Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Few sites about free software attract more controversy than Boycott Novell. Founded in 2006 in response to the first Microsoft-Novell deal, as its name suggests, the site has evolved more recently into a site for commentary and investigation of any subject that might be a threat to free software. To its regular readers, this subject matter makes Boycott Novell -- like Groklaw, its apparent inspiration -- a defender of the community. But to others, especially those who have been the subject of its articles, the site is full of illogical arguments and undeserved attacks, and an embarrassment that only brings the community into disrepute.

The Linksys PAP2T is an analog telephone adapter (ATA) widely used in VoIP applications to connect an analog phone to a digital IP network. Some PAP2T units are locked and dedicated to a particular VoIP service. Others are capable of using a process called provisioning to ensure that important parameters remain fixed despite local attempts to change them. By employing open source tools such as PHP and MySQL, you can manage these latter kinds of units while they are out in the field. Linksys is helpful in giving the overall approach to provisioning these units. The process consists of creating a special XML file that sits on a server, and instructing the unit to provision itself from that location. The XML file specifies the parameters that control the unit's operation, and their values.

When I present the XO to people, I indicate that the lack of printer support is a feature, not a bug. The issue I see is one of sustainability. We cannot replicate our US lifestyle at a global level, there is just so much that Gaia can take. What we can afford here, as the biggest consumers of resources in the world, at an expense to the whole world, we cannot consider as the parameter to reproduce elsewhere.

Mac clone manufacturer Psystar, which has been sued by Apple for copyright violation, isn't putting all its eggs in the Mac OS market. The Miami-based system integrator has introduced a Linux-based personal computer that sells for just $299. Psystar's OpenLite system ships with the Ubuntu Linux desktop preinstalled, running on a 1.8-GHz Intel Celeron chip with integrated graphics support. Upgrading to a dual-core Pentium chip costs an additional $40. "With unparalleled affordability, this computer can bring Windows computing into every home and office," Psystar boasts on its Web site, even though the system runs Linux, notMicrosoft Windows.

The Linux client for Unreal Tournament 3 has yet to be released, and almost one year later we still have no idea when this game will arrive for Linux. Ryan Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) that ported the UT3 server to Linux and is working on the client does have some news today but it's not about this game. Ryan Gordon has just released the Prey client for Linux.

So, you've got the greatest open source idea since Firefox. It's guaranteed to be bigger than TCP/IP. All you need now is some scratch to get your project off the ground. Given the genius of your idea, you're sure you'll have to beat off potential investors with a stick. If you think that's reality, I've got some subprime mortgages to sell you. Getting venture capital (VC) to fund your business is hard work, even if you have a commercial product to sell. The degree of difficulty ratchets up many times if you're an open source developer. It can be done, but it takes such single-minded focus that getting turned down multiple -- maybe even dozens -- of times won't faze you.

Xfce version 4.6 is shaping up to be more significant than most minor releases. Besides fixes and enhancements that are invisible to the casual user, the first revision in almost two years of GNU/Linux's third most popular desktop includes numerous changes to applications such as the calendar, mixer, and logout dialog, a new configuration engine, and usability changes to the desktop. Their combined effect is to increase the usability of Xfce without sacrificing any of the speed for which the desktop is well-known.

Tasque (pronounced "task") is a to-do manager built with C# and Mono, created as part of Novell's Hackweek v2. The application interface is really simple; in fact, you have to click on the Tasque icon in the system tray to find most of the options. Adding a new task is a breeze -- just type in the name for your to-do in the text box on the top of the interface and click Add. Tasque shows many categories natively, but you can't update or create new categories. (The software is still in beta, and more category functionality is expected in a future release.) You can set due dates and priority ratings (a number between for 1, 2, and 3, or "-" for no rating) by clicking on the corresponding columns in the interface. Notifications for upcoming due dates aren't supported yet, but you can set notes to store more information within the task itself.

An open-source digital rights management (DRM) scheme says it's ready to supplant Apple and Microsoft as the world's leading copy protection solution. Marlin, which is backed by companies such as Sony and Samsung, has just announced a new partner program that aims to drive the DRM system into more consumer devices.

Smart Firefox Tricks, part 2: Javascript bookmarklets have been around since the early days of Javascript, and are possible because Firefox and most other modern browsers (except Konqueror) offer the special protocol "javascript:" to let you execute bits of javascript code directly. Akkana Peck shows us how to harness this power to turbocharge our Web-surfing.

Toshiba came to the TechRadar offices today to show off its new range of business laptops. In its horde of goodies, we also found the NB100, Toshiba's first-ever netbook, which we told you about back in September. First impressions of the ultra-portable machine is its size. Forgoing the 10-inch screen size that a number of manufacturers seem to favour, Toshiba has given its machine a leaner 8.9-inch widescreen display.

In a move demonstrating its confidence in the community-based approach, Swets is to allow users of its subscription management service SwetsWise to edit its help pages. By making the SwetsWise help pages wiki-based, Swets is offering customers an easy-to-use tool to exchange their views and comments on the service with other customers.

Chrome, Google’s new browser, was barely out of its wrapping before Internet pundits began writing it off. As the first wave of early-adopter enthusiasts lost interest in their experiments and returned to their original browsers, so analysts began to declare Chrome dead. But there is a far more interesting set of dynamics at work. Google is not after Microsoft’s share of the browser market: it’s after something much bigger.

The Computer History Museum on Tuesday night honored three legends in the industry, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, whose operating system became the catalyst for the open source software movement that challenged traditional concepts of intellectual property. Along with Torvalds, the museum honored at its annual Fellow Awards ceremony Jean Bartik, one of the first programmers of the ENIAC computing system that later evolved into the first stored-program computer; and Bob Metcalfe, who led the invention, standardization, and commercialization of the Ethernet local area networking system for PCs.

Shared libraries that are dynamically linked make more efficient use of disk space than those that are statically linked, and more importantly allow you to perform security updates in a more efficient manner, but executables compiled against a particular version of a dynamic library expect that version of the shared library to be available on the machine they run on. If you are running machines with both Fedora 9 and openSUSE 11, the versions of some shared libraries are likely to be slightly different, and if you copy an executable between the machines, the file might fail to execute because of these version differences.

The opening keynote speaker for the 2008 Linux-Kongress was James Bottomley, who presented his views on the Linux community's values. What these values are, says James, is not entirely obvious. Related groups - the free software community, for example - have well-articulated value systems which define them. The Linux community's values are not so clearly expressed, but, he says, they are central to what we do.

Google officially opened its Android Market Wednesday and promised that beginning next year, programmers will get the lion's share of revenue from applications sold on the download site for the company's mobile phone operating system. The first incarnation of the Android Market has more than 50 applications available for download, but they're all free. Google said the site will be able to distribute paid applications early in the first quarter of 2009.

Have you got some loose change in your pocket, and dreams of building a better operating system? It would take about 25 years, nearly 60,000 developer-years, and $10.8B to re-create a distribution like Fedora 9, according to a new report from the Linux Foundation. One implication of the study seems to be that companies wishing to economize, in these tough economic times, would do well to leverage all of the value in free and open source software. That value, the Linux Foundation report discloses, is considerable. For example, the Linux kernel alone would take $1.4B to build, and an estimated 16 years to complete. No wonder the Free Software Foundation never got anywhere with Hurd.

In a recent report of the European Union's IDABC agency, numerous software tenders in Europe run against regulations in that they favor proprietary software. If it were up to the IDABC, the tendering organizations would be liable for these practices.

“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.