Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Online learning is evolving into much more than discussions via Blackboard. Today's online learners are spending time engaged in discussions, meeting in virtual classrooms, and combining online and on-the-ground learning, even if they live time zones away from campus.

Service providers are all excited about "the cloud" and want us to buy into this vague, mysterious "new" service. But real geeks want details, not hand-waving. In this installment of the excellent classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting tells us how competing service providers all have to cooperate for the Internet to work at all.

IBM on Wednesday outlined the roadmap for its free office productivity suite, saying that future versions would be developed on the OpenOffice 3.0 open source code base, would run on Apple's Mac OS X and would supportMicrosoft Office 2007 file formats.

There are many ways to share files with teams of people, but few require only a Web browser for access and let you choose from tens of different ways of authenticating user access to the files. Such lightweight and universal access is the promise of Gollem, a file manager that runs in your Web browser. With it you can connect to and manage your files on a WebDAV, FTP, or traditional filesystem or SQL database.

Yahoo was quite the chooser last spring when Microsoft offered to buy it -- the Yahoo board held out for a higher price. Now it's looking more and more like the beggar. Its relationship with Google is pretty much finished before it even had a chance to begin, and it appears Yahoo is reaching the end of its rope.

BIOS giant Phoenix Technologies will ship a fast-booting, power-sipping, Linux-based environment equipped with Opera Software's embedded browser, the companies announced. Due in January, and targeting "mobile PCs," Phoenix's "HyperSpace" product promises "instant-on" Internet access on mobile PCs, while the primary OS is booting, running, or shutting down, Phoenix says.

My employer, Warnbro Community Library in Western Australia, had a problem with wasted paper from printing. Library patrons often sent unnecessary print jobs to the printers, then refused to pay for them, leaving reams of unclaimed paper. The library needed a print queue to enable library staff to control patrons' print jobs. It needed to be easy to set up and maintain and cost nothing. We found the answer in using Linux as a print server. Our public network consisted of a simple local area network with 15 Windows clients connecting to the outside world via a dedicated proxy server, and one networked Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 5200. As there was no budget to purchase any special server hardware or software, that left out the option of a dedicated Windows print server, which in any case would have been overkill.

Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s open source point man, promotes the company’s efforts in the areas of interoperability and open source software at the Apache Software Foundation’s ApacheCon conference. In a keynote at the event, Ramji discussed various Microsoft interoperability efforts involving partnerships with WSO2, HBase, AMQP and the company’s “Oslo” modeling technology.

Web developers have many options for the servlet containers they use to host Java apps. Included in these choices are both classic proprietary and a host of open source containers. For the typical Java application developer, the container that holds one or more Java applications together is fairly transparent. From a non-techy's perspective, servlet containers are largely redundant.

Many network-attached storage (NAS) devices, in addition to offering network storage, offer features such as VPN access, calendaring, wikis, and even an iTunes server. The open source Amahi Linux Home Server provides all of that and more in a complete NAS box integrated with a Fedora 9 base.

Asustek is not a name most people know. The Taiwan-based hardware maker traditionally operates in the PC-board sector. But a few years ago the company began to make its own notebook PCs. Branded Asus, the initial slew of notebooks escaped most people’s attention, except geeks who already knew of Asustek’s good reputation in the PC-board market.

Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal" will be released tomorrow, and while this release is coming just two months after the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.2, there are in fact quite a few changes for this Q4'08 release. In two months time we have pushed out five development releases of Orkdal, there are over 220 official changes, and the diff output between the Malvik and Orkdal releases amount to over 20,000 lines of code. The most prominent features in Orkdal are compatibility the Mac OS X operating system, support for Cascading Test Profiles, support for Self-Contained Test Profiles, new modules being added, updates to all in-tree test profiles, WINE test coverage, and improved hardware/software detection.

Sun Microsystems has released the updated 5.1 version of the MySQL open source database software it recent acquired, promising improved performance and management of larger database applications. "If our users initially choose MySQL because of its low cost, they continue to use MySQL for its high performance, scalability and broad platform support," said Marten Mickos, Sun's SVP of its database group. "MySQL 5.1 continues this tradition by performing up to 15 percent faster than previous versions in our own internal tests--making it a compelling solution for demanding Web-based enterprise applications."

It's been coming along for some time, but today RPM Fusion has officially launched as the premiere third-party RPM repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users. The Dribble, FreshRPMs, and Livna repositories had merged to form RPM Fusion...

A. Lizard's in-depth howto on setting up secure remote graphical desktops wraps up today with the final server and client setup, and how to get through firewalls.

Firefox has a lot of special features that are written specifically for Linux users. Akkana Peck shares some of her favorites.

As the primary gateway to voice calls, Internet browsing, audio and video applications, and imaging display, demand for consumer electronics are naturally increasing. Specifically, there is a need for more choices in hardware features, software applications and innovative user interfaces (UI) packaged together in portable devices that are customized in various shapes and colors. To meet this growing demand, consumer electronics manufacturers look to open source software and hardware platforms that allow unbarred innovation. In this article, we'll examine why and how manufacturers engage with the open source community, where open source Linux is and isn't succeeding, and how Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is participating in various open source projects and organizations, including Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

The writing is on the wall. Despite a major push to sell the much-maligned Windows Vista, customers aren't buying. Nearly two years after Vista's release, Windows XP remains the standard desktop OS in business, and Microsoft has extended its availability three times (currently to August 2009) due to customer demand. Microsoft itself forecasts just 2 percent growth in Vista sales in early 2009, after lackluster sales in 2008. And that's after forcing customers to buy Vista to get XP "downgrades."

It seems as though the wide-open door for the Google Android-based T-Mobile G1 wasn't nearly wide enough. Intrepid hackers have blown the door right off the hinges and shined a big spotlight inside the smartphone software. What did they find? Full root privileges to the G1 file system.

Sun is offering on Thursday its open-source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude, a Web application server based on a modular OSGi architecture with capabilities from the planned Java Platform EE (Enterprise Edition) 6 release. The application server, which will be supported by Sun, is geared to Web-tier production environments. It will be the basis for the planned GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, also based on OSGi and Java EE 6 and due next year. "Glassfish v3 Prelude is our OSGI microkernel application server," said Paul Hinz, director of product management for Java enterprise systems at Sun.