Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

So here we are. Home prices and incomes are falling, foreclosures are rising, layoffs are multiplying, and wealth is evaporating. Everyone is looking for signs of stability, but each new day brings new despair and uncertainty. Amidst the reckoning, it's hard to imagine the future, but regardless, it will arrive soon enough.

There is something rather curious about software companies operating in the open source world. Although they may be competitors in a particular sector, the open source licence they employ means that they are also partners: they can generally use the code of other companies if they wish. The stronger those companies become, the more code they produce, and the more code there is available to everyone – including their nominal rivals. This makes the commercial ecosystem that evolves around free software strangely collegiate: everyone has a vested interest in growing the code base, because it is a commons that all can and do draw on.

The IEEE 802.11n standard gives users a choice between 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz spectrum, but how do you know which one is best for your network needs? Jim Geier outlines the key factors to consider when deciding which spectrum to deploy.

Just upgraded your system with a shiny new hard disk and want to make it your new book disk? Cloning Ubuntu to another hard disk is easy. In fact, Ubuntu provides tools to clone the entire hard disk -- including the Windows partition, if there's one on there. This is the kind of fundamental task that Linux excels at, in fact. This article is excerpted from the newly published book Ubuntu Kung Fu and published with the express permission of the publisher, the Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.

The sour economy is causing industries and individuals alike to tighten their belts in just about all areas of spending, including software. Downloading free and low-cost open source software is often an attractive alternative to proprietary commercial products. The potential for enterprises and other users switching from high-priced software to open source alternatives poses a new opportunity.

Over time, people tend to accumulate a large number of messages in various email accounts, most of which they never bother with again. The problem is particularly acute for administrator accounts that receive routine notifications of events that are viewed, if at all, no more than once. The archivemail tool lets you easily archive these old messages and thereby free up some disk space and improve your mail client's performance.

Advanced Micro Devices is releasing a computer chip that could give it a much-needed boost against bigger rival Intel. On Nov. 13, AMD unveiled a processor, code-named Shanghai, for use in servers, the powerful computers that run corporate networks. Unlike other recent chips from AMD, Shanghai is being released on time, and it will be more versatile than a comparable chip due to be released from Intel in the coming days. AMD says Shanghai will perform 35% better than its previous generation of server chips while decreasing power requirements by 35%, a combination that should help customers reduce operational costs while boosting efficiency.

Google is tight-lipped about the Linux version of its Chrome browser, but the company's programmers have proved a bit more forthcoming with a brief announcement that they have a crude version of Chrome working on Linux. "Dude, Gmail works in the test shell on Linux!" said programmer Dan Kegel in a note to the Chromium developers mailing list on Tuesday. It is pretty crude, though: the "enter" key does not work, for example.

At the end of my profile of AlgoScore I stated that my one wished-for addition to that program would be support for OpenSound Control (OSC). Well, my wish has been granted, the latest AlgoScore supports OSC, and I'm a happy guy. This article introduces OSC and explains why it makes me a more pleasant fellow.

As our classic Networking 101 series continues, Charlie Schluting guides us through the Border Gateway Protocol, which is the routing protocol of the Internet. BGP itself isnt too complex, but the concepts behind autonomous-system-based routing can be strange to newcomers. In this article we are given a short overview of how BGP works, along with the problems it solves and causes.

Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn't already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult--to say the least. The makers of these 10 tech products--the iPod, BlackBerry, Firefox, Twitter, Windows 7, ThinkPad, Android, Wikipedia, Mac OS X and the "Big Cats," and Red Hat Linux--all have displayed certain amounts marketing savvy, common sense and fun-loving spirit in settling on their products' names. Here are the intriguing, surprising and sometimes predictable accounts of their creation.

The Splashtop instant-on Linux environment is included in the new Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook, marking the product's first appearance in that form factor. That news should come as no surprise, since netbooks' ultra-portability is a natural match for Splashtop's instant-on. The IdeaPad S10e is an Atom-powered, 10.1-inch, education-oriented netbook scheduled to hit shelves this month in a variety of storage and operating system combinations, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Attorney Andrew Updegrove specializes in technology, intellectual property, and standards. While other lawyers can make the same claim, few have his credentials -- maintainer of an online repository about standards consortia, former board member of the Linux Foundation, and progenitor of a major open source license.

Virtual worlds provide not only a new universe in which brave explorers stake their claims, but also a new legal landscape in which the colonists are often at odds with the natives from theold world. How do real-world laws apply? How do traditional concepts of intellectual property -- patents, copyrights, and trademarks -- apply in a virtual world?

Linux-based PCs have reportedly been getting a bad rap for consumer resistance, but manufacturers say demand for them varies between the different Asian markets. This follows recent remarks made by a Philippines-based Asus marketing manager, that the vendor was dropping Linux on all of its upcoming Eee PC models in the country because Filipinos are not taking to the Linux OS well.

Novell Tuesday took aim at rival and Linux market leader Red Hat with a migration service designed to help move Linux users onto Novell's Suse enterprise servers. The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) Subscription with Expanded Support program is a three-year contract that covers support for Red Hat or CentOS, a Red Hat clone, during the first two years of the deal. During that time, Novell will provide Red Hat and CentOS server users with binaries released by Red Hat for its platform and technical support. The subscriptions, which include two years of transition support and three years SLES support, are similar to the three-year priority contracts Novell offers on its own servers. The price of the migration subscription is $3,748 per server.

Even as Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, and other Linux vendors seek to differentiate their respective offerings, Novell wants to make it easy to overcome differences between Linux distributions...provided that customers want to migrate to Novell's SUSE? Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

If you want to turn your netbook or conventional laptop into a nifty open source navigation system, you need two things: a USB receiver and a GPS-enabled navigation application. You can buy a GPS receiver cheaply at virtually any gadget store or on eBay. And there are actually several GPS-enabled navigation applications out there, including Navit, GPSdrive, and Roadnav. These are fine applications, but if you are looking for GPS software that offers the right amount of features wrapped in a sleek and user-friendly interface, try tangoGPS. This lightweight GPS-enabled navigation application can pull maps from different sources and has a few clever features up its sleeve.

United National Breweries switches over to Red Hat Linux to run financial systems, improves performance significantly. Like many companies United National Breweries (UNB) took a decision some time ago to lease its IT equipment instead of buying it outright. In line with that decision UNB’s national IT manager Kevern Upton says that its primary IT suppliers for its financial systems were Unisys, who took responsibility for the server hardware and operating system, and Proteus, who took care of the financial system and the database that supports it.

When writing bash scripts you sometimes need to run commands in the background. This is easily accomplished by appending the command line to be run in the background with an ampersand "&". But what do you do if you need to run multiple commands in the background? You could put them all into a separate script file and then execute that script followed by an ampersand, or you can keep the commands in your main script and run them as a sub-shell.