Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

UK operator O2 has just launched its latest attempt to create a mobile developer's community, ticking all the Web 2.0 boxes - just as the rest of the industry seems to be moving on. Like the dad arriving late to the party, O2 is keen to show off their Web 2.0 credentials: Litmus features social networking, user ratings, a blog, and the ever-present "beta" tag that's so cool with the kids these days. The service, which launched today at the venue formally known as the millennium dome, provides developers with access to O2 services and support, as well as a place to showcase and distribute new applications.

For a long time, I recorded a basic list of all the backups I made of my movie collection in a scruffy notebook. In due time, I found that relying on a simple piece of paper was wishful thinking. I then endured the laborious process of migrating my list to a spreadsheet on my computer -- but that still wasn't enough. Eventually I found Griffith, a movie collection manager, and was pleasantly surprised to discover what it was capable of.

Linux forums, mailing lists, and even howto articles are full of fearful comments against the Linux command line. "Pry my GUI from my cold dead hands!" is all too common. Nobody wants to take your GUI away, because with Linux you get the full power of both. Akkana Peck gives us a friendly introduction to the Linux command line, starting with a lesson on the fastest way to find files.

Red Hat and Ingres will offer a combination of Linux, JBoss middleware and the Ingres open source database as a new open source software stack to application developers around the world, the companies recently announced. It's neither a duplicate of nor replacement for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP combination) that has already won a wide following of application developers. Instead, the pair is seeking to create an enterprise-ready stack that can be used in transaction processing.

Sun has reached an agreement with Toshiba to pre-install the OpenSolaris operating system on Toshiba laptops. The laptops will be available in the US from early 2009 and will come with the latest version of OpenSolaris: 2008.11. "Toshiba and Sun are announcing that we're going to pre-configure and optimise OpenSolaris for certain Toshiba models," said Jim McHugh, Sun's vice president of datacentre software, in a promotional video.

While I'm a die-hard Google user -- especially the PIM apps -- I still appreciate offline applications for the integration with the desktop, speed, and features they sport. The Evolution contact and calendaring application is a great example: it's as feature-packed as Microsoft Outlook, but with GNOME integration, and it's fast. Gmail, by comparison, is slow and lacks any desktop integration. In a perfect world, Evolution would sync with Google's PIM apps. Unfortunately, there aren't any good, easy-to-use, comprehensive guides for setting up Evolution to sync with all of these apps -- until now.

Tasmania will host its first national Linux conference in just over 30 days and while the pace is getting crazy, the organisers appear to have one thing in abundance - enthusiasm.

When it comes to processing financial transactions, money can be won or lost in milliseconds. That's why high throughput, low latency, and consistent latency for transactions are the name of the game. Financial institutions are fanatical about their market data and trading systems, and Linux distros want to cash in on that.

Tunneling over untrusted networks is a flexible, powerful security tool. We continue our classic Networking 101 series with Charlie Schluting's gentle introduction to how they work, and some easy-to-try examples with SSH.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco. The FSF’s complaint alleges that in the course of distributing various products under the Linksys brand Cisco had violated the licences of many programs on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the GNU C Library. In doing so, Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software.

After more than a year in development, Amarok, a multipurpose media player with a host of features, has issued release candidate code for version 2. It comes with a completely redesigned interface, and takes advantage of KDE 4's new libraries and interfaces. While you may have a hard time getting used to the new interface, you'll probably come to appreciate all the improvements.

OpenOffice Impress is an excellent slideshow application with a wealth of useful features, including animations. Experienced speakers know that animations are more often distracting than helpful, but one very useful animation is zooming in to enlarge small details. Rob Reilly shows us how.

There has been some concern among enthusiasts that the emerging netbook market is nothing but a fad - it's fun and interesting now, but it will die out soon enough. Intel and AMD sure seem to be very careful about the netbook market, but according to figures from DisplaySearch, the market for small notebooks has exploded over the course of a year.

Hewlett-Packard is set to offer Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop bundle on one of its desktop PCs. The HP Compaq dc5850, which is aimed at schools and small-to-medium-sized businesses, will be available in the US from mid-December. Besides SuSE, it will come with the OpenOffice.org office suite and other applications. Users can also download more than 40 free education-related software applications for teachers and students, along with school administration applications.

Hey Star Trek fans, do you remember the Tholian web? It was sort of an outer space spider web that ensnared the starship Enterprise and threatened to end that five-year mission. I bring that up because two announcements this week -- one by Google, a second by Appcelerator -- look like a few more strands in the open source web threatening to stall starship Microsoft.

We can debate all we want to about whether Linux will ever beat Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS X on the computer's desktop. To be honest though, the opinion that matters to me the most is my own opinion. Except for the occasional hardware compatibility issue, Linux is the operating system I have found to be the most dependable. I know what most of you are thinking and let me address what is on your mind at this very moment. No, I'm not blinded with nerd goggles. In fact, I'm currently writing this post from a Windows Vista PC while my wife in the next room is on her MacBook Pro. Windows and OS X have earned their roles on the computer stage and I would be the last person to dismiss these great operating systems. However, these days I'm finding that Linux has just as much of a right to this stage when debating the value of operating systems.

Adobe Air is getting an open source rival with Appcelerator Titanium, a new platform designed to let web developers build installable desktop and mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Googleton Mountain View, California-based Appcelerator on Monday cooked up a public preview release of Titanium for Windows and Mac. The Linux version apparently needs to stay in the oven until January 2009.

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric. This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

[Too much cool stuff on this list! - Scott]

GameLayers' Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), which allows users to immerse themselves in a virtual world of adventures, challenges, and intrigue, has been picking up traction thanks in part to its robust open source framework. Underpinning the popular online game is Ruby on Rails, a full-stack framework for developing database-backed Web applications that works with a variety of Web servers and databases.

Last year, when Australia went to the polls, one of the major promises held out by the Labor Party - which ultimately returned to government after 11 years - was the provision of computers to school-children, one for each child in grades 9 to 12. A year has gone by and it has become apparent that the costing of this programme wasn't exactly spot on. The projected support costs and the electricity costs are prohibitive, to the extent that some states are reluctant to join the programme. And as with any delayed initiative, the cost has blown out, some say by as much as two-thirds. The original estimate was that it would cost $A1.2 billion.