Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The first phone using Google's Android operating system will debut Tuesday, a model from T-Mobile, and more are set come. But some Android partners say the software will use more broadly than just phones. "We're starting to see Android get designed in on devices that extend way beyond the phone--things that might go in the automobile or things that might go in the home," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer at Wind River Systems, a Google ally that helps phone makers build and customize Android for their phone hardware.

KStars and XEphem can answer pretty much any question about what's where and when in the night sky. But they don't really give you the feeling of being there like a couple of newer entries on the Linux astronomy scene: Stellarium and Celestia. Grab your red-blue 3D glasses, and follow Akkana Peck on a celestial tour.

Open Source companies have been granted official permission to supply software to the UK public sector for the first time in British history. At least two Open Source software suppliers have been awarded places on the £80 million Software for Educational Institutions Framework, making them official suppliers to UK schools and scoring a victory in what has been a long and frustrating battle against favouritism shown to conventional commercial software companies in UK politics and procurement.

After a decade of converting every piece of music I've purchased into digital formats and (lately) buying digital music directly and skipping the CD step altogether, managing my music library has gotten to be a big chore. It's easy enough to organize my music library on a single computer, but it's been years since I had just a single computer. My music files are more or less together on my home file server, but then there's my wife's collection on her iMac. There's also the fact that I don't use my file server as an everyday desktop machine. My laptop is the machine you can usually find me behind while at home. The reason my music is on the fileserver is because of space, it has the room to keep it all together. The issue then is to make my large and growing audio collection available to all of the computers I use. At home this is easy thanks to a protocol called DAAP.

Sun has released the first update to its recently purchased desktop virtualization program, now called Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0. While not a major update, it does bring improved performance and 64-bit operating system support to the popular open source virtualization program. VirtualBox, now part of Sun's xVM series, runs on a wide variety of host operating systems, including 32- and 64-bit versions of Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, Solaris, and Windows. However, while the manual claims that it supports 64-bit Mac OS X, the program doesn't actually support it yet. That said, VirtualBox runs a remarkable number of operating systems on any of these platforms, from MS-DOS and Windows 98 to OpenBSD and OS/2.

Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system. The move represents a big leap for Saudi Arabia and the region generally, which, despite massive oil wealth, has not had much of an impact on information technology, except as consumers.

After announcing its first event for "end users," the Linux Foundation has begun to promote "individual memberships." Available now for $50 a year, memberships include a T-shirt, quarterly newsletter, and the "ability to run for and vote for a Linux Foundation board seat," says the organization.

In a move reminiscent of its “Get the Facts” anti-Linux campaign, Microsoft is waging war on VMware with a customer-focused Web site that provides the Redmondian spin on how its products stack up against the competition. Microsoft refers to its anti-Linux playbook to attack VMwareThe Burton Group Data Center Strategies blog highlighted Microsoft’s new virtualization site, with the URL

We’ve covered many tips and tricks about working between OpenOffice.org (OOo) and Microsoft (MS) Office, however now we’ll address the formatting issues experienced when converting between the two formats. We’ll give you a few ways to make your documents convert better, so you can share your work with those who only use MS Office. You’ll also discover the Navigator in this tutorial. This window in OOo can help you jump from here to there in your document and gives you a quick way to modify the structure. Lets get started!

Having given in to gravity, America's elite graduate schools are taking on open source. In recent research published in Production and Operations Management, Deishin Lee (Harvard Business School) and Haim Mendelson (Stanford Graduate School of Business) teach would-be business executives how to "Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects."

With libfaketime you can tell a process that the current time is something different from the machine's system clock. This fake time setting affects not only the functions directly related to reading the system time, but also file timestamps such as modification times. With libfaketime you can test how a program will respond when it is running in the future or in a different timezone without having to change your machine's system clock. Timezone testing can be useful for network applications where a certificate may have already expired in a given timezone but might still work in your local environment.

I have one last item I would like to discuss pertaining to the use of html forms. That is, the question on how to store unvetted, input data. I will show it makes sense to store the news items as formatted, ready to publish summaries as separate text files each containing one story. I further suggest they be deposited in an off site directory with severely limited access rights. The formatting for news items is simple, using either a template or an informed (trained) user. I show how I would have implemented a simple file naming structure to make news items easier to work with in an inherently date / time ordering. For this particular, limited instance, I think my model would have worked.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Linux community must be doing something right. Rumors abounded throughout the blogosphere last week that HP may be working on its own version of our favorite operating system. Specifically, employees within HP's PC division are reportedly working on a mass-market operating system that is based on Linux but easier to use.

Mail merge, the production of multiple documents that differ only in minor details, remains a difficult task in OpenOffice.org Writer. Few use the function regularly, and when they do, the mail merge wizard seems to cause as much confusion as it resolves. Writer's original mail merge feature, retrievable from Tools -> Customize -> Add -> Documents -> Mail Merge is somewhat more straightforward, but, even with it, users are likely to confuse the original document and the information source. In comparison to those other alternatives, FastMailMerge is not only simplicity itself, but a welcome relief that easily lives up to its name.

Toshiba has announced that it too is joining the “Netbook” race, but given that the Intel Atom is a chip designed for exactly this type of low-spec computer, what’s more of a surprise is that it has taken Toshiba this long to join in the fun!

Until Chrome came along, Google's Master Mobile Plan didn't quite add up. Now it does. Chrome -- Google's new superbrowser -- is cream on the top of a new mobile software stack. Let's call it GACL, for Gears, Android and Chrome on Linux. Gears is a way to run Web apps on desktops and store data locally as well as in the cloud. Android is a development framework for Linux-based mobile devices. Chrome is a browser, but not just for pages. Chrome also runs apps. In that respect, it's more than the UI-inside-a-window that all browsers have become. It's essentially an operating system.

LXer Feature: 21-Sept-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have, The Large Hadron Collider survives its first attacks from hackers, 5 Useful Tips to Customize Firefox 3, Android gets closer to being released, Carls Schroder opines on what it means to be a "geek" and University of Santa Barbara researchers show incredibly easy it is to compromise the security on a Sequoia Systems voting machine. Also, 10 things Linux does better than Windows, a Richard Stallman interview, VLC gets a new look and Google Chrome for Linux?

Google controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes? Brad Smith of Microsoft said Yahoo’s gains would be at the cost of American businesses. It does not. Google does not set the prices. Its advertisers do, bidding against one another for the amount they will pay when a user clicks on one of their ads. They do the same for ads on Yahoo and Microsoft search sites, too. Auction pricing is so deeply embedded in this business that you can see why Google and Yahoo innocently thought that their advertising pact, which was announced in July and is to be put into effect next month, would sail through a regulatory review to which they voluntarily submitted. The review continues.

Following the release on Tuesday of details about debates and decisions at this year's Kernel Summit, LWN.net has now reported on the second and final day of the conference. Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and some 80 other important and nearly all male kernel developers discussed their approaches to the further development of Linux and exchanged experiences. Like the LWN.net articles covering the first day, Jonathan Corbet's reports on the second day of the kernel Summit are available exclusively to LWN.net subscribers until the 25th of September. As has been the case in previous years, other sources of information on the summit are scarce – it often takes weeks or months for additional information on decisions reached at the conference to trickle out on blogs or posts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code