Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Sun has released a new development kit aimed at mobile software developers. The toolkit will allow developers to create user interfaces for Java-based mobile phone applications. The package is being made available for download by the company under the title"Light-Weight UI Toolkit" or LWUIT.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people. Torvalds explained his position in an e-mail exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.

I first heard of gOS when it was chosen to power the $199 Wal-Mart gPC. The third iteration of the OS, gOS 3.0 "Gadgets" Beta, was released last week. It's a great Web-focused desktop, but it doesn't offer much to experienced or current Ubuntu users. I downloaded the ISO image of gOS 3.0, burned it to a CD, and installed it on one of my test systems. I used a basic PC with a 1.7GHz AMD Duron processor and 512MB of RAM, to see how well gOS fared on an unimpressive machine.

This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks. The day opened with Kate Alhola from Nokia showing off the Nokia N810. As already reported, the talk was followed by handing out the devices to the audience. Her blog says she hopes to see lots of Qt and KDE applications in Maemo Garage soon.

With DrasticGrid, you can easily put a MySQL database table or view on a Web page, complete with editing, sorting, and pagination capabilities, and support for adding and deleting records. DrasticGrid is one of three controls from DrasticData -- the others are a tag cloud and Google Maps controller, both of which also get their data from a MySQL database.

Our open source expert foresees the future of Linux: By 2012 the OS will have matured into three basic usage models. Web-based apps rule, virtualization is a breeze, and command-line hacking for basic system configuration is a thing of the past.

LXer Feature: 15-Aug-2008

In many ways the virtues that have brought Linux from a Unix look alike pet project to a competitive operating system are the same as the ideals behind DefCon. The community stood on each other's shoulders and developed piece after piece of software to fill in the gaps that were found through use. Programmer's built on the ideas of others creating tighter and tighter code to support an increasingly complex framework. Originally that was the theme of this article when I had begun thinking about writing it. The things that I saw at DefCon were every bit of the ideals I went up there to find and more...

A federal judge in the United States has ruled that an open source license should have the same legal enforceability as traditional copyright.

With LinuxWorld showcasing the popularity of the open source operating system, and with open source in general finding its legs in the enterprise, Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, made a slate of predictions for Linux and open source during his keynote address on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference.

The computing industry is familiar with the low-cost lab known as the garage, a historic hot-bed for innovation, and this week LinuxWorld had its own "garage" to showcase embedded Linux. From a wirelessly controlled Lego robot to a device designed to aid information sharing in third-world countries, a number of small vendors and independent thinkers were on hand to showcase the possibilities inherent in embedded Linux.

Would you believe a major software vendor released a patch for their flagship program that made it impossible to run their software? Believe it. That's exactly what happened with VMware. On August 12th, users throughout the U.S. tried to turn on their ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi Server 3.5 Update 2 hypervisors and ... were told that their VMware licenses had expired. That's always a great way to win friends and influence software license sales.

Guvnor is the business rules management system in Drools 5. When you deploy it out of the box, you get an unsecured web application that stores data in Jackrabbit’s embedded Derby database. This two-part article explains how to tune Guvnor deployed on JBoss Application Server 4.2.3. (If you missed the first half of the series, catch up in our archives.)This means that we will use the container’s configuration files and security infrastructure. This installment covers enabling password validation based on an OpenLDAP server, moving from the default data repository, and enabling SSL for better security.

Sun Microsystems has open sourced its Java toolkit for building mobile applications just as the role Java plays on handsets comes into question. The company has released the Light-Weight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) under a GPLv2 license with a classpath exception - for binary linking with an application - as an incubator project to Java.net. Fixes to LWUIT from Sun will be posted to the repository.

A glitch in VMware's most recent update had customers scrambling this week. A problem caused by a bug from the beta version of the software that engineers failed to remove or deactivate left VMware users unable to power on virtual machines running the hypervisor software. The bug, also known as a"time bomb," is code that developers insert in beta software to push users to upgrade to an application's final version.

I was already mourning the destruction of my Saturday, thanks to some blown deadlines, and was resigned to spending at least part of the day working. Then I made a fatal error: I read my email. There were two messages from readers that said, in essence, another article about RAID 5 was about as interesting as yet another fawning review of Ubuntu Retching Rabbit or Pooping Penguin or whatever the newest coolest release is, and RAID 5 has some serious flaws anyway, and if I really wanted to be hip and helpful I would write about RAID 10.

Despite all its advances, GNU/Linux remains weak in its support for proprietary audio and video codecs. Because these codecs are often encumbered by patents, distributions must choose either to include support of questionable legality or else exclude it altogether. In the middle of this controversy sits Fluendo, a Catalan company of about 50 employees that is a main contributor to projects like GStreamer, and supports open formats, but also offers licensed, proprietary codecs such as Windows Media Video and MPEG4. While many would argue that this dual position is necessary, it's one that sometimes creates an unasy balance for the company, says Muriel Moscardini, Fluendo's sale director.

A federal appeals court has struck down a lower court ruling that found that open source copyrights may not be legally enforceable if they're licensed under terms that are "intentionally broad." Ruling on an appeal brought by software developer Robert Jacobsen, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said Wednesday that open source users that do not comply with the software's strict licensing terms can, in fact, be sued for copyright infringement -- even if the software is free.

Open source developers now have newly clarified protection, thanks to an appeals court ruling over the validity of their licenses. A judge with U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Wednesday that programmers who"engage in open source licensing" and copyright their work do"have the right to control the modification and distribution" of their products.

Quantum GIS 0.11.0, released last month, is a free geographic information system (GIS) application released under the GPL that runs on multiple platforms, including Linux. QGIS can read, edit, and export common GIS file formats. After installing it and using it to work with existing data layers available from official data repositories, performing common spatial analysis tasks, and sharing files and data with the commercial GIS products, I found QGIS has the potential to be a viable alternative to proprietary commercial GIS programs from the likes of ESRI and Intergraph/Geomedia.

In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies, and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events and transactions.