Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A virtual affair is ending a real-life marriage in southwest England. Amy Taylor filed for divorce when she discovered her husband cheating in Second Life -- an online community where players adopt personas calledavatars, mingle with others and teleport themselves into a series of artificial worlds.

The Linux Foundation has published a series of video interviews from the annual Linux Kernel Summit held Sept. 15-16 in Portland, Oregon. In the videos, 16 developers — including Linux creator Linus Torvalds (shown at left) — discuss their development activities. The Kernel Summit is an annual invitation-only meeting during which kernel developers discuss the current state of the Linux kernel and plans for future development.

Last year we hosted a 2007 Linux Graphics Survey and received more than 20,000 submissions of users sharing their video card preferences, driver information, and details about different aspects of X.Org. This year we're hosting the survey again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information.

Recently, I stopped by a local T-Mobile Latest News about T-Mobile store, the home of the new G1 phone. This is the so-called Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google phone, the mobile device with Google's Android operating system. Many in the press have anointed the Google phone as a potential "iPhone killer." That is, a device capable of knocking the iPhone off its pedestal as the most desirable and most well-reviewed smartphone on the market. While the iPhone is not yet the leader in sales, it's moving along here as well; latest reports show that the iPhone has surpassed RIM's BlackBerry to reach second place in smartphone rankings.

The btrfs filesystem is widely regarded as being the long-term future choice for Linux. But what if btrfs is taking the wrong direction, fighting an old war? If the nature of our storage devices changes significantly, our filesystems will have to change as well. A lot of attention has been paid to the increasing prevalence of flash-based devices, but there is another upcoming technology which should be planned for: object storage devices (OSDs). The recent posting of a new filesystem called osdfs provides a good opportunity to look at OSDs and how they might be supported under Linux.

Last year I told you the "10 Black Friday Secrets Retailers Don't Want You To Know." All these secrets still apply (and the retailers still don't want you to know them). What's different this year is that Black Friday will be dominated by netbook deals. Here's why: First, unless the Grinch finds a way to keep Christmas from coming, the holidays will soon be upon us. Netbooks make perfect gifts because the cost is low, the value is high, and everybody wants one. Unlike other gadgets, netbooks are popular among all age groups, from 9 to 99. They're even great gifts for people who already own desktop, laptop and other netbook computers. You can never be too rich, too thin or have too many netbooks.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is slashing its workforce on a scale typically reserved for automakers, announcing today that it plans to lay off up to 6,000 employees — a restructuring that comes on top of earlier cutbacks made over the past year. In moving to cut its current workforce by between 15% and 18%, Sun is trying to stay ahead of a falling knife. And today's announcement made it clear that Sun officials are banking on the the company's open-source strategy to help it pull through.

Currently the Sugar/OLPC/XO development community is discussing what to add, change or improve in the next major release. Printing is a topic that is currently under discussion. This discussion occurs on the OLPC development list and related lists. These lists are open, and any interested party can join.

Beleaguered server and software maker Sun Microsystems said Friday that it will lay off as many as 6,000 employees, or 18 percent of its worldwide workforce, over the next year. Sun's announcement appears to confirm fears that the economic turmoil that has overtaken the financial services and manufacturing sector has now spread to the technology sector.

“They order, said I, this matter better in France.” So wrote Laurence Sterne in his 1768 book A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Alas, things have changed much since then, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. In the light of recent events, now he would we have to say: they order this matter worse in France. Even more unfortunately, France's bad habits are spreading, and could have serious consequences for free software. These started going downhill with the “three strikes and you're out” idea:

Is it reasonable to expect users to understand the differences between WEP and WAP, IMAP and SMTP, how to figure out the ins and outs of encryption? Kenneth van Wyk believes that the security community simply forgot about the users, and as a result created more problems than solutions.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to cut as many as 6,000 jobs as the company tries to cope with plunging sales of server computers to financial firms, market-share losses to bigger competitors and a spiraling stock price. The reduction, which will eliminate as much as 18 percent of the staff, will shave $700 million to $800 million from annual expenses, Sun said today in an e-mailed statement. The moves will cost as much as $600 million in the next 12 months.

Most of the new breed of open source hardware centers on specific products. Bug Labs is taking a different approach. Instead of developing particular devices, Bug Labs' goal is to provide a Lego-like collection of open source hardware and software that customers can use to build their own devices. According to CEO Peter Semmelhack, the result should be not only a higher degree of innovation, but also a forerunner of the hardware business of the future.

In the last few weeks and months, there have been some very interesting articles and discussions on iTWire about Linux, Windows and Mac OS and their relative merits. Here's my take on why I think that Linux will ultimately succeed, though don't be afraid the timeline is still pretty long!

m0n0wall is a popular, specialized implementation of FreeBSD + ipfilter designed for routers and firewalls. This Tip introduces us to its friendly natural-language ipfilter rules syntax, which has all the power and flexibility of iptables, but is much easier to understand.

An Estonian embedded design house has developed a data-collection barcode scanner and PDA with an OLED display. Billed as the first OLED-equipped mobile terminal device, Artec's Triskan TS8 Professional Mobile Terminal runs embedded Linux on an ARM processor, and includes Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS, with optional WiFi.

Before attempting to convert Friend to Linux, there are some major tweaks you need to do. If you already done these tweaks and living by them then good for you, if not then doing this is a MUST: First of all you need to have a Friend first to convert before attempting to convert. And in order to have a Friend you need to have a Life right? Let me try to make it simpler for you my fellow geek: Now you have a package named whatever-3.42.tar.gz, what will you do? Untar it, then configure, make, make install right? But you will need a compiler first right? Now think of Life as your compiler, all of us have Life, but we need to recompile Life first using the -lessgeek and -moreoutgoing flags in order to create Life suitable for Friend.

A title like that is bound to get your attention, now that I have it, I would like to say something to all of the Linux enthusiasts out there. Now I ask you, how many times have you talked to a Windows user about Linux this year? Was there any result from your enthusiastic pitch: i.e. did anyone install Linux? Often we don't know. The problem is, without giving someone a tangible item to remember your conversation and or to take action with, we may have wasted time and energy.

Linux users have a myriad of calculators and unit conversion tools at their disposal. To set itself apart, Frink aims to track units for you and give you a way to quickly perform little conversions and real-world calculations without burdening you with needless details.

What is it about Novell? It's almost as if the company is determined to make itself unpopular with Linux users. The latest big announcement from Novell is that it has a new programme in place to lure Red Hat and Cent OS users across to its Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The company says it is planning on offering a three year subscription to its own Linux product for customers who make the switch.