and 0xa011) for the desktop and mobile version and makes some clock-related changes. Within the code, the chipset is referred to as just an IGD (Integrated Graphics Device) rather than being more descriptive like the I945GM, I965GM, and GM45 defines.

As many LinuxJournal.com readers will know, a number of the Linux Journal crew hail from Houston. Thus we were particularly pleased to learn that the Houston Zoo has just installed Firefox — but not quite how you think.

In late December AMD had released open-source R600/700 3D code and a month later they released the 3D documentation that covers these Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards. The initial code drop didn't do much good for end-users as they couldn't do much more than render a couple triangles, but over the past few months the open-source developers have been working on the proper Mesa support for the R600/700 graphics cards in a private code repository. Now this code may finally be pushed out to the general public in the near future.

Only four freshmen showed up at the University of Virginia in 2007 without a computer of their own, and the school has decided that it's no longer worth the expense of running campus computer labs. What's the point of running a university computer lab when all the students bring laptops anyway? That's a question that schools have been asking themselves as computer ownership rates among incoming freshmen routinely top 90 percent. Schools like the University of Virginia have concluded that the time has come to dismantle the community computer labs and put that money to more productive uses.

Thanks to Ed Cherlin for your reference to the OLPC trials in Ethiopia and and the challenge of a rote-learning based culture per Eduvision's Ethiopia Implementation Report. This is a very useful report. As I read it I found myself thinking -I recognise what they are saying - it could have been written for Nigeria.

Microsoft today sits comfortably atop the growing netbook market, with Windows garnering 90% of netbook sales in November, December and January, according to research firm The NPD Group. What about Linux? With just 10% netbook market share, the open-source operating system is a toothless tiger for now. But Linux-based netbooks may encroach on Microsoft's success in the near future. Two looming threats: Google may decide to run its operating system, Android, on netbooks and low-power processors from smartphone chip licenser ARM may take off in netbooks.

Device and hardware makers are discovering the flexibility of the Linux stack as the foundation of a platform for mobile applications that bring value to the wares they want to sell. Complications exist, but manufacturers are working through them to further drive the adoption of the Linux stack.

It's hard to write a bash script of much import without using a pipe or two. Named pipes, on the other hand, are much rarer.