Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The KOffice team, developers, students, packagers and bug reporters have prepared the final Alpha release of KOffice 2.0: KOffice 2.0 Alpha 10. KOffice will enter feature freeze in two weeks, so the next release will be the first Beta. And we are committed to releasing as many Beta's as is necessary before declaring Release Candidate status for KOffice 2.0.

Google has undone an earlier ban on the Mozilla Public License, an option for open source projects hosted at its Google Code site. Ostensibly as part of an effort to discourage the proliferation of open source licenses, Google dropped support for the MPL earlier in August. Now, though, the company reconsidered, restoring it and adding support for the Eclipse Public License as well.

Walter Bender's question 22: What “shoulders of giants” should we stand on? What is it that children should learn? Are there any universals? How do children decide whom and what to believe? I've been providing what I think is a good answer to these questions for some time now but often the response is muted and contradictory. It's not my original answer, it originates from Alan Kay and his analysis originates from anthropologists. The answer is not that children should learn universals but there needs to be more focus on what Kay has called the "non universals". From anthropological research of over 3000 human cultures, Kay presented two lists, the first were universals, the things that all human cultures have in common.

Project Gutenberg, the online library of more than 25,000 free books, is a treasure trove for bookworms and casual readers alike, but turning electronic text files into a readable form is not as easy as it may seem. In theory, since etexts are just plain text files, you should be able to open and read them on any platform without any tweaking. In practice, however, this approach rarely works. Hard line breaks, for example, may ruin the text flow, making it virtually impossible to read the book on a mobile device. Another problem is that most books are stored as single files, so locating a particular chapter or section in a lengthy book can be a serious nuisance. Then there are minor but annoying formatting quirks, such as inconsistent handling of italicized text, use of straight quotes instead of smart ones, and so on.

The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology. As a 501(c)3 charity in the United States, the FSF is run by a board of directors. The current board includes FSF founder and president Richard M. Stallman and long-term member Henry Poole, but, in the last few years, new faces have appeared on the board.

What's that super-bright star in the western sky after sunset? Was the moon full last night? Is Mars visible now? What time will the sun set on Saturday? Do you ever look up at the sky and wonder about it? Your Linux desktop has lots of astronomy programs that can help you explore the night sky. This article will start with the one that's easiest to use: KStars. KStars is a nifty "planetarium program" that's probably available through your Linux distro. Don't let the "K" scare you off -- kstars works fine even if you're not running KDE.

Intercepting Internet traffic and spying on the communication between two computers is a gold mine for hackers. Now Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope software they've built will make it harder for criminals to hit that jackpot. The software, for use with latest version of the Firefox Web browser, creates an additional way for people to verify whether the site they're trying to visit is authentic.

This month saw the release of LyX 1.6 release candidate 1. Occupying a position somewhere between a word processor and a mark-up editor, LyX is designed to meet the needs of professional and academic writers by allowing them to focus on their content rather than formatting and layout. It achieves this by eschewing some of the WYSIWYG conventions of a word processor. We've covered LyX in the past, so this time we'll focus on the enhancements that the 1.6 release brings with it.

At Akademy 2008, KDE Release Team members Sebastian Kügler and Dirk Müller discussed the future of KDE's development process. Describing the challenges KDE faces and proposing some solutions, they spawned a lot of discussion. Read on for a summary of what has been said and done around this topic at Akademy.

Last week I discussed the SliTaz Linux distro and the use of QEMU to launch a virtual machine on Windows in which SliTaz or pretty much any other operating system can run. As always, your feedback didn't disappoint. Reader Art Gibbens wrote, "Thanx so much for the tip on QEMU. I also stuffed both a Knoppix and PCLinuxOS [ISO files] in the folder (separately - of course) and they both came to life. I had to tweak screen resolution in Knoppix and the login doesn't work in PCLinux, which I would think could both be rectified. Keep up the good work!"

Java training and education has never been easy. Not only are the language and its third-party and community offerings constantly moving targets, each developer has his or her own preferences, plug-ins inventory and habits. What's more, the"book knowledge" gained in many course settings can vary wildly from what happens in the"real world" of communities and teams.

Twitter is a social networking platform that keeps you in conversation by allowing you and your friends to follow each others' updates. The service lets users post and read 140-character updates, called tweets. With Twitter, you can do social networking on the fly, from your mobile phone or at your desktop, from a Web browser or a Twitter client. Twitter clients make the service more usuable by automatically checking for updates from your friends and allowing you to easily post your own updates. I tested four Twitter clients for Linux on a desktop running Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Why sell somebody else's product line when you can do a better job offering your own? That was the question that ultimately pushed Jan Hichert, CEO of Astaro, and two other cofounders to develop their own Internet security solutions for a market they viewed as needy of attention -- the small- to medium-sized business segment.

Xen.org, the developer of the open source Xen project, on Wednesday announced the release of the Xen 3.3 hypervisor engine. The product is the result of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software and security vendors.

NASA has confirmed that a laptop aboard the International Space Station has been infected with the W32.Gammima.AG worm, and admits this isn't the first time it has happened... Well, what do you know, it seems that the latest International Space Station mission has an uninvited guest in the shape of a worm that managed to stowaway for the ride.

So Microsoft and Novell are extending their two year old partnership. Is anyone really surprised? Similar, if smaller, deals are announced by other partners on an almost daily basis. The truth is, the deal is not nearly as insightful as the reactions to it in the free and open source (FOSS) community. I'm not talking about the extreme reactions here. On the one hand, you have the market-speak of Novell, which ignores the profound uneasiness that the community has about deals that, in the words of Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, concern "building a bridge between proprietary and open source software," let alone involving a company that is perceived with profound distrust.

One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues. As part of this effort, the SFLC has already published "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects." Its latest effort in public education, released last week, is "A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance," a 15-page guide for FOSS projects on how to avoid violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The guide is a practical summary of its subject, but its wording is unnecessarily legalistic, and its structure and omissions sometimes fall short of the goal of being a standalone reference.

US researchers have found a way to thwart hack attacks which intercept data passing from a PC to a website....To spread the word about their defence the trio of researchers have signed up a series of sites to act as notaries and have developed software worried web users can install to help protect them. Currently the software is only available as an add-on for the Firefox browser, Apple's OS X on Intel machines and Linux.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced its first summit for Linux end users. The Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit runs from October 13-14 in New York City, and will "provide end users a direct connection and voice to the kernel community," says the LF. Held at the Desmond Tutu Center, the event offers an opportunity for "sophisticated" end users to "learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers," says the non-profit organization.

No one saw this coming. Cisco, the networking giant, announced today it was buying PostPath, maker of the Linux-based Exchange server replacement PostPath Server. PostPath is best known as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Unlike other would-be Exchange competitors Scalix and Lotus Domino/Notes, which use a Outlook-compatible Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI) on the client PC, PostPath actually reverse-engineered Microsoft's MAPI and Active Directory (AD) protocols. This means that, from the network and Windows PC's viewpoint, PostPath actually appears to be an Exchange server.