Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Dell IdeaStorm site was an inspired move by the company, providing a way for the market to tell a major supplier what to do, rather than the reverse, which has been the default for the whole Industrial Age. When the site first went up, it sustained what we might call an Insistence on Service Attack by Linux and open-source geeks. Since then, however, the pressure hasn't let up. At the time of this writing (on September 10, 2008 for the print magazine), the same kind of demand is there.

When I wrote the first addendum it was with a sense of disappointment, because I had to inform the readers that my assumptions were in error. That is, it was not possible to activate the update notifier for an unprivileged users [1.]. However, I had promised to pursue the issue on Canonical's Launchpad site by reporting my problems. Surprisingly, I am here now to report the success of that approach.

Alex Brown, in ODF – OASIS and JTC 1 Get It Together, refers to those like me, who have been vocal in our disapproval of ISO’s handling of office-document standards, as the “tinfoil brigade” with a “crazed oppositional narrative”. He even provides an illustration of the use of a shiny silver fashion statement. Is this fair? It should be noted that Alex is not alone. Back in July, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, one of the most balanced and thorough thinkers I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, noted with displeasure that some factions in the OOXML argument took positions that were not only passionately emotional but veered into the ad hominem.

In an exclusive interview, Stallman discusses his views on free versus proprietary and open source software, social networking sites and privacy issues.

Yes, this sounds every bit as ridiculous to me as it probably does you. The Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France, or SPPF -- France's analogue to the RIAA -- is preparing to file suit not only against the makers of various P2P sharing apps, but SourceForge.net, which provides code hosting for many such projects. All together, now, in your best Stupefied Bill Maher Voice: What!?

That blur you saw at the edges of your vision just now? That would be the Internet continuing to move at light speed to your cell phone and other mobile devices. So Adobe's argument is, how can anything move that fast without Flash? The company is staging its MAX 2008 conference in San Francisco this week.

Everywhere you turn there are "brain training" games that claim to help you "lower your brain age" or "boost your brain power" and other such marketing hyperbole. Much like saying a certain breakfast cereal is "more satisfying" than other cereals, these claims are basically meaningless. As fun as they may be to play, brain training games have one fundamental flaw: the improvements you see the more you perform the exercises are not evidence of your brain becoming better, smarter, or faster. Instead, the improvements are the same sorts of improvements that you will see in almost any task: the more you practice, the better you get at it. You haven't gotten any smarter, you've just learned how to perform the task at hand faster and more efficiently which translates into a better score.

The UHM College of Education, in a joint project with Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation (HOSEF) and Pan-Pacific Distance Learning Association (PPDLA), has constructed a “new again” computer lab for Maili Elementary School. In cooperation with these organizations, the college raised funds to build the lab, using computers which were originally designated as eWaste. “What really made the project unique is that the computers were destined for the scrap pile,” said Dr. Paul McKimmy, Director of Technology and Distance Programs in the COE.

In 2005, when Slumberland faced end-of-lifecycle replacements of its proprietary Unix platform, its warehouse management system (WMS) vendor suggested a move to Red Hat Linux and commodity x86 servers. Seth Mitchell, the infrastructure team manager at the large furniture retailer, gladly agreed. Upper management wasn't quite as quick to jump on the open source bandwagon, but once the cost savings started rolling in, everyone agreed that it was a profitable decision.

Neither Ubuntu nor any other brand of Linux is ever going to make it as a mainstream desktop operating system. Listen to a roar of protests from some of the millions of Linux desktop users around the world. Very loud they are but in the scheme of things their numbers are tiny - they are a tinority.

If you're used to Windows Vista or Mac OS X Leopard, you may be disappointed in the parental controls, or the lack there of, in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. But don't give up on open source for your youngsters yet-- Eric Geier shows how to create a safer computing environment on Linux.

Several extensions can help you work with photographic images on your Joomla! content management system. Here are some of the best. Multithumb is the Swiss Army knife of image manipulation. If you're not picky, it might be the only such extension you'll need. It can automatically generate thumbnails and eye-catching image galleries. Its options are highly customizable, and it's one of the easiest plugins to work with.

Open-source software is almost universal in the enterprise, a survey from analyst group Garner has confirmed. New research has highlighted quite how pervasive open-source software (OSS) has become, with 85% of companies currently using OSS and the remaining 15% expecting to in the next 12 months. The findings come from a Gartner survey in May and June 2008, which covered 274 end-user organizations in Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America, and raise a series of management issues for businesses.

The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack. A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003. The professor, Charles Nesson, has come to the defense of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. By taking on the case, Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it.

After a rocky beginning, the nonprofit group One Laptop Per Child thinks an advertising campaign will give a lift to the organization’s effort to place low-cost laptops in the hands of children in developing nations. About 500,000 of the group’s light and rugged machines are being used in 31 countries, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, Peru, Rwanda and Uruguay. But the cost of the laptops, at less than $200 each, has been prohibitively high for many countries,and the number of laptops distributed has fallen short of early projections.

DistroWatch Weekly was first published in June 2003 as a publication summarising the happenings in the distribution world on a weekly basis. Now, 5½ years and 278 issues later, an era is about to end. The publication that has been growing in stature and influence, needs a new editor, a person (or two) with fresh ideas, eager for new challenges, ready to report about the latest technologies in an unbiased manner. If you think you can fulfil the criteria, please read below for the official "position vacant" notice. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for missing an issue last week. We hope to bring you more quality articles, authoritative news summaries, and all the usual goodies you've come to expect from your DistroWatch Weekly in the future. Happy reading and thank you all for your continued support!

LXer Feature: 16-Nov-2008

We have a slew of big stories from the previous week that include OpenOffice 3.0 downloads hit over 10 Million, Mark Shuttleworth talks about Dell, one of our readers tries to get Linux support from a Domain Hosting company, a list of 50 Open Source security tools, getting Linux to boot in 2.97 seconds, Novell decides to go after Red Hat's customers instead of getting their own and one writer's take on why we'll all be buying netbooks on Black Friday.

When the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched last week, the astronauts onboard and the technicians on the ground at mission control will have at their disposal new software that could streamline the process of problem reporting and analysis. The software, called the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system, was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is designed to give a wide cross-section of people in the Space Shuttle ecosystem access to a single database package for tracking problems with the Shuttle and its associated infrastructure.

Hosted, and generally free, office applications are being touted as a big threat to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop, but a survey of US Internet consumers found that free desktop based office apps like OpenOffice are what Microsoft should fear most. For now at least.

With a default install of Ubuntu Desktop 8.10, there are quite a few mono packages installed as standard. In fact there seem to be quite lot really (I counted 28!), especially considering they are only there to support two fairly minor applications: Tomboy and F-Spot. Although the good news is that Intrepid Ibex comes with one less Mono application than did Hardy; which also included Banshee.