Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Amarok team is proud to present the second Alpha of Amarok 2.0. Development is moving at full speed and a lot of bugs have been fixed sinceAlpha 1, as well as features polished. Thank you to everyone who has already helped by filing bug reports and sending patches. Please keep them coming! Read the release announcement for a list of bug fixes and changes. Get Alpha 2 today and help make Amarok 2.0 rock.

File under really big stuff. Google search engineers are reporting that the Google search index has grown from 26 million pages when it first launched back in 1998, to a whopping one trillion unique URLs today...

Microsoft has announced that it will buy DATAllegro, maker of data warehouse appliances. It plans to use the acquired technology as the basis for a SQL Server 2008 appliance. This purchase is interesting on a lot of levels for the enterprise market. First and foremost, it signals that the hot area of high-end, shared nothing massively parallel processing (MPP) appliances have won out and users can expect them to take a major leap toward affordability, now that Microsoft has entered the market.

The family of KDE websites has got a new member, the site for the fine utilities applications from the module kdeutils. Despite being one of the first modules, kdeutils has always been without its own website. No longer. At utils.kde.org you can now find a lot of information about the KDE Utilities. See for yourself the details of the current set of programs below.

In the nightmare scenario of Luddites everywhere, The Computers have been entrusted with mankind's accumulated knowledge. All is well until that fateful day when the machines band together, creating a mammoth, all-powerful, living network that thinks, grows and takes over the Earth. Think"The Terminator" or"Colossus: The Forbin Project."

On July 15, Red Hat and Firestar released the terms of the settlement [PDF] of their patent suit. When we last looked at this settlement, those terms were not available. Now we can examine exactly what was agreed to and assess the degree of protection that Red Hat actually negotiated for the wider community. It may be tempting to say that recent events have reduced the relevance of this settlement, but that would be a mistake; what Red Hat has done here still matters.

"Since everybody seems to be having fun building new filesystems these days, I thought I should join the party, began Daniel Phillips, announcing the Tux3 versioning filesystem. He continued, "Tux3 is a write anywhere, atomic commit, btree based versioning filesystem. As part of this work, the venerable HTree design used in Ext3 and Lustre is getting a rev to better support NFS and possibly become more efficient."

Since version 2 came out in 2005, Google Desktop for Windows has included a sidebar that users can fill with screen gadgets, but the Linux version (version 1, from June 2007) provided only indexing and search functions, with no eye candy whatsoever. This has finally changed. Google recently released Google Gadgets for Linux (GGL), which closes the gap between the operating systems. With GGL, you can run as many gadgets as you wish on your screen -- or at least that's the idea. Some flaws still need to be fixed, and not everything works 100% correctly.

Intel has switched from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux for release 2.0 of its MID-targeted Moblin open source stack, according to a variety of sources, including The Register. Intel also indicated Moblin 2.0 would be unveiled on August 19th, say multiple sources.

Here's how it works: Novell owns Unix's IP (intellectual property). SCO sold Unix's IP to Sun. Sun then included some Unix IP into Solaris. Finally, Sun open sourced Solaris as OpenSolaris. Sounds like trouble, doesn't it? While Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps described the line of logic above as "sheer speculation," others see a major potential legal problem for Sun. However, analysts, lawyers and open source leaders also agreed that it's unlikely Novell would ever choose to make trouble for Sun. Novell, however, has not commented on its intentions despite several attempts to get the Linux company's take on the issue.

Over the past few days details have surfaced about the nature of the DNS bug that Dan Kaminsky announced two weeks ago. Yes, it is as big and as scary as we were told. As you may remember, Kaminsky coordinated the announcement with many major software vendors and promised not to disclose a way to exploit the bug until August 6 at the annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. This would give ISPs 30 days to patch their systems and protect their users. Kaminsky also asked members of the security community to refrain from publicly speculating about the issue until the details were officially announced. That may have been too much to ask, as it only took 13 days for the issue to find its way into the public eye.

VIA Technologies today boosted its involvement in the open source community by appointing Harald Welte as its open source liason. Welte was the 2007 recipient of the Free Software Foundation’s Award for the Advancement of Free Software. He also recently won the Defender of Rights award at the 2008 Open Source Awards.

The second of four days at the 10th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium got off to an unusual start as a small bird "assisted" Rob Landley in giving the first talk I attended, called "Where Linux kernel documentation hides." The tweeting bird was polite, only flying over the audience a couple of times and mostly paying attention. Landley did a six-month fellowship with the Linux Foundation last year to try to improve the Linux kernel's documentation. He explained that it was meant to be a year, but after six months he had come to some conclusions about how documentation should be done, which he said the Linux Foundation both agreed with and did not plan to pursue, and so he went back to maintaining his other projects.

Is OpenID a panacea, a placebo, or something in between? Opposing viewpoints took turns on center stage Wednesday afternoon at OSCON 2008. The session entitled "A Critical View of OpenID" started off as anything but critical, but once the audience got its turn to raise questions, things got more interesting. Moderated by author Jason Levitt, the session featured four speakers explaining the theory, security model, implementation, and importance of the OpenID single sign-on system. Simon Willison gave an overview of the system, Scott Kveton of Vidoop examined its security, Chris Messina of the DiSo project described its potential impact on social networking, and Yahoo!'s Membership Team architect Allen Tom related his company's experience deploying it.

A Finnish Internet community is seeking to apply the collective approach taken by online collaborators like the authors of Wikipedia to start a mass movement toward electric cars. The plan is to encourage the conversion of used gasoline-powered cars to run on electricity, with the first rollout due this year.

A coalition of individuals and corporate backers are creating the Open Web Foundation, an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications following the open-source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation. The group was announced July 24 here at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

Only 3 months late, the Government has finally released a consultation into potential legislation aimed at curbing illicit filesharing on the net. Several of the legislative options on the table are worrying, and mirror schemes being discussed in various national and international fora. They include streamlining the legal process to require ISPs to provide personal data relating to an IP address, handing responsibility for taking action against illicit filesharers to a third party body, or requiring ISPs to take action against users themselves or to install filtering equipment to block infringing content.

Yahoo! subsidiary Zimbra has released beta 3 of Zimbra Desktop, its new email application designed to make it simpler to work with multiple web mail accounts, even when offline. The program also includes calendaring facilities.

Looking for a good job in IT? Sharpen your knowledge of open source development frameworks, languages, and programming. A just-published study of available IT jobs found that 5 percent to 15 percent of the positions now on the market call for open source software skills. Written by consultant and author Bernard Golden in conjunction with O'Reilly Media, the 50-page report attempts to document the spread of open source in the enterprise. Although the study did not quantify the actual percentage of open source products used in the enterprise, the strong growth in available jobs -- in a period when overall IT job growth may be slowing -- points to a surprising breadth of adoption. Indeed, the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has emerged as a popular technology for modern voice communications. Many organizations have replaced their analog or proprietary digital telephone systems with VoIP-based solutions. This allows the consolidation of telephone services into an existing IP infrastructure. In addition, using IP to host voice services lets the organization leverage existing expertise–while retaining all of the network’s management advantages. Though not without its disadvantages, VoIP provides a compelling option to those looking for a telephone solution.