Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In late 2005 we looked at the ATP ToughDrive 1GB flash drive and in 2006 looked at ATP's ProMax 150x CF card, but since then we haven't heard much from this company. However, they have recently released two new products, which we are looking at today. There is the ATP 8GB EarthDrive, which is advertised as the world's first recyclable USB drive, and secondly there is the ATP 8GB ToughDrive. The EarthDrive is made of a biodegradable material that is derived from corn.

Are rumors of Sun's demise greatly exaggerated? Maybe so, if the company's open-source storage strategy is any indication. Sun has struggled for years to shed its image as an old-school IT dinosaur. Lately, with the economy tanking and Sun's stock price tagging along for the ride, its quest for profitability looks more than ever like an exercise in futility.

Russell Coker is not a man who sleeps with his computers. But he does come pretty close - two servers are positioned in a little cabinet in his bedroom, one being his server and the other his Security Enhanced Linux "play machine." The play machine is open to anyone to log in and try to break the security. The root password is out in public - this is one of the many ways in which he engages with the wider FOSS community and a way by which he tried to improve what has become the project to which he devotes a considerable amount of time.

Last week I had the privilege to chat via IM with Orv Beach, the Publicity Chair for the Southern California Linux Expo, about how SCALE uses FLOSS to productively plan and implement their event. SCALE is currently one of the biggest Linux conferences in the US…but I’ll let Orv fill you in on rest. This year’s Expo will be February 20th - 22nd, 2009. Find out more at the official website.

People often wonder how to get new capabilities—new packages, new features in existing packages, or even bug fixes—included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The process for doing so is straightforward, but may be foreign to those with a background in traditional software products.

Continuing my holiday machine maintenance saga I move on to some notable trials and tribulations with Ubuntu, but not before I report on a little more holiday cheer.

I didn't want to write this column. I live as Windows-free an existence as most people can these days. Of course I have to run Windows as part of my job, in order to make sure that Samba, the software I write, will interoperate correctly with all the multiple Windows versions out there. I also have to install some Windows applications using the Open Source Wine project, which emulates Windows on Linux well enough that some binary Windows applications will install and run straight off the DvD. Like most people, there are some Windows applications I just can't do without, although in this case it's my three year old son who finds an amazing amount of joy in his toddler games, none of which have yet been ported to Linux. Wine works amazingly well these days for this sort of thing, well enough that my wife no longer complains about the computer "being hard to use".

[What part of (W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator - WINE, do people not get? Call me a stickler but if its not an emulator, then why do we let people get away with saying it is? - Scott]

Andrew Shebanow didn't imagine that asking for feedback about how Palm's app store should work would open up a flood of input. He also didn't expect the move would change his job description. But now both have happened. On Jan. 8, Shebanow, who is working on a third-party application distribution system for Palm's new operating system, posted an item on his blog looking for input from developers on how that system should work. He threw out a few questions, such as: how should application updating and installation work; should Palm offer payment processing or leave it to third parties; should application trials be available; and how should Palm handle featured applications.

Fear not the command line! Akkana Peck reveals one of the great secrets of the Linux command line, and that is you don't have to be a great typist--there are plenty of fast shortcuts and help for everyone. Many of them are easy to remember, like CTRL+U for Undo, and CTRL+W for "erase last Word." Come on inside to learn more.

ITTIA announced the availability of its DB-SQL lightweight, Linux-compatible SQL R-DBMS (relational database management system) for Freescale's ARM-based i.MX family of system-on-chips (SoCs). DB-SQL can support embedded-systems database functionality on i.MX-based devices including PDAs, portable media players, and industrial measurement systems, says the company.

IBM announced today that it will increase the number of technical inventions it makes freely available to others by 50 per cent, and seek less patent protection for its inventions, in an effort to stimulate worldwide innovation and economic growth. The company successfully filed 4,186 US patents in 2008, more than any organisation has achieved before, according to the IT giant. "IBM's leadership in the strategic use of intellectual property is based on balancing proprietary and open innovation," said IBM director of research John Kelly.

Cloud-computing platform vendor Joyent said Wednesday it is buying startup Reasonably Smart, a maker of a "direct, open-source competitor" to Google's App Engine framework for quickly building and deploying Web applications that run on Google's infrastructure. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Like Amazon Web Services and others, the Quebec-based Joyent sells scalable computing infrastructure. Reasonably Smart's toolset will provide its customers with a "write-once/scale forever" Web application framework, according to a statement

Marketcetera, the leader in open source platforms for automated trading, today announced general availability of the new Marketcetera Automated Trading Platform. This first production-ready release of the most popular open source trading platform for traders, hedge fund managers and broker/dealers offers new features that include robust complex event processing (CEP) capabilities and enhanced strategy development for faster testing and deployment of algorithms.

The economic crisis has hit the worldwide PC industry hard in the fourth quarter of 2008, causing it to suffer its worst growth rate since 2002. The normally high growth market of Asia has seen its worst result on record, while the US PC market nose dived in the final quarter of the year, according to a new report.

There are important lessons for open source in the Nortel bankruptcy, some good and some bad. First, phone companies are liars. That’s a good fact to know.

Since the moment I purchased my MacBook, I’ve sworn it was the best computer I’ve ever owned. It’s light, durable, elegant, the screen is bright and crisp, the built-in iLife software works brilliantly, and OS 10.5 is stable and fast. What’s not to like, right? Well, there’s this recession going on. I consider myself very lucky to have a couple of decent-paying jobs (tech director and blogger) and to have been able to spend some serious money on hardware and software upgrades in our schools before the economy completely tanked. It’s very clear, with guidance from the state and an Obama stimulus package with unclear benefits to schools (just how do we get on the list for retooling to meet 21st Century needs?) that for at least the next two years, we need to make every dollar stretch.

It appears that Apple is not just going after Psystar when it comes to running Mac OS X on non-Apple branded computers. Wired's gadget blog was running a story, accompanied by a video, demonstrating how to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple netbook. After Apple contacted Wired, the website took down the video.

An alpha version of Ubuntu's coming April release is now available and the results are spectacular. Ubuntu 9.04 looks set to live up to its Jaunty Jackalope monicker with the ext4 filesystem already receiving great verdicts.

Two different companies this week announced that they have created tools that allow for software written using two different application development environments - the relatively new Ruby on Rails and the relatively ancient (but still respected and used) COBOL - to be deployed on Amazon's Web Services compute and storage clouds.

Using the SSConverter class that we developed last week, which used the OORunner class from the week before that, this week we'll create a Python function that allows us to use spreadsheets as if they were CSV files by converting them on the fly.