Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

OLPC Learning Club DC member Mike Cariaso popped up on my Google Talk one night last week to tell me he had arrived at the Elaine & Nicholas Negropnte School in Reaksmy, Cambodia. This is the school featured in the May 2007 60 Minutes report on OLPC, and where Nicholas Negroponte first tried the one laptop per child idea. Mike is volunteering at the school over the next several months.

Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of F#, its simplicity when solving complex tasks, the thriving F# community and the future ahead for this fuctional programming language.

Microsoft has begun to realign its legal department, allowing it to work in collaboration with its engineers so that product teams can have more flexibility with open-source software. The company is evangelizing—internally—that more interoperability can be good for the bottom line. Microsoft's Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, discussed with SD Times his company's evolution to a pragmatic viewpoint toward open source, and explained why the company is offering its support to some open-source projects that it feels advances its business and technology goals.

There's no way around it: the longer you run a Windows installation, the slower and less responsive it gets. On my year-old dual-boot laptop, I wait longer and longer for Windows to boot, and longer and longer for programs to do what I ask. Meanwhile, my Ubuntu Linux installation, on exactly the same hardware, installed almost as long ago, is as snappy as the day I set it up—faster, in fact, as I've tweaked it and geeked it.

If you should ever need to clean up your computer, use this clean up utility for very low price (for free)..

[Sorry but I just had to share this one, almost spewed coffee all over my computer.. - Scott]

While commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has not grown enough to justify the ridiculous valuations that Wall Street put on the company when it went public a decade ago, the company is more or less on track to break $1bn in sales in the next couple years. In the third quarter of fiscal 2009 ended November 30, which had the global economic meltdown smack dab in the middle of it, Red Hat reported software subscription sales of $135.5m, up 17 per cent, with training and services sales of $29.9m, up 52.1 per cent. Overall sales rose by 22.1 per cent to $165.3m, and despite larger operating costs compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2008, net income rose by 18.7 per cent to $25.1m.

Microsoft just can't quit you, Windows XP. The final shipment date of Microsoft's aged, yet distinctively non-Vista operating system has been extended yet again. System builders can now obtain Windows XP until May 30, 2009. Windows XP was originally scheduled for OEM extinction on January 31, 2009. That deadline was given once, twice, three times the delay to mid-2010, provided the Windows XP licenses were for netbooks and low-cost PCs that can't handle Windows Vista - or perhaps more importantly, can and do support Linux.

Linux Mint says its "purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." With hundreds of Linux distributions vying for our attention, what sets Linux Mint apart? Paul Ferrill learns that it does indeed have some worthy features not commonly found in other distributions.

In a move designed to bolster VoIP quality, an open source telephony platform reportedly is now supporting a Web-based development group’s low-delay audio codec. Officials at FreeSWITCH say their platform supports Xiph.Org’s so-called “Constrained Energy Lapped Transform,” or “CELT” codec, a technology used for low-delay speech and audio communication.

Matt (friend of the blog) Asay tells Oracle today to expand its open source strategy, but I want to ask the opposite question, namely whether Oracle hasn’t got the best strategy for fighting open source. The answer depends on whether you blame its weak earnings for the quarter on a strong dollar and the general malaise or think its failure to make many new sales hint at declining market share.

Bloggers with a Linux bent took a break from last week's bashing of a misinformed teacher to focus on the holidays -- and to ponder aloud yet again whether next year will be the year of Linux's long-awaited mainstream breakthrough. Hint: Don't hold your breath.

A next-generation package manager called Nix provides a simple distribution-independent method for deploying a binary or source package on different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. Even better, Nix does not interfere with existing package managers. Unlike existing package managers, Nix allows different versions of software to live side by side, and permits sane rollbacks of software upgrades. Nix is a useful system administration tool for heterogeneous environments and developers who write software supported on different libraries, compilers, or interpreters.

Sugar Labs, a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, is joining the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board. Sugar Labs creates software for young children used on platforms like the One Laptop Per Child's XO. Sugar is based on the GNOME platform and relies on technologies like GTK+ and Telepathy.

The end of the year is a self-indulgent time, when those who write about technology stop making lists of the best, worst, and most mind-numbingly mediocre applications they find and pause to make lists about tech trends in the upcoming year. Assessing the past is easy: it has been an interesting year for open source software. Predictions that come to pass, unless suitably vague, just fall into the "lucky guess" category. The one prediction I am sure of for 2009: Open source software will hold its own when it comes to growth and adoption.

In her last installment, Akkana Peck gave us a friendly introduction to the Linux command line. Today we learn the difference between the console, terminal, and shell, and some slick shortcuts that are faster than a GUI.

The Git distributed source code management system has won over another major project, Perl 5. The Perl Foundation has announced that they have completed moving the source code of Perl 5 from Perforce to Git and are now opening the system up for developer use. Git is the open sourced source code control system created by Linus Torvalds to manage Linux development. The move to Git gives developers equal and easier access to the Perl source code and the distributed nature of git will allow developers to work on experimental changes to the language more easily.

Managing buddies on a few online social networks isn't too much of a hassle, but throw in your contact list from instant messaging platforms and online apps and services like Flickr, Digg, and Twitter, and you have a contact list that'd rival that of Kevin Bacon. Managing so many people can be a headache, but here are three browser plugins that can help you manage your online presence more efficiently.

This week we take a first look at Novell's openSUSE 11.1, the latest release from the ever popular distribution. In the news, the release of openSUSE 11.1 heralds the adoption of a freer license, Debian calls a vote on whether or not to include firmware in the upcoming Lenny release while Debian secretary quits over backlash from firmware vote, Gentoo begins releasing weekly snapshots of stage tarballs, the Asianux Consortium incorporates its fifth member and expands into Thailand, Mandriva sets up a Community Steering Committee and increases their number of channel partners, a new distro, Hackable: 1, aims to create a GNOME-based software stack for hackable devices while the Openmoko project releases an update to their software stack. Finally, included in their respective new sections are two interviews - one with Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier of openSUSE and the other with Johannes (Hanno) Böck of Gentoo Linux.

In which Rob Reilly's old heap dies for good; he replaces it with the laptop equivalent of an American muscle car, stuffs 64-bit Kubuntu on it, and goes joyriding. Is it a good trip? Does it perform to expectations? Come on in and find out.

LXer Feature: 21-Dec-2008

There were several articles about Netbooks this week. One article entitled "Small is beautiful" that talks about the joys of the Netbook, another of how now that Microsoft has dumped XP on the Netbook market, that it has of course taken the majority of the share of pre-installs. Isn't it nice to know that you can buy a little Netbook with XP installed on it without having to pay for the 'downgrade' (I mean upgrade) like you would have to if you did not want Vista to come pre-installed on a new desktop or laptop? I didn't think so either.