Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google's Chrome browser appears to be doing more damage to Firefox and Opera's market share, leaving Internet Explorer sitting pretty.

Download management is one of the larger categories on the Firefox Add-ons site, but while hundreds of extensions fall under this category, they are a mixed lot at best. Many have yet to release versions compatible with Firefox 3.0, and others are designed to work with Windows programs. However, with patience, you can find some programs worth exploring -- and even a few small treasures -- in this category.

Well it was a comparatively quiet week on the Linux blogs last week, due at least in part, no doubt, to the Labor Day holiday. Gustav could have been a factor too -- dampening, so to speak, those conversational fires -- but we here at LinuxInsider also have another small theory to explain some of the relative lack of discussion.

Thursday's news that Amazon will be running G1G1 v2 starting in late November certainly made quite a splash. I've seen north of 50 news-stories on news.google.com and within 24 hours we also had two major Austrian news-organisations inquire about the details at OLPC Austria.

As a .NET developer, you should avoid using the newly released Managed Extensibility Framework as its license prevents its use beyond the Windows platform. This will prevent your .NET software from running on Linux or MacOS in the future. Luckily, there is a cross platform solution available today that has no platform limitations: Mono.Addins, a technology inspired by Eclipse's own plugin system. We have tutorials, reference manuals, API docs, our FAQ our public groups and multiple large applications with source code available that you can learn from (MonoDevelop, Banshee, F-Spot and Gnome-Do).

NetSuite already supports Apple's Safari browser in addition to Internet Explorer and Firefox. Since Chrome uses the same HTML engine as Safari (WebKit), the major aspect that NetSuite might have needed to accommodate is Chrome's new V8 JavaScript engine.

LXer Feature: 07-Sept-2008

The big news this week was the release of 'Chrome' the new browser from Google. It is only available on the Windows platform as of right now. I tried it and it has some cool features, it has some things that need a lot of work too. Also Microsoft's new Vista ads start to show up on T.V., a self professed "Windows Guy" decides to takes Open SuSE 11 for a spin, some advice on mailing list etiquette and how to get the younger generation into Linux.

Microsoft, once an ardent proponent of proprietary software, is no longer fighting the growing army of open source developers worldwide and in the Philippines. In fact, it will soon open in the country its first interoperability lab in Asia. The software behemoth’s local subsidiary teamed up with the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) and the National Computer Center (NCC) for the establishment of the Microsoft Open Source Interoperability Lab, which will officially begin operations in September this year.

During Akademy 2008, we sat down with Fabrizio Montesi who's working on JOLIE integration in KDE (and Plasma in particular). He explained the mechanics of the technology and what it can do for KDE. Read on for the interview.

Trying to begin a career as a graphic designer and build a portfolio, Evan Stremke joined CrowdSpring, a Chicago-based online marketplace for creative services. No conventional help-wanted Web site, CrowdSpring is part of a trend sweeping the Web, sometimes called"crowdsourcing."

Paul Ferrill evaluates openSUSE 11.0, which shines on the desktop, for its fitness as a server capable of filling many different roles.

The Linux Foundation plans to hold an End User Collaboration Summit in New York City in October. The press release we received introducing the event said, "It's by invitation, but registration is free, in keeping with the idea of opening it to 'real' end users." Imagine my grief when I checked the "Press/Analyst" button next to the "What type of constituent group do you belong to?" question on the application form and learned that, by virtue of my occupation, I was not allowed to attend. According to a public relations representative, "The logic behind keeping the press out is to make sure that participants do not feel like opinions, ideas, or even dumb questions will be recorded for posterity." I repeatedly asked both Linux Foundation personnel and their PR firm what other occupations would not be allowed to enjoy the event. Would bloggers be blackballed, lest their presence make attendees self-conscious? What about people who work in law enforcement or for intelligence agencies? They never answered the question.

Wikis began as free, open, public spaces for anyone at all to contribute and share their knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Businesses have begun to recognize, however, the power of the wiki model for accomplishing internal collaborative tasks, like revising HR documents, producing specifications, and communicating across time and space. Call it Wiki 2.0 -- and it's the newest thing in enterprise software.

Eight years ago, computer stores stocked a choice of GNU/Linux distributions -- established ones like Caldera, Red Hat, and SUSE, and newcomers like Corel, Progeny, and Stormix. Now, only Ubuntu and openSUSE offer box sets, and both face challenges that other distributions found unsolvable, ranging from reasonable prices and features sets through to getting into distribution channels and finding the right marketing approach -- all for an effort that may be only moderately profitable at best, and perhaps best undertaken for non-financial reasons.

Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month. LDN focuses in September 2008 on different aspects of kernel development and management. We'll be back mid-month with our own slant on kernel work; first, though, we return from the US Labor Day holiday this week wondering why everyone doesn't use Erlang? Regular Expressions' usual domain is high-productivity languages like Perl, Tcl, and Python, and specific news or ideas that help make the most of them.

My favorite quote of the day so far comes from a comment that was filed on Bob Sutor's post about how the International Organization of Standardization is risking irrelevancy based on the way it ignored objections to the rushing of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification through the ISO's ratification process. OOXML is primarily a Microsoft-authored competitor to the already ISO-ratified OpenDocument Format (ODF). Bob Sutor is the grand pooh-bah of open standards at IBM (a major proponent of ODF).

It was in line with the likelihood of summer following spring that somebody would declare an application optimized for Google's Chrome, the new web browser that has dominated the geekier end of technology news this week. And it turns out that that somebody is the rising star of the software-as-a-service movement, NetSuite.

I've wanted to write this article for quite a while. Over the years I've noted that Java-based music and sound applications have increased in number and quality, yet no comprehensive list or summaries have covered these advances. And so at long last I present this survey of music and sound applications that require Java. The presentation follows no particular order, but in this first part I'll begin by questioning the use of Java in sound and music applications development, followed by a brief look at Java's internal audio and MIDI capabilities.

The One Laptop per Child program is a nonprofit, philanthropic organization, so how can Intel, a 500-pound gorilla, compete against a philanthropic project like OLPC? This competition would barely be newsworthy if OLPC was a for-profit company… competition is just a standard part of doing business in the corporate world. As I said in Part 1 of my series exploring the ongoing “battle” between Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC laptop project and Intel’s Classmate PC, my philosophy (shared with many Intel execs) was to embrace OLPC and win them over, and to not trash them in the press, especially given OLPC’s philanthropic mission.

Google's Chrome browser has as Spartan a user interface as possible, but the browser's Omnibox also turns out to be a window into a much more elaborate view of the browser. That's because Chrome users can type several commands into the browser's address box to uncovers a wealth of nitty-gritty detail and an amusing Easter egg.