Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Valentines Day. That one day a year when geeks everywhere find themselves whisked away from their terminals for a night filled with flowers, chocolate, and — dare we say it? — romance. This year, however, significant others of the Debian set may find it more difficult to drag their beloved beyond the box, as, barring a lovers quarrel, the Debian community and the long-awaited Debian 5, better known as Lenny, will finally tie the knot.

Software that can be used to play almost any computer game in history is to be developed as part of a European attempt to preserve digital cultural heritage. The European Union has funded a €4.02 million (£3.6m, $5.2m) project dubbed KEEP, for Keeping Emulation Environments Portable, which will develop new ways to archive digital objects endangered by the relentless march of technology. As well as games, it will work to ensure that other kinds of files and software remain accessible long after the demise of the hardware and software for which they were originally intended.

Planned celebrations will spontaneously erupt all over the globe as computer geeks celebrate when UNIX time hits 1234567890! Today! On Friday the 13th! The day before Valentine's Day!

As most any user can tell you, Linux systems think of time in terms of the number of seconds, not counting leap seconds, since the beginning of the UNIX epoch: Jan. 1, 1970. For most readers, that number will reach 1,234,567,890 this Fri. the 13th. Psyche!

Sun Microsystems has upped its ante in the rich internet application battle for mobile mind-share, just as Microsoft and Adobe Systems traded shots at each other. On Thursday, the systems and server company released a version of JavaFX for mobile devices here, branded JavaFX Mobile by marketing types but known to coders as JavaFX 1.1.

Cuba released its own distribution of the free Linux operating system this week, as the communist island seeks to wean its citizens and institutions from what it says is insecure, capitalist-produced Microsoft Corp. software, according to a report. The Reuters news service reported Wednesday that the new version is called Nova, and was introduced at a technical conference in Havana. Based on a Linux variant called Gentoo that is popular with highly technical users, Nova has been in development since 2007, according to the Associated Press, after Free Software guru Richard Stallman visited the island and persuaded government officials to move off Windows.

In November 2008 the Buzztard project maintainers announced the public release of version 0.4.0 of their flagship application. This version of Buzztard brings new features and performance enhancements, including expanded support for original Buzz songs and machines and an impressive make-over of its GUI.

Microsoft Corp. said it hired a former Wal-Mart Stores Inc. executive to help the company open its own retail stores, a strategy shift that borrows from the playbook of rival Apple Inc. The Redmond, Wash., company said it hired David Porter, most recently the head of world-wide product distribution at DreamWorks Animation SKG, as corporate vice president of retail stores for Microsoft. In a statement, Microsoft said the first priority of Mr. Porter, who is also a 25-year veteran of Wal-Mart, will be to define where to place the Microsoft stores and when to open them. A Microsoft spokesman said the company's current plans are for a "small number" of stores.

[Oh my, this is going to be good. Popcorn anyone? - Scott]

The Symbian Foundation is limbering up to face the Open Handset Alliance next week, announcing a raft of new members to take on the Android threat, while LiMo and Access Linux lurk nearby looking for scraps. Realizing that the battle of operating systems is all about applications, Symbian has announced a load of new members including MySpace, Bank of America, and Omron Software - though most of the new members have something to gain for their $1,500 membership fee and there's a remarkable degree of infidelity with companies betting each way.

If you thought installing Linux on a laptop was a fun discussion, have I got a new one for you. This comes straight out of the really, it should not be this hard category…the server side.

Bruce Perens reports that Linux is a natural for embedded systems. That's why it's popping up in more cell phones, often without the customer even realizing it's there. But cell phone manufacturers, and the broader sector of embedded systems, must cope with the problem of how to combine the GPL Linux kernel, and software that isn't Open Source. How does one do that legally?

Jeff Soble, Neil Cowles, and Edmund Billings have a response reproduced after the break to HIMSS "Call to Action". This is a sobering look at the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which looks poised to result in the demise of real competition, medical data in the hands of a cartel or monopoly for a few wealthy corporations, loss of privacy and the loss of the physician as the traditional custodian of medical data.

Sun Microsystems has released version 1.1 of their rich internet technology JavaFX, which now includes the JavaFX Mobile runtime component to better support mobile devices. The runtime also includes a Software Development Kit (SDK) for developing JavaFX mobile applications. Sun will demonstrate the technology next week in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress. Companies, including Sony Ericsson, LG, Orange and Sprint have already confirmed their support for the technology.

An open-source version of Silverlight has been released with Microsoft's support, as Flash rival Adobe began crowing about the new media player's death. Moonlight 1.0 from the Novell-backed Mono team was posted Wednesday, having passed all of Microsoft's regression tests. Moonlight plugs into Firefox and is available for all major Linux distributions including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

You've been reading Akkana Pecks's excellent articles on the nifty tricks you can do in the shell, and you're feeling the power. But one thing has you puzzled-- there are no file icons to click on, so how do you find your files? The Linux filesystem has an orderly structure; come on inside to learn how to navigate it effortlessly from the command line.

On January 20, 2009, Apple was awarded patent #7,479,949, titled "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics." This patent potentially has the power to make life difficult for anybody developing hardware or software involving touch screens. It could also bring about an unwelcome repeat of some twenty-year-old history. But any attempt to enforce this patent risks repeating a twenty-year-old conclusion.

Developers soon will have a network to go to for developing principally open source projects and testing their software on multiple platforms. The planned Snakebite network is intended to "provide developers of open source projects complete and unrestricted access to as many different platforms, operating systems, architectures, compilers, devices, databases, tools, and applications that they may need in order to optimally develop their software," according to the Snakebite Web site, which also welcomes visitors to "the future of open source development."

Red Hat has launched a new open-source project the company said is aimed at making it easier for enterprises to move from proprietary Java-based middleware like Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere to its JBoss Enterprise Middleware. The JBoss MASS (Migration Assistance) project -- launched as a community effort with Red Hat partners -- will provide software to help enterprises migrate to JBoss, as well as an online community to connect new JBoss customers with other customers and partners that have more experience working with the platform.

I spent some time talking with an Accenture veteran this morning, and came away with an intriguing idea: enable open-source projects to provide corporate benefits like health insurance to their developers so that they can ditch their day jobs to focus on their open-source passion. If you've ever started a small business, you know that getting "enterprise-grade" benefits like health insurance is very difficult. At Alfresco, for example, we ultimately joined a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) called Trinet [PDF], which aggregates many smaller companies to negotiate insurance plans with companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield that would normally not consider providing small companies insurance.

Hoping to bolster its position in the Web-based content management system market, Plain Black has rolled out a spruced-up version of its flagship product that makes it easier to maintain Web content and features a new point-of-sale cash register. The point-of-sale capability added to the 7.6 version of WebGUI now lets authorized users work with a virtual cash register. The new feature was added to make it easier for companies at remote events such as trade shows, for instance, to sell tickets and products directly to customers.