Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Toshiba has announced that it too is joining the “Netbook” race, but given that the Intel Atom is a chip designed for exactly this type of low-spec computer, what’s more of a surprise is that it has taken Toshiba this long to join in the fun!

Until Chrome came along, Google's Master Mobile Plan didn't quite add up. Now it does. Chrome -- Google's new superbrowser -- is cream on the top of a new mobile software stack. Let's call it GACL, for Gears, Android and Chrome on Linux. Gears is a way to run Web apps on desktops and store data locally as well as in the cloud. Android is a development framework for Linux-based mobile devices. Chrome is a browser, but not just for pages. Chrome also runs apps. In that respect, it's more than the UI-inside-a-window that all browsers have become. It's essentially an operating system.

LXer Feature: 21-Sept-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have, The Large Hadron Collider survives its first attacks from hackers, 5 Useful Tips to Customize Firefox 3, Android gets closer to being released, Carls Schroder opines on what it means to be a "geek" and University of Santa Barbara researchers show incredibly easy it is to compromise the security on a Sequoia Systems voting machine. Also, 10 things Linux does better than Windows, a Richard Stallman interview, VLC gets a new look and Google Chrome for Linux?

Google controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes? Brad Smith of Microsoft said Yahoo’s gains would be at the cost of American businesses. It does not. Google does not set the prices. Its advertisers do, bidding against one another for the amount they will pay when a user clicks on one of their ads. They do the same for ads on Yahoo and Microsoft search sites, too. Auction pricing is so deeply embedded in this business that you can see why Google and Yahoo innocently thought that their advertising pact, which was announced in July and is to be put into effect next month, would sail through a regulatory review to which they voluntarily submitted. The review continues.

Following the release on Tuesday of details about debates and decisions at this year's Kernel Summit, LWN.net has now reported on the second and final day of the conference. Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and some 80 other important and nearly all male kernel developers discussed their approaches to the further development of Linux and exchanged experiences. Like the LWN.net articles covering the first day, Jonathan Corbet's reports on the second day of the kernel Summit are available exclusively to LWN.net subscribers until the 25th of September. As has been the case in previous years, other sources of information on the summit are scarce – it often takes weeks or months for additional information on decisions reached at the conference to trickle out on blogs or posts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code

Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken -- putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court. Blaise Mouttet, a small inventor in Alexandria, Va., thinks he knows why. The problem, he said, is that"there are too many lawyers and not enough inventors involved with the patent system."

There's no doubt that Linux is a secure operating system. However, nothing is perfect. Millions of lines of code are churned through the kernel every second and it only takes a single programming mistake to open a door into the operating system. If that line of code happens to face the Internet, that's a backdoor to your server.

Earlier this year, your editor asked a high-profile kernel developer, in a public discussion at a conference, about the seemingly large number of kernel-related security bugs. Was the number of these vulnerabilities of concern, and what was being done about it? The answer that came back was that security issues aren't a huge concern, that most of the reported issues were obscure local exploits requiring the presence of specific hardware. Serious issues, like the vmsplice() vulnerability, are rare.

A video game is helping university students prepare for careers in business and information technology. At the San Mateo IBM Innovation Center on Thursday, San Francisco State University student Andrey Lyubimov played a simulation on a large screen in which he came across various"co-workers" at a call center.

As some of you know, Google released a new browser recently, something calledChrome. The idea is/was to fix everything that is wrong with browsers and make the Web browsers a tool to run applications. As opposed to just viewing Web pages. I'm being a bit silly here, but Chrome is built to be more like an operating system than a plain old browser. There's more but it's all only for Windows users since a Linux version doesn't yet exist. Wait . . . What? Check out this screenhost (click it for a full screen view).

French software firm Mandriva has released a version of its Linux distribution designed for netbooks. Aimed at original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs), Mandriva Mini is a faster booting, smaller footprint version of the Mandriva desktop distribution, says Mandriva.

The nonprofit Linux Foundation (LF), which coordinates an assortment of Linux-oriented standardization efforts and employs key developers such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds, has added to its Web site a gateway toward individual -- as opposed to corporate -- membership. Individuals can join through the site by paying yearly dues, and will get a small voice in Foundation matters in exchange -- plus their choice of T-shirts.

After nine months, an open secret can finally be acknowledged: The OpenGL code that is responsible for 3-D acceleration on GNU/Linux, which was released by SGI in 1999, has been running on licenses that were accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative. Today, however, the FSF has announced that the licenses in question, the SGI Free License B and the GLX Public License, have been rewritten after months of negotiation between the FSF and SGI. The problem is now resolved, and the result is a code contribution that the FSF ranks as one of the greatest given to the community by a proprietary company.

After two years in development, VLC, the universal media player, has moved from the 0.8.x versions to version 0.9.2. The release, named "Grishenko", is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other operating systems, is available to download from the Videolan web site. The most visible new feature in the Windows and Linux versions is a new user interface. The new interface uses Qt4, replacing the previous wxWidgets-based interface as the default interface and allowing for better internationalisation and a richer set of graphical controls.

The Open Prosthetics Project (OPP) has applied the"open source" model-long used in developing "community-based" software to the design of inexpensive prosthetic hands and arms that a small demand can still support. The designs are free for anyone to use. A community of engineers, designers and innovators is collaborating online to make better prosthetic hands and arms for amputees. One of the lead engineers lost his own arm in Iraq.

Networking giant Cisco Systems said Friday that will acquire instant-messaging software maker Jabber. Terms of the pending deal were not disclosed. Denver-based Jabber makes an open source instant-messaging software that supports an assortment of devices across a business' IT network.

Digital media files are more useful and accessible when tagged with metadata -- that is, descriptive information about each photo that either can be embedded inside images themselves or stored in external databases. ExifTool is an efficient, flexible, and portable way to manage image, audio, and video metadata under Linux. In this article we'll see how to use ExifTool to manage EXIF data inside JPEG files.

T-Mobile USA has been beefing up its nascent 3G mobile wireless services network, announcing that 3G will be ready to run in 21 markets by the middle of next month and will reach 27 major markets by the end of this year. The company says the planned expansion will deliver T-Mobile 3G services to more than two-thirds of the company's current data customers -- but T-Mobile will continue to expand throughout 2009.

Paul Ferrill takes a look at the new, more powerful Asus EeePC 1000 from ZaReason, customized with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Do a beefier CPU, more RAM, and goodies like a Webcam, Bluetooth,and a larger solid-state hard disk play well with Ubuntu?