Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. The lawsuit by Facil was lodged with the Quebec Superior Court on July 15 and made public on Wednesday. In it, the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp.

This is my second attempt to write this introduction [1.]. My intent was to outline methods that took external inputs and converted them into content that would be inserted running web pages. However, my plans went astray. It seemed the mere mention of the word security subverted my intentions. This rewrite is aimed at regaining my balance.

Dell is going after emerging markets with a new line of low-cost computers. The Vostro notebooks and desktops are the company's first models targeted specifically at China, India and a handful of other Asian, African and Latin American nations. The systems will sell for about the equivalent of $440 to $475.

Suppose someone wants to send you a large file. They could try to send it via email, but many email servers impose limits on file size. They could try sending it over during an instant messenger or Internet Relay Chat session, but that's slow, as the file actually gets transferred twice: once to the chat server, then to your machine. File transfer services like RapidShare and MegaUpload are fine, but not for confidential information. Of course, you could set up an FTP server on your box, but you don't want to leave that door open all the time. Luckily, there's now an easy solution: droopy.

The much anticipated spanning tree edition of Networking 101 has finally arrived. Yes, you too can have a network that survives multiple exploding switches. Read on. The spanning tree protocol was invented by Dr. Radia Perlman, distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems. Dr. Perlman devised a method by which bridges can obtain layer 2 routing utopia: redundant and loop-free operation. Think of spanning tree as a tree that the bridge keeps in memory for the purposes of optimized and fault-tolerant data forwarding.

In a new twist to the Psystar saga, the Mac cloning company is to countersue Apple claiming anticompetitive business practises because the Mac Operating System is tied to Apple only hardware. Rudy Pedraza has become something of a love him or loathe him figure in the Applesphere. His company, Psystar, started selling Mac clones this year under the guise of the OpenMac which quickly became the OpenComputer and then added the OpenPro to its range.

My name is Adrienne, and I’m a graphic designer at Red Hat—I create meaning using type and image. The other day I stumbled upon a story involving music, sustainability, and open source. Needless to say, I was intrigued. Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain are the artists and creators behind Monome. At first glance, this cool device is simply a white square with a grid of buttons. It produces music and the buttons light up. It seems random, but the lights and music are synchronized.

Mozilla has announced the launch of a new feature for its Firefox Web browser designed to make it perform faster. Called"TraceMonkey," the feature is an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and will be built into Firefox 3.1, according to the company. To increase JavaScript speeds by an order of magnitude or more, Mozilla designed TraceMonkey with a new type of just-in-time compiler.

Mailboxes are going the way of phone booths. More of us are paying our bills online and using the Internet to send our correspondence, so the U.S. Postal Service has decided it needs fewer mailboxes. (WTOP) The first question that jumped to my mind is how does the USPS expect me to mail a letter when I cannot find a mail box? The second question is, will there be any letters twenty years from now? Or less? This is not as trivial a concern as you might expect.

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference& Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

[Hilarious, Editor for over a year and he is just now 'switching' Linux. - Scott]

ReadyTechs provides network support services for companies that don't want the expense of hiring and caring for their own employees. Now CEO Gerry Libertelli says the company is using Linux virtualization to open a new income stream based on cloud computing. Libertelli say he catches his existing customers at the end-of-life stage in hardware maintenance to offer them more than just virtual server administration. "We intervene in the hardware stream and say, 'How about a virtual network?' And that is starting to ramp up."

Dan Kaminsky spoke to a packed house at Black Hat on 6 August to outline the fundamental flaw he found in the Domain Name System (DNS). Contrary to his hopes, though, the flaw was discovered and publicized before his presentation. The vulnerability is interesting in its own right, but the implications of what can be done with it are staggering. In addition, the "fix" has well understood shortcomings that can still potentially be exploited to poison DNS caches. We reported on the vulnerability in early July, including Kaminsky's request that security folks not publicly speculate about the flaw. As one might guess, that request was largely ignored. When security researcher Halvar Flake published his speculation, another researcher, who was known to have the details of the flaw, publicly confirmed it, but just as quickly removed the confirmation. While it sounds a bit like a security community soap opera, it was fairly clearly caused by the attempt to contain the vulnerability information.

If you follow technology trends, you have probably heard of the semantic desktop -- a data layer for annotating and sharing the information in your computer. But what you may not be aware of is that the semantic desktop is not a distant goal, but scheduled to arrive at the end of 2008. And, when it does, the idea will probably be implemented through the work done by the Nepomuk project, and, most likely, by KDE first.

If like first-person shooters, you'll love Sauerbraten. This open source game might not have the visual finesse of other FPSes, but what it lacks in the graphics department, Sauerbraten more than makes up for with its various single and multiplayer modes, including an experimental role-playing game mode, and a unique WYSIWYG in-game map editor. Sauerbraten blends the best of FPSes like Quake and Max Payne to give you a unique gaming experience.

Web applications are set for a speed boost, but it's nothing to do with their developers. The TraceMonkey project is hard at work on a new and much faster implementation of JavaScript for the Firefox browser. While TraceMonkey is still in its early stages, the target is to make it a part of Firefox 3.1, which is expected in late 2008 or early 2009. TraceMonkey already performs various benchmarks in 4.5 percent to 55 percent of the time taken by Firefox 3, and useful further improvements are thought possible.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.10, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.5.10 sports changes in Kicker, the KDE3 panel and KPDF, the PDF viewer. The KDE community has finalized yet another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release in terms of features, 3.5.10 brings a couple of nice bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5.

You probably know intuitively that applications have limited powers in Intel x86 computers and that only operating system code can perform certain tasks, but do you know how this really works? This post takes a look at x86 privilege levels, the mechanism whereby the OS and CPU conspire to restrict what user-mode programs can do.

Photosynth is one of the most exciting programs I've seen in a long time. It takes a group of photos, typically of a single geographical location, but possibly taken at different times by different people, analyses them for similarities, and then stitches then together into a smooth-flowing, pseudo-3D panorama. It's really great. Just two problems. One: it won't run on GNU/Linux; and two: it's from Microsoft, and so is unlikely ever to do so. My question is this: Why didn't the free software community come up with Photosynth first?

While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as"clients." They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more.

In August 2008 a small OLPC XO deployment project was started in Russia. A group of Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogic University professors has taught 32 students from Nizhny Novgorod how to use XOs in a summer camp environment. The project was launched in a field facility of Nizhny Novgorod State University in Staraya Pustyn village in Nizhny Novgorod region.