Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When I typed on Google “Do I really need a firewall?” 695,000 results came across. And I'm pretty sure they must be saying “Hell yeah!”. In my opinion, no one would ever recommend anyone to sit naked on the internet keeping in mind the insecurity internet carries these days, unless you really know what you are doing.

SRWare, a German company, has released Iron, based on Google's Chromium code. The big difference, according to the authors on their German language-only web site, is that the features which have caused people to question the privacy of Google's browser are all disabled.

You don't need a dedicated computing cluster to perform big processing jobs - you can turn your LAN into a part-time cluster with Condor. In part two of her look at this distributed computing framework, Juliet Kemp shows how to submit jobs to your running installation.

The GNOME project has released a major upgrade of its desktop environment that adds an instant messaging (IM) client. GNOME 2.24 also features a new task manager, screen resolution tools, and enhanced conferencing support, and spins off a new GNOME Mobile version for embedded devices.

KDE's Konqueror is as multifunctional as a Swiss Army knife. It works as both a file manager and a Web browser, and you can enhance it even further by adding new commands to its repertoire by means of service menus. The new commands appear in Konqueror's context menu when you right-click a file. Here's how to create service menus, and some specific commands that you might want to use in them.

The KOffice team is proud to announce the first beta of KOffice 2.0. The goal of this release is to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow us to release a usable 2.0 release, demonstrating our vision for the future of the digital office to a larger audience and attract new contributions both in terms of code and ideas for improvements. Read on for more information or see the announcement and download it from the release notes.

This post comes hard on the heels of an important piece of news... at least two Open Source companies have become part of the Becta's official list of suppliers to the education sector. The new procurement frame work under the aegis of the OGC relaunches the supply of ICT to education. The emphasis is clear: deliver value for money to UK schools.

You can monitor your computers in a wide variety of ways. Large proprietary applications make sense for large installations that can afford the expense of both the software and consultants who fine-tune the systems. Open source monitoring solutions like Nagios or OpenNMS cost nothing to acquire but still require planning and tweaking. When you need to address smaller problems with process data on a system, the process monitoring tool ps-watcher comes in handy.

Oracle announced at its OpenWorld event this week two new partnerships intended to boost the firm's cloud computing offerings. The enterprise software maker announced Monday that it has teamed with Amazon to offer enterprise customers options available via the mega-e-tailer's Elastic Compute Cloud service.

One of the most frustrating aspects of open source but commercially supported software is that it takes many orders of magnitude of freebie customers to attain a base of core customers who will pay for a glorified product with commercial-grade installation and ongoing tech support. There is always a temptation to try to monetize the vast installed base of users who are making use of the so-called development or community editions of programs. But Red Hat isn't going for it.

You have to give Oracle credit for persistence. The software giant has been trying to build out its groupware business for nearly 10 years, and has as yet modest success. Now, with Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the enterprise messaging waters.

Large Chicago law firm Jones Day is suing a tiny Internet startup called BlockShopper over the use of the humble hyperlink. But BlockShopper has picked up a pair of allies in the form of the EFF and Public Citizen, and the two groups jointly filed anamici curiae brief with the court that points out the obvious:"linking is what web sites do-that is, after all, why it is called the 'World Wide Web'."

Many applications need to graphically display the relation between two data axes. Common examples are how one resource such as CPU load or an exchange rate varies over time. GtkDatabox makes presenting such information in a GTK+ desktop application much simpler. Version 0.8.2.2 is packaged for Fedora 9, while version 0.7.0.x is available for both Ubuntu Hardy and as a 1-Click install for openSUSE. I'll build from source using the latest version 0.9.0.1 on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.

The students of a missionary school in Pakistan, from first graders to graduates, have become enthusiast Edubuntu users thanks to the cooperation between their administrator and an Italian LUG. Padre (Father) Aldino Amato is an Italian missionary who has been working for 25 years in the schools of the Rosary Christian Hospital, a nonprofit charitable institution in the village of Rehmpur, near to the city of Okara in the Pakistani province of Punjab. In 2006, during a holiday in Italy, a friend suggested Amato publish in an Italian missionary newletter a request for all the things his schools needed but couldn't find easily in Pakistan. The first item on that list was computers. A newsletter reader pointed Amato to Golem (Gruppo Operativo Linux EMpoli), an Italian Linux user group (LUG) founded in 2000 in Empoli, a Tuscan town about 30 kilometers west of Florence.

It is becoming more and more clear to me that decision makers in healthcare policy and especially in healthcare IT policy do not understand the real underlying problems of interoperability in healthcare applications. Dare I also say that most developers don't either?

IBM has announced a new corporate strategy regarding its participation in the hundreds of standard-setting organizations relevant to its products. Simply put, it only wants to work within an environment that is open and transparent."There is simply no justification for standards to be created in nontransparent ways," said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers. The controversial plan sparked debate over whether Oracle was trying to kill off Red Hat by taking away Red Hat's revenue stream. Oracle and Red Hat representatives questioned during this week's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco offered strikingly different perspectives on how well Oracle's plan has worked out.

The unveiling Tuesday of HTC's much-anticipated G1 handset for T-Mobile, the first device running Google's Android mobile operating system, looks to be the opening salvo in a battle for smartphone consumers between Google and Apple. Although the first-generation G1 and second-gen iPhone are not exactly the same, the two handsets offer consumers many of the same features and functionalities.

Part two of Charlie Schluting's overview of TCP covers the basics of TCP connections and flow control.

Good OS (gOS) has achieved a major new release of its Ubuntu-based operating system. Targeting OEMs that want quickly customizable Linux netbook OSes, gOS 3.0 integrates closely with Google Gadgets, as well as with Google Mail, Calendar, Reader, News, Applications, Picasa, and so on.