Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In the first article in this series, I was forced to resort to Javascript code to match the central column heights that were too disparate to allow a single minimum height setting to cover all instances. Nonetheless, I used a simplification where on my site I knew the center column would outgrow the side columns. Hence, I could use simpler code. Now the footer columns in the menu template are not quite as well structured, however, the differences in heights are minimal in comparison to the range in the central columns. Therefore, setting the minimum heights in the cascading style sheet was the simplest most effective method to reach the goal for this site.

We've all seen them: on comes a commercial with a young, casually dressed,if somewhat unkempt, young man, and an older, portly man in a very middle-management-esque suit. The younger man announces "I'm a Mac" while the older responds "And I'm a PC," and the two go on to lament some critical design failure facing the PC to which the Mac is impervious. As Linux users, we know the basic premise of the commercial — that "I'm a PC" means "I run Windows" — is a fallacy, and what is really needed is a third cast member declaring "I'm Linux." If such a thought has ever crossed your mind, then fire up your camera, because the time to act is now.

A good offsite backup strategy is not sending boxes of unencrypted tapes home with your party-hearty college intern. Carla Schroder reviews the Spideroak online backup service to see if they offer something better, more secure, and more convenient.

Linus Torvalds is a regular visitor to Australia in January. He comes out for some sunshine and to attend the annual linux.conf.au organised by Linux Australia. He took some time out to speak to Rodney Gedda about a host of topics including point releases, filesystems and what it is like switching to GNOME. He also puts Windows 7 in perspective.

Getting started with Linux can be an intimidating task, particularly for people who have never tried any operating system besides Windows. In truth, however, very little about Linux is actually difficult to use. It's simply a different OS, with its own approach to doing things. Once you learn your way around a Linux desktop, you're likely to find that it's no more challenging to work with than Windows or Mac OS.

According to current plans, version 11 of Fedora, which is expected to arrive in late May, will use Ext4 as its standard file system. That's what the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) recently decided, following a heated discussion in an IRC meeting. If however Ext3's successor encounters big problems with the pre-release versions of Fedora 11, the developers will dump that plan and revert to Ext3.

The Wikimedia Foundation have published a draft plan for the process of switching from the GNU Free Documentaion Licence (GFDL) over to the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Licence (CC-BY-SA) for Wikipedia. The change in licensing was made possible by the publication of the GFDL 1.3, which was itself prompted by an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation.

In preparation for hopefully the final beta version of KOffice 2.0, the bug squad will host a Bug Krush Day next Sunday Jan 25th from approximately 10 am CET. Everybody who has an interest in making KOffice 2.0 usable should try to be present. Especially note that you do not have to have any programming experience to take part of this Krush. The purpose of the exercise is to test the applications and to try to find as many bugs as possible.

When your editor posted the Grumpy Editor's next project, he certainly did not anticipate that it would take more than a year and a half for the next installment to be written. Or that, even after all that time, the project of moving LWN's accounting from proprietary software to free software would be incomplete. But the world is full of surprises, even in places where surprises are most unwelcome - like accounting. Happily, your editor's surprises do not involve counterparty risk, credit-default swaps, or anything else of that sort.

DesktopLinux founder Rick Lehrbaum has posted a fun how-to that shows how to lash a Ubuntu Linux desktop right up to Google's cloud. Lehrbaum shares everything needed to make your Mac- and Vista-using friends feel like they're living with last's year's model.

Mark Shuttleworth is looking forward to a good, clean netbook fight with Microsoft following the release of Windows 7. Speaking with The Reg, the founder of popular Linux distro Ubuntu and chief executive of Canonical called Windows 7 a great operating system. Great? Doesn't Shuttleworth work for the competition? Shouldn't he be building up Windows 7's hidden weaknesses? Apparently not. "I'm not going to 'diss it", he said categorically. So there.

There was a time when the Linux community used BitKeeper as its source code control system, after switching from the open-source CVS. But then Samba developer Andrew Tridgell figured out you could telnet to a BitKeeper server, type "HELP," and get a list of commands. Upon hearing of Tridgell's daring hack, BitMover - the company that maintains BitKeeper - got all license-revokey on the community, changing the terms of the agreement and demanding that Linux developers start paying for its software.

JBoss Operations Network (JON) recently became available as an open source solution through the Jopr project. (That’s pronounced “jopper.”) We interviewed Chris Morgan from Red Hat’s JON group to learn more.

In November 2006, Sun Microsystems began making all of its Java technology implementations open source, offering them under the GPL. More than two years later, reactions are mixed as to what exactly has been the impact of this momentous change. Some, including the chief executive at Eclipse Foundation and Sun's own James Gosling, considered the father of Java, have seen little impact. "That was mostly about community relations," says Gosling, who is CTO of the client software group at Sun. "So far, I think it hasn't had too much [effect]," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, which was spawned in an IBM-based effort to build Java tools.

iTunes has the looks, the industry muscle, the DRM, and the lock-in. But the iTunes media player is inflexible and limited. Matt Hartley reviews some powerhouse open source media players that offer attractive feature sets, user-friendliness, and don't even try to fence users in.

According to a Nabble post from an OpenStreetMap (OSM) community member the French Minister of the Economy, and the Direction Générale des Finances publiques (DGFiP) in charge of the French cadastre have allowed the OSM project access to vectorised geo-data from the French land registry.

It's one of those perennial age-old battles that can never be resolved. Coke or Pepsi? Chocolate or vanilla? Linux or Windows? I've been in the trenches of those wars for years. I've written about Windows since the days of Windows 2.0, including numerous books and hundreds or even thousands of articles, blogs and columns. Along the way, I've been called every name in the book -- and many you won't find in any books, either -- by Linux proponents, because I've extolled the benefits of Windows, while ignoring those of Linux.

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products. The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration. "It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software," he said. "Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money."

KBasic is a new programming language similar to Visual Basic. It combines the best features of those tools and comes with built-in backward support for those tools as it is 100% syntax compatible to VB and QBasic. It is written with Qt making it entirely cross platform. The Full Version Professional Edition is available to download for KDE now. It follows the old Qt licencing of being GPL licenced for Free Software and commercially sold for proprietary software.

Developers might get the picture, but Eclipse reckons it had better ramp up awareness its products among senior management as it moves beyond tools in 2009. Eclipse Foundation marketing director Ian Skerrett has blogged it's important to help senior business and technology executives to understand the Foundation as it moves into runtimes.