Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This post comes hard on the heels of an important piece of news... at least two Open Source companies have become part of the Becta's official list of suppliers to the education sector. The new procurement frame work under the aegis of the OGC relaunches the supply of ICT to education. The emphasis is clear: deliver value for money to UK schools.

You can monitor your computers in a wide variety of ways. Large proprietary applications make sense for large installations that can afford the expense of both the software and consultants who fine-tune the systems. Open source monitoring solutions like Nagios or OpenNMS cost nothing to acquire but still require planning and tweaking. When you need to address smaller problems with process data on a system, the process monitoring tool ps-watcher comes in handy.

Oracle announced at its OpenWorld event this week two new partnerships intended to boost the firm's cloud computing offerings. The enterprise software maker announced Monday that it has teamed with Amazon to offer enterprise customers options available via the mega-e-tailer's Elastic Compute Cloud service.

One of the most frustrating aspects of open source but commercially supported software is that it takes many orders of magnitude of freebie customers to attain a base of core customers who will pay for a glorified product with commercial-grade installation and ongoing tech support. There is always a temptation to try to monetize the vast installed base of users who are making use of the so-called development or community editions of programs. But Red Hat isn't going for it.

You have to give Oracle credit for persistence. The software giant has been trying to build out its groupware business for nearly 10 years, and has as yet modest success. Now, with Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the enterprise messaging waters.

Large Chicago law firm Jones Day is suing a tiny Internet startup called BlockShopper over the use of the humble hyperlink. But BlockShopper has picked up a pair of allies in the form of the EFF and Public Citizen, and the two groups jointly filed anamici curiae brief with the court that points out the obvious:"linking is what web sites do-that is, after all, why it is called the 'World Wide Web'."

Many applications need to graphically display the relation between two data axes. Common examples are how one resource such as CPU load or an exchange rate varies over time. GtkDatabox makes presenting such information in a GTK+ desktop application much simpler. Version 0.8.2.2 is packaged for Fedora 9, while version 0.7.0.x is available for both Ubuntu Hardy and as a 1-Click install for openSUSE. I'll build from source using the latest version 0.9.0.1 on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.

The students of a missionary school in Pakistan, from first graders to graduates, have become enthusiast Edubuntu users thanks to the cooperation between their administrator and an Italian LUG. Padre (Father) Aldino Amato is an Italian missionary who has been working for 25 years in the schools of the Rosary Christian Hospital, a nonprofit charitable institution in the village of Rehmpur, near to the city of Okara in the Pakistani province of Punjab. In 2006, during a holiday in Italy, a friend suggested Amato publish in an Italian missionary newletter a request for all the things his schools needed but couldn't find easily in Pakistan. The first item on that list was computers. A newsletter reader pointed Amato to Golem (Gruppo Operativo Linux EMpoli), an Italian Linux user group (LUG) founded in 2000 in Empoli, a Tuscan town about 30 kilometers west of Florence.

It is becoming more and more clear to me that decision makers in healthcare policy and especially in healthcare IT policy do not understand the real underlying problems of interoperability in healthcare applications. Dare I also say that most developers don't either?

IBM has announced a new corporate strategy regarding its participation in the hundreds of standard-setting organizations relevant to its products. Simply put, it only wants to work within an environment that is open and transparent."There is simply no justification for standards to be created in nontransparent ways," said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers. The controversial plan sparked debate over whether Oracle was trying to kill off Red Hat by taking away Red Hat's revenue stream. Oracle and Red Hat representatives questioned during this week's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco offered strikingly different perspectives on how well Oracle's plan has worked out.

The unveiling Tuesday of HTC's much-anticipated G1 handset for T-Mobile, the first device running Google's Android mobile operating system, looks to be the opening salvo in a battle for smartphone consumers between Google and Apple. Although the first-generation G1 and second-gen iPhone are not exactly the same, the two handsets offer consumers many of the same features and functionalities.

Part two of Charlie Schluting's overview of TCP covers the basics of TCP connections and flow control.

Good OS (gOS) has achieved a major new release of its Ubuntu-based operating system. Targeting OEMs that want quickly customizable Linux netbook OSes, gOS 3.0 integrates closely with Google Gadgets, as well as with Google Mail, Calendar, Reader, News, Applications, Picasa, and so on.

Google Maps opened up a whole new world of mapping on the Web, making it easy for companies and individuals to put their data on a map. But if you want more control over how your maps look, or have data that doesn't really work well with Google Maps, there are other options, including serving your own data with Geoserver. Geoserver implements the Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Feature Server and Web Coverage Server specifications, with an integrated Web Map Server. The current stable version is 1.6.5, although the developers recently released 1.7.0-RC2. Written in Java, it's available for Linux and Unix variants and for Windows, and it requires a Java Runtime Environment, such as Sun JRE 6, to run.

Bad standards and standard wars are an all too common part of modern information technology. Now, IBM has announced that it's not going to put up with them anymore. And, yes, Microsoft, IBM is looking at you. In a statement, Ari Fishkind, public affairs manager for IBM Research's Development and Intellectual Property section, says that "IBM is announcing a new corporate policy governing its participation in the technology standards community. As members of that community, we are formalizing a commitment to behave in a progressive and transparent way as we promote open, high quality standards."

HP and Oracle are teaming up to release the HP Oracle Database Machine. The HP Oracle Database Machine has some analysts predicting that Oracle will disrupt the data warehouse market, as Oracle issues a direct challenge to data warehouse leaders like Teradata. Not too long ago, Microsoft sought to shake up the data warehousing market with the purchase of DATAllegro. Not to be outdone, Oracle jumped into the fray at its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. But instead of an acquisition, Oracle pulled the covers off a project three years in the making—the HP Oracle Database Machine..

[So let me get this straight, Oracle is making hardware? Oracle entering the hardware business with or without HP's help; is a major move for them and the market. - Scott]

While the top brass at Sun Microsystems might seem to be clueless about the company sometimes, there are plenty of people who know where the bread gets buttered - or doesn't. They know that Solaris and the servers that run it are what really matter at Sun. And that means Sun's OpenSolaris project and its related Solaris commercial distribution are still the key to success or failure for Sun Microsystems.

Life-saving scientific research is being stifled by a "broken" patent system, according to a new report. "Blocking patents" are delaying advances in cancer medicine and food crops, says the Canada-based Innovation Partnership, a non-profit consultancy. The full benefits of synthetic biology and nanotechnology will not be realised without urgent reforms to encourage sharing of information, they say.

Novell is getting into network access control via an OEM agreement with StillSecure that initially provides a stand-alone product but also includes plans to ensure that software works well with Novell’s ZENworks configuration management. Called ZENworks Network Access Control, the Linux package is based on StillSecure’s Safe Access, and can be downloaded from Novell’s site for use on customer-provided server hardware. (Compare client management products.)