Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Xbox Live is being targeted by malicious hackers selling services that kick players off the network. The booting services are proving popular with players who want a way to get revenge on those who beat them in an Xbox Live game. The attackers are employing data flooding tools that have been used against websites for many years.

[Why am I not surprised? - Scott]

We've become quite adept at sharing information over the intertubes. But perhaps that's different when it comes to sharing that information personally and verbally. Ever been annoyed when someone at a computer asks you a question as though you're some sort of walking encyclopedia rather than looking it up on the Web? Jake Coyle has just the site for you.

San Diego, Calif., February 19, 2009 – Building on its reputation as the data protection leader of the open systems market, Arkeia Software is proud to announce support of its 100th Linux platform. With Oracle Enterprise Linux, Arkeia Software reiterates its leadership as the broadest supporter for open source operating systems and applications. In addition to Linux, Arkeia supports other open source operating systems including OpenSolaris and the BSD family.

OSCON is months away. LinuxWorld — excuse me, Open Source World — might as well be an eon or two away. What’s a person to do in the meantime? If you have the misfortune of living outside the Golden State, hop a plane and make your way to Los Angeles this weekend for the Southern California Linux Expo. If you’re within walking or driving distance, by all means you should be able to get your fix before the summer at the Westin Los Angeles Airport from Friday through Sunday.

In the Boston Globe article "Cheaper Cheap Laptop Promised" we have Nicholas Negroponte giving an interesting spin to what amounts to a price increase he kept out of the news till now..

Are you disappointed because you couldn't make it out to one of the parties held in honor of 1234567890 Day last week? Not to worry -- we have video so you don't feel left out. As an added bonus, we've got an opportunity to help Linux fight off patent trolls.

For IT teams, it's not a case of having no budget. It is simply that they must get better value for money. They must invest to grow the business or save significant dollars. To help us out, US-led IT vendors have raised their prices by 20 to 30 percent. They might keep their profits high, but where does that leave us? As a result, many IT managers are struggling to deliver on their goals and their promises while making their dollars go much, much further.

This time it's Zarafa, developer of collaboration software, that has announced it's adding native support for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to its Linux-based e-mail and calendaring server. Zarafa's server already contains support for several other Microsoft and open source products, including Outlook, SugarCRM, OpenERP, and Alfresco.

You can count on two things for every Debian release: It will be later than expected, and it will be suitable for every possible level of expertise. Debian 5.0 is no exception. Arriving almost five months later than originally scheduled, Debian 5.0 is not the most cutting-edge GNU/Linux distribution, but, like earlier releases, it is unparalleled for flexibility.

Money can't buy you love; nor can it buy you happiness. But it just might bring you peace of mind. The Big 3 commercial Linux vendors; Canonical, Novell and Red Hat are ready to serve you through support subscription services for your Linux infrastructure. There are some big advantages to using commercial vendor support for your systems: 24x7 priority support, fixed support costs and experts who know your operating system inside and out.

Companies and communities is a topic I'll speaking on at SCALE. I welcome any feedback or points to consider! First off, there is no ideal company/community relationship. There are lots of different types of relationships between companies and the communities they work with (or don't work with) - and no one way is perfect for everyone. The goal should be for companies and individuals who use and support open source software to work effectively together. And part of working effectively together means making sure that the open source model is sustainable. Which means interacting for the good of the project, not just taking or using open source software.

"What about Linux, which many users found hard to use and not compatible with all the programs they want to run? “There has not been a substantial incentive for a user to choose Linux before,” Mr. Burchers answered. “If you say a netbook is almost half the thinness, the battery life is four times, and it costs 100 bucks less, but I have to use Linux, that is an incentive.” Linux, he added, is improving. “This has been the first generation that is for non-geeks.”

One request that actually made it past the budget gods for FY10 was 60 convertible Classmate PCs (30 for each of two schools). These will replace aging stationary labs in the schools, freeing up needed space and allowing for redeployment of the older computers for individual classroom and student use. This leaves me with a question to answer, though: Do I use Windows XP Home or Edubuntu?

Google Inc.’s Android operating system, after making inroads into the mobile-phone market, may be running on portable computers within the next year, challenging the dominance of Microsoft Corp. Google, which owns the most popular Internet search engine, could use its brand name and community of developers to get the software onto low-cost notebooks, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner Inc. One chipmaker, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., is already working on designs for an Android computer.

Website encryption has sustained another body blow, this time by an independent hacker who demonstrated a tool that can steal sensitive information by tricking users into believing they're visiting protected sites when in fact they're not. Unveiled Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Washington, SSLstrip works on public Wi-Fi networks, onion-routing systems, and anywhere else a man-in-the-middle attack is practical. It converts pages that normally would be protected by the secure sockets layer protocol into their unencrypted versions. It does this while continuing to fool both the website and the user into believing the security measure is still in place.

These days, most people have at least one computer and a large collection of media files. The conventional practice for most people has always been to have redundant copies of their media collection on their various computers. While this system technically works, it is highly inefficient and creates the unnecessary task of keeping the media collection on each computer synchronized and up-to-date with the others. A far better solution is to keep all the media on one computer and stream it as needed to the other machines over the network.

Release engineering for a large project is always a tricky task. Balancing the needs of new features, removing old cruft, and bug fixing while still producing releases in a timely fashion is difficult. Python is currently struggling with this as it is trying to determine which things go into a 3.0.1 release versus those that belong in 3.1.0. The discussion gives a glimpse into the thinking that must go on as projects decide how, what, and when to release. It is very common to find bugs shortly after a release that would seem to necessitate a bug fix release. Ofttimes these are bugs that would have been considered show-stopping had they been found before the release. But what about features that were supposed to be dropped, after having been deprecated for several releases, but were mistakenly left in? That is one of the current dilemmas facing Python.

Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.

SugarCRM has long driven roughly 30 percent of its revenue through Sugar-on-Demand, its hosted offering. But in a recent TechTarget interview, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts pushes the envelope a bit on what it means to be open source and cloud-based..

Userful Corp. has won a deal to supply its Linux-based PC-sharing software to 357,000 Linux desktops in schools throughout Brazil. Userful's Multiplier software runs on top of any version of the open-source Linux OS and enables a single desktop PC to be shared by as many as 10 users, all connected by individual monitors, keyboards and mice. The massive deal, won in partnership with ThinNetworks and a number of local Brazilian PC manufacturers, is Userful's largest deployment by far. Including this deal, the Calgary, Alberta firm will now have contracts to supply more than 400,000 seats.