Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

An issue near and dear to my heart, both personally and professionally is that of spam. Not the lunch meat, which, when prepared correctly, I happen to enjoy, but that bane of email, the unsolicited commercial email (UCE). At what point does legitimate communication cross the line to become junk. I am asking this question for a couple of reasons. The first is an article in this morning's Washingtong Post about Facebook users having their account's deactivated for abuse, because the user was using the system for, theoretically, just what its designers intended - staying in contact with friends. The second reason is more critical to me and that is sending out updates about hazardous weather and preparations to members of my volunteer cadre. As TS Hanna approaches, the traffic will increase and many of the systems that some of my people are on consider this uptick in mail to be spam, regardless of whether or not the end user actually chooses to receive it.

Never let it be said that I don't listen to readers. In April, after I favorably reviewed a wireless product that elegantly displayed baseball scores, Don wrote:"How could you recommend that, especially at the price of $200 for a unitasker? This isn't worth $20 for what it does. What a joke. Please check out Chumby for a slightly cheaper and much more functional alternative."

If the rocky reception of KDE 4 has done anything, it has forced the KDE project to realize it needs to listen to users more closely. One of the first results of this realization is the new Community Working Group (CWG). Announced at Akademy, the recently concluded annual KDE conference, the CWG was described as designed "to act as a central point of contact by being available to communicate user needs and concerns to developers, and developer intentions and plans to users." The CWG is still being organized; to find out more about its plans, we contacted Anne Wilson and Juan Carlos Torres, two of the group's five initial members.

Wrapping up the OSCON (Open Source Convention) held in Portland, Oregon on July 21-25, show organizer O'Reilly Media has posted photos, videos, and presentations files. Meanwhile, winners of the 2008 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards and the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards have also been announced.

Google's Chrome web browser is upon us, with performance already hitting legendary status. Yet, it is presently available only for use on Microsoft Windows systems? What then for us, the Linux user? Here's how to begin poking around and see what the future looks like.

I've been thinking about something for a few days now. It's about the latest Novell-Microsoft deal that was announced on August 20, where Microsoft agreed to buy another $100 million worth of vouchers from Novell. I was wondering: how come two public companies can make a deal that seems to me to be material and yet keep pieces of the deal secret?

Sun Microsystems Inc. has released a new version of xVM VirtualBox, its platform for desktop virtualization, and is also starting to offer enterprise support for the platform, the company said on Thursday. Version 2.0 comes with improved performance and platform support, adding support for 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Sun has also developed a new user interface for the Mac platform. Mac users will also get better networking performance, as will users who are running Sun's Solaris OS. It has also improved overall performance on AMD-based systems.

HP announced a slew of new products on Wednesday designed to make the deployment of a virtualized solution a greater value for businesses. HP's virtualization push focuses on getting rid of the impediments that reduce a virtual deployment's positive effect on a business.

Out of the many available open source document management packages, Epiware GPL is noteworthy because it includes project management features: if your work has to do with producing written matter, you can not only manage the documents themselves, but the development project as well. Epiware is a Web-based application, so clients need just a Web browser to use it; check out the online demo if you want to get a taste of it. There are (or will be) three versions: Epiware GPL, which we will examine; Epiware Professional Free, a simpler version that allows you to handle a single project; and Epiware Professional Desktop ("coming soon"). Epiware GPL is available under the GPL version 2. Its latest release is 4.8.6, dated May 2008.

For some time I have been using the American Power Conversion (APC) uninterruptible power supply (UPS) daemon Apcupsd to interface my desktop computer with my APC Back-UPS ES 550. Available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris 10, Apcupsd reliably warns me when the power goes out and gives me time to get my box properly shut down before data is lost, or does so automatically if I am not there to supervise.

No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It's leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind. Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his announcement that he intended to create a complete Unix-like system that would be completely open and hackable, giving anyone the right to modify and distribute the work. The Free Software Foundation is getting its celebration in early.

HP announced a series of wide-ranging virtualization products, services and initiatives on Sept. 2. The drive indicates a global and long-term surge by HP on managing solutions for virtualization, but in the context of business outcomes and in a management framework that includes larger IT transformation strategies.

Last week, SugarCRM made version 5.1 generally available. With its beta release earlier this year, the open source CRM provider broke new ground, providing innovations in business intelligence and an intriguing mobile app for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Developers are particularly excited about the release's module builder enhancer and customization capabilities.

While Google's new Chrome web browser has been met with a lot of praise and positive responses (well, mostly, at least), there has been one nagging issue that arose quite quickly after people got their hands on Chrome: the End User License Agreement accompanying the browser. It more or less granted Google the rights to everything seen or transmitted through the browser. Google now changed the EULA, saying it was a big case of woopsiedoopsie.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer lost nearly a full percentage point in market share during August, the browser's biggest drop in three months, a Web metrics firm said today. IE's rivals -- Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Opera Software ASA's Opera -- all extended their shares at IE's expense last month. But all those browsers, Microsoft's included, now face competition from Google Inc., which yesterday launched a new browser, dubbed Chrome, that immediately grabbed 1% of the market, Net Applications Inc. said today.

My copy of Oxford defines open as: unconcealed circumstances or condition. Way back in the day when the GNU operating system was getting going, they coined the mantra: Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Last month, I talked about transparency and how important it was in software and systems. Just as important are standards, and, more important following those standards. Today, in Computerworld, a different issue has been raised. The value of standards.

Adopting an open source library automation system allowed a small group of libraries on Maryland's eastern shore to save money and create a more intuitive, user-friendly catalog system for both librarians and patrons. Library automation systems allow librarians to keep track of which materials patrons have checked out and when those materials are due back in. They also allow patrons to access the library's catalog system online to search for books and put them on hold, as well as renew books they've already checked out.

This past winter, Red Hat announced the release of a product called MRG–a computing platform that features high-speed messaging and allows high-throughput computing, realtime transactions, and workload management. Not sure what all that means? We weren’t either. So we contacted Brian Che, the project manager for MRG, to see if we couldn’t get a few questions answered. He obliged, and so we bring you the MRG QandA. Still have questions of your own you want answered? Comment and let us know…

If you do your Debian package management from the command line, you are probably aware of utilities that search the cache of available programs, such as apt-cache, apt-file, and dpkg. Possibly, too, you have cursed the limited search information available in graphical interfaces like Synaptic, which does not extend much beyond searching for the description, name, versions, and dependencies. Now, the GNOME Debian Package Finder (gpfind) is in the process of bring much of the command-line search capacity to the desktop -- although, at version 0.1.6, it is still too rough to replace its command-line equivalents for most users.

Google Inc.'s new Chrome browser grabbed 1% of the browser market in its first day out in public, Web metrics providers said today. Both U.S.-based tracking company Net Applications Inc. and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1%, less than 24 hours after the browser's launch, passing rivals such as Opera and Netscape in the process. "This is a phenomenal performance," said CEO Aodhan Cullen, in a post to StatCounter's blog today. StatCounter, which provides free visitor statistics tools to Web developers, monitors traffic on the sites run by its 1.5 million members.