Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open source software adoption is high in Asia, but the level of contribution from the region's open source developer community leaves much to be desired, says a prominent figure in the open source industry. David Axmark, co-founder of the popular MySQL database, said during a media session here Tuesday that usage of open source software continues to grow significantly across the region.

As regular Deeplinks readers know, EFF's Coders' Rights Project is defending the rights of three MIT students who were prevented from presenting their research on security vulnerabilities in Boston's transit fare payment system. The students were hit with a temporary restraining order that silenced their planned presentation at DEFCON. At first glance, the issues at play may appear obscure, and of interest only to technical researchers and lawyers. But as we noted in a post last week, the right to publish without pre-publication review is part of the purpose of the 1st amendment, and one of the reasons Americans fought the Revolutionary War. (The MBTA's stance is all the more ironic, considering Boston's role in that war.)

[More follow up in regards our DefCon 16 review. - Scott]

The entity behind one of the most popular desktop interface, GNOME Foundation is doing the right thing at the right time. The foundation has hired Stormy Peters as the executive director. We reached out to Stormy and conducted an e-mailed interview to understand how is she planning to take the computing world by 'storm'. Here is the complete interaction with Stormy.

[Four days old but I thought it still worthy; it being a decent Interview. - Scott]

Four years ago I wrote an article for the Linux Journal about my use of Linux software for music instruction. A lot has changed since then, so I thought I should update that article to reflect my current use of Linux in my work as a music teacher. I'll follow the presentation of materials as I organized it in the original article, but first I'll share some observations about the changing nature of my trade. I'm interested in how and where my younger students hear new music. Some of the old channels still work for them, especially live shows, but television and radio have little appeal. On-line music services such as iTunes and Magnatunes are very popular, many students have directed me to music tracks and performances on YouTube and MySpace sites, and the Guitar Hero games have inspired some students to learn tunes they may not have heard elsewhere. Surprisingly, very few have ever tuned in to an Internet radio station. Students still share mix CDs, but of course the iPod is now the preferred portable media player.

Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and 6 but steadily declining since, despite the introduction of IE7. Microsoft spent over 100 million dollars (USD) a year in the late 1990s, with over 1000 people working on IE by 1999.

Linux distributions can be a pain. Users have to go through the whole process of installation, configuration, and updates, and, often, all they really want to do is to run a single application. The vendors of that application, meanwhile, feel the need to support as many distributions as possible, even though the actual system running underneath their code is nearly irrelevant. Wouldn't it be nice if users could simply get their desired application as an "appliance" which comes with all the necessary component parts nicely hidden inside?

Helping develop and foster up and coming talent in the open source software field, the Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, has announced the newly created Fedora Scholarship programme. The programme recognises college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. The inaugural scholarship recipient for 2008 is Ricky Zhou who will attend Carnegie Mellon University this fall.

When it comes to Linux there are 3 kinds of people, those who never heard of it, those who are afraid of it, and those who hate it and spread falsities about it. I don’t really care about the first, they probably aren’t really technologically literate anyways, as long as they have E-mail they are content. While the second group is the result of the actions of the third. Let’s hit two birds with one stone shall we?

Software supplier Red Hat is racking up growth figures that much of techdom might envy. Sales rose 32%, to $157 million, in the quarter ended May 31, and profits climbed a respectable 7%. So why is Wall Street so bearish on the stock? A day after Red Hat reported results, Oppenheimer & Co. downgraded the shares, citing few opportunities for growth. Three other investment banks had lowered their Red Hat ratings in the previous nine months, and the company's shares, which on Aug. 15 dipped 22¢, to 22.75, have been parked between 21 and 23 for a year. "There's a concern that our growth rate will slow," Red Hat Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst says. "We've been in that funk the last couple of years."

Last week, we told you that Taiwan-based HTC, one of the largest mobile device makers in the world, was readying the first smart phone to use Google’s Android operating system. Well, on Monday the Federal Communications Commission approved the device for use in the United States. The F.C.C. posted certification documentation on its Web site. The documents confirm is the name of the new phone: Dream. Most important, though: with the smartphone’s certification behind it, it is possible for T-Mobile, the nation’s No. 4 wireless carrier, to go ahead with plans to debut the phone next month and begin selling it ahead of the Christmas shopping season.

GoboLinux is a distribution which sports a different file system structure than 'ordinary' Linux distributions. In order to remain compatible with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, symbolic links are used to map the GoboLinux tree to standard UNIX directories. A post in the GoboLinux forums suggested that it might be better to turn the concept around: retain the FHS, and then use symbolic links to map the GoboLinux tree on top of it. This sparked some interesting discussion.

In the name of defining jargon, Forbes this week tries a complete rewrite of open source history. This is accomplished by someone named Dan Woods, who calls his company Evolved Media. (He might want to rename it Unevolved Medium.) Woods does this by ignoring Eric Raymond’s ground-breaking The Cathedral and the Bazaar, making Richard Stallman the father of something he frankly detests.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has joined the Linux Foundation. This move reflects the growing relevance of Canonical in the Linux ecosystem and indicates that the company has achieved a level of growth that empowers it to contribute additional resources back to the Linux community.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released documents today suggesting that the first Android phone will hit the U.S. market in November. The documents show that the FCC has approved the sale of HTC's Dream phone. It is widely rumored that the device will be the first to run Google Inc.'s Linux-based Android software.

One of the advantages, touted by the Open Source community is that you can read the source code and make changes to it if you need to. Now to be honest, how many of us even bother to look at the source code? Come on, fess up. Yes, that is about what I thought. To the five percent of you that do read the code (or tweak it), bravo, but, while most of us do not live in C (or C++ or insert your favorite language here), we do have to configure, tweak, twist, bend and occasional bully the code into working correctly and in a useful manner, whether that is playing nice with our libraries or other application. So, the Open can also mean transparent. And this is a good thing.

Cluster computing has played a pivotal role in the way research is conducted in educational environments. Because the amount of available money and hardware varies between university researchers, often it's necessary to find a clustering solution that can work well on a small scale, but also can be expanded into a large computing cluster. To maximize grants, researchers typically ask for an open source solution to meet their needs. Despite the lack of certain desirable features, Rocks clusters are among the best open source solution for building a computing cluster.

When I was a kid, I used to make crude little animated cartoons in my notebooks using the flipbook technique. Walt Disney had nothing to worry about. I was awful even by the 3rd grade standards of White Pine elementary. Today, I could be great, because almost all top animation and special effects artists are Linux users.

The other day I was talking with a bunch of other tech heads about the ongoing Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux market share war and why, from a stats point of view, that Mac and Linux were still trailing far behind Windows. “It all revolves around killer apps,” pipes up one of the tech heads. “The problem with both Apple and Linux is that neither OS has a compelling killer app driving the user base.” The conversation then went off on to discuss apps such as Photoshop and AutoCAD and how with Windows you have a single unified platform that’ll run almost any professional grade package that you can think of, while with Mac and Linux your choices are restricted. Bull.

While there is never any shortage of hope in the world of technology, perhaps the largest gusher in the last 20 years came from two words: open source, a term that is too large for one column (too big for most books, in fact). This week JargonSpy takes a trip back in time to understand how many of the hopes and dreams for open source ended up creating a world just like the one we always had. To reduce the scope of our discussion to a digestible size, we must add a qualifier, so this week we are going to look at "commercial open source."

[Lookout, major lapse in research ahead. - Scott]

Last month we started a tutorial series covering tips and tricks to help you make the transition from Microsoft (MS) Office to OpenOffice.org (OOo) 2.4 easier. We discovered how to add more templates and clip art to OOo, include grammar checking, and replicate the convenient Split Window feature of MS Office. This part of the series will take you through the process of importing the custom dictionary of MS Office, setting OOo to always save in the MS Office format, and using MS Office. Ready, set, go!