Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.

According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent. If Linux server vendors want to continue to grow, at some point they're going to have to come to grips with Windows, rather than eating into the low-hanging Unix fruit.

PDF files are a lot like democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill. PDFs are a lousy way to move documents around, but the alternatives are worse. I hate PDF files. Portable Document Format is a benevolent monopoly by Adobe, which created the format and sets the standards for its development.

KDE 4.1, released last month, brought a great number of improvements to the popular desktop environment. It's the best desktop I've ever used -- but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. 2009 will see the release of KDE 4.2. Here are 10 features that would be great additions to a future KDE release that I hope the developers will consider.

How to react to the news that an earlier flaw in Debian's random-number generator has been used to fuel an honest-to-Linus exploit, especially after yesterday's post? Welcome to the tip of the iceberg. It's been said, somewhat cynically, that one possible good reason we don't see more Linux exploits scurrying around in the wild is because Linux doesn't represent the same kind of attack surface for criminal hackers as Windows does. True, Linux still doesn't have the desktop market share of even the Macintosh -- but it's become that much more interesting as a target because of the number of server and infrastructure systems that use it.

Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife. "I wish to humbly apologize to society for my crime," Reiser said in a statement before his sentence was pronounced. "Every human life is sacred. I took the life of a human being and I'm very sorry for that."

The August 2th "Linux Product Insider" features Memopal Online Backup, gNewSense 2.1, Super Talent Pico D USB Drive, SEH's PS56 WLAN Print Server and the new book Building Embedded Linux Systems.

Intel has acquired embedded Linux specialists OpenedHand. The London based company, with offices in Paris and Helsinki, offers software development and services in the mobile embedded Linux field. OpenedHand maintains a number of open source projects such as Matchbox, an X Window manager for small devices, and Pimlico, a compact personal information manager. Intel say that it will continue to support these OpenedHand led projects.

In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: "use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default." Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise.

Enterprise organizations are tapping the benefits not only of using open source software, but contributing to it by using the Eclipse model. The Eclipse Swordfish, Tigerstripe, Open Financial Market Platform and Open System Engineering Environment projects are all based on code contributed by end-user enterprises. As an indication that the open source model is beginning to mature and move beyond just independent software vendors (ISVs) and into the enterprise, Eclipse Foundation leaders say a new trend in Eclipse indicates that enterprises are beginning to develop and contribute code to Eclipse projects.

Google is gearing up to launch its Android Market -- the open source phone software's answer to Apple's iPhone App Store. Staying true to the open model, the platform will allow more instant developer access compared to Apple's approval-based system and will also offer a set of tools for developers to track their business progress.

Teaching and learning have always had a collaborative element, but wiki technology has in recent years made collaboration central to the method of many educators. Since they can be edited by anyone with access to them, education wikis are ever-changing and evolving documents that ideally represent the wisdom of the student crowd.

Juliet Kemp explores the incredibly useful xargs command. It takes in input and executes your chosen command on it. Deceptively simple in concept; extremely powerful in execution. Here we'll look at xargs with find, and then at some other possibilities.

A cellular plan using an EVDO modem can provide a connection with bandwidth of approximately 3Mbps to the client and 1.5Mbps up to the provider (comparable to DSL) for a much lower cost than alternatives such as satellite. For applications requiring high-quality audio transmission from remote locations, such as the radio remotes we do at the radio station where I work, a Linux laptop with an EVDO modem and VoIP software offers an inexpensive and reliable solution. Here's what you need to get started.

My dad has been pestering me for some time to find him an open source tool that he could use to follow the market trends. He's been thinking about investing a little something in the market, but not without due diligence. Grism, written in Ruby, is the tool my dad now uses to easily follow the changing market trends. It allows you to create watchlists and portfolios and offers charts to help you gauge the performance of particular stocks.

Open source projects and vendors are trying a variety of technical approaches to replacing the expensive but ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange. While none is yet a drop-in replacement, some administrators can get a TCO advantage by switching.

If you're a frequent business traveler who keeps important company files on your laptop, using a centralized management solution to back up files automatically during a fixed time interval won't work. Instead, consider Box Backup, which backs up files from a laptop directly to a backup server over an encrypted link. Box Backup doesn't rely on server-initiated backups. Whenever laptops, or other clients, connect to the backup server, the backup can start immediately. You are assured that the files are secure, because Box Backup uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt data straight to the backup server's disks. In addition to the usual snapshot type of backup, Box Backup also lets you make a continuous backup for every change in files while connected to the server. Best of all, Box Backup is free.

Bordeaux is a commercial User Interface to the Wine software that allows Linux systems to run Windows software. The Bordeaux Technology Group distributes this software and provides professional support to companies and individuals running Windows apps on Linux (and soon FreeBSD). I interviewed Tom Wickline to get some details and find out what they're up to now.

We are in an economic downturn, perhaps even a full-blown recession. Any doubts I had about that were removed by two related, recent phenomena. The first is that whenever I walk down a high street I see almost every single retailer involved in near permanent 'sales'. Looking into the figures confirms the picture - sales on the high street have fallen for four of the past five months.

Solid state drives are in the news right now and IBM has not only pushed the speed barriers for these small devices but is also testing a 4 terabyte SSD. On the Linux front, Intel has bought a Linux distributor and Novell's Linux revenues jump 30% this quarter. And finally (so to speak) Bloomberg accidentally killed Apple supremo Steve Jobs this week.