Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Fear not the command line! Akkana Peck reveals one of the great secrets of the Linux command line, and that is you don't have to be a great typist--there are plenty of fast shortcuts and help for everyone. Many of them are easy to remember, like CTRL+U for Undo, and CTRL+W for "erase last Word." Come on inside to learn more.

ITTIA announced the availability of its DB-SQL lightweight, Linux-compatible SQL R-DBMS (relational database management system) for Freescale's ARM-based i.MX family of system-on-chips (SoCs). DB-SQL can support embedded-systems database functionality on i.MX-based devices including PDAs, portable media players, and industrial measurement systems, says the company.

IBM announced today that it will increase the number of technical inventions it makes freely available to others by 50 per cent, and seek less patent protection for its inventions, in an effort to stimulate worldwide innovation and economic growth. The company successfully filed 4,186 US patents in 2008, more than any organisation has achieved before, according to the IT giant. "IBM's leadership in the strategic use of intellectual property is based on balancing proprietary and open innovation," said IBM director of research John Kelly.

Cloud-computing platform vendor Joyent said Wednesday it is buying startup Reasonably Smart, a maker of a "direct, open-source competitor" to Google's App Engine framework for quickly building and deploying Web applications that run on Google's infrastructure. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Like Amazon Web Services and others, the Quebec-based Joyent sells scalable computing infrastructure. Reasonably Smart's toolset will provide its customers with a "write-once/scale forever" Web application framework, according to a statement

Marketcetera, the leader in open source platforms for automated trading, today announced general availability of the new Marketcetera Automated Trading Platform. This first production-ready release of the most popular open source trading platform for traders, hedge fund managers and broker/dealers offers new features that include robust complex event processing (CEP) capabilities and enhanced strategy development for faster testing and deployment of algorithms.

The economic crisis has hit the worldwide PC industry hard in the fourth quarter of 2008, causing it to suffer its worst growth rate since 2002. The normally high growth market of Asia has seen its worst result on record, while the US PC market nose dived in the final quarter of the year, according to a new report.

There are important lessons for open source in the Nortel bankruptcy, some good and some bad. First, phone companies are liars. That’s a good fact to know.

Since the moment I purchased my MacBook, I’ve sworn it was the best computer I’ve ever owned. It’s light, durable, elegant, the screen is bright and crisp, the built-in iLife software works brilliantly, and OS 10.5 is stable and fast. What’s not to like, right? Well, there’s this recession going on. I consider myself very lucky to have a couple of decent-paying jobs (tech director and blogger) and to have been able to spend some serious money on hardware and software upgrades in our schools before the economy completely tanked. It’s very clear, with guidance from the state and an Obama stimulus package with unclear benefits to schools (just how do we get on the list for retooling to meet 21st Century needs?) that for at least the next two years, we need to make every dollar stretch.

It appears that Apple is not just going after Psystar when it comes to running Mac OS X on non-Apple branded computers. Wired's gadget blog was running a story, accompanied by a video, demonstrating how to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple netbook. After Apple contacted Wired, the website took down the video.

An alpha version of Ubuntu's coming April release is now available and the results are spectacular. Ubuntu 9.04 looks set to live up to its Jaunty Jackalope monicker with the ext4 filesystem already receiving great verdicts.

Two different companies this week announced that they have created tools that allow for software written using two different application development environments - the relatively new Ruby on Rails and the relatively ancient (but still respected and used) COBOL - to be deployed on Amazon's Web Services compute and storage clouds.

Using the SSConverter class that we developed last week, which used the OORunner class from the week before that, this week we'll create a Python function that allows us to use spreadsheets as if they were CSV files by converting them on the fly.

Moving towards the 2.0 release with almost monthly beta releases, the KOffice team has once more honoured its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the time is right for a release candidate. So today we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across the board. Incremental as it is, this beta is an important step towards a final release.

KDE's Konqueror file manager and Web browser is a powerhouse loaded with useful features. However, sometimes it takes a bit of digging to unearth treasures and to figure out how to make it do what you want. Carla Schroder offers up tips on creating view profiles that stick, and how to open it exactly to the profile that you want.

James Grimmelman compares Google to Sauron. I'm flabbergasted. I had always thought that Google was the Ringbearer and that Mordor was where Gates and Ballmer hung out. Was I misinformed? Or am I just confused? If it's the latter, I have a decent excuse. After all, even though Google and Microsoft have very different public personae, it's getting harder and harder to tell them apart as businesses. Both built their empires through the same strategy: gaining control of the economic chokepoint of the prevailing computing model of their day.

Today I would like to announce the appointment of Tracy Anne Barlow aka tracyanne to Contributing Editor. Tracy has been a force of fact and opinion in the LXer forums for some time now. Her contributions to the forums quite literally speak for themselves. LXer is lucky to have her. Please join me in welcoming Tracy to the LXer Team.

Steve Jobs is taking a five and a half month medical leave of absence from his role as CEO of Apple, saying his health issues "are more complex than I originally thought." Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in mid 2004. Since then there has been much speculation about his health, largely due to a significant loss of weight that gave him a somewhat haggard appearance.

[I have a feeling its going to turn into more than just five or six months. - Scott]

Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement, "The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework."

If you've been hacking, coding, or just generally IT-ing for more than ten minutes, you've likely run into a stereotype or two about geeks — and there's always a grain of truth, however tiny, behind a stereotype. At least that seems to be the prevailing wisdom at Germany's Potsdam University, where the IT faculty are gearing up to turn their masters students into master suitors.

Open Source in the public sector seemed to be all the rage in 2008, with government agencies all over Europe — not to mention agencies of the EU itself — adopting, and in many cases, mandating Open Source software and standards. Of course, Europe was not the only continent cozying up with a copy of the source code — governments in Africa, Asia, North & South America, and all over the South Pacific were exploring and implementing Open Source in 2008. Now, one of those governments has revealed the savings-side of OSS, and the numbers they're tossing around are pretty nice.