Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Wikis began as free, open, public spaces for anyone at all to contribute and share their knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Businesses have begun to recognize, however, the power of the wiki model for accomplishing internal collaborative tasks, like revising HR documents, producing specifications, and communicating across time and space. Call it Wiki 2.0 -- and it's the newest thing in enterprise software.

Eight years ago, computer stores stocked a choice of GNU/Linux distributions -- established ones like Caldera, Red Hat, and SUSE, and newcomers like Corel, Progeny, and Stormix. Now, only Ubuntu and openSUSE offer box sets, and both face challenges that other distributions found unsolvable, ranging from reasonable prices and features sets through to getting into distribution channels and finding the right marketing approach -- all for an effort that may be only moderately profitable at best, and perhaps best undertaken for non-financial reasons.

Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month. LDN focuses in September 2008 on different aspects of kernel development and management. We'll be back mid-month with our own slant on kernel work; first, though, we return from the US Labor Day holiday this week wondering why everyone doesn't use Erlang? Regular Expressions' usual domain is high-productivity languages like Perl, Tcl, and Python, and specific news or ideas that help make the most of them.

My favorite quote of the day so far comes from a comment that was filed on Bob Sutor's post about how the International Organization of Standardization is risking irrelevancy based on the way it ignored objections to the rushing of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification through the ISO's ratification process. OOXML is primarily a Microsoft-authored competitor to the already ISO-ratified OpenDocument Format (ODF). Bob Sutor is the grand pooh-bah of open standards at IBM (a major proponent of ODF).

It was in line with the likelihood of summer following spring that somebody would declare an application optimized for Google's Chrome, the new web browser that has dominated the geekier end of technology news this week. And it turns out that that somebody is the rising star of the software-as-a-service movement, NetSuite.

I've wanted to write this article for quite a while. Over the years I've noted that Java-based music and sound applications have increased in number and quality, yet no comprehensive list or summaries have covered these advances. And so at long last I present this survey of music and sound applications that require Java. The presentation follows no particular order, but in this first part I'll begin by questioning the use of Java in sound and music applications development, followed by a brief look at Java's internal audio and MIDI capabilities.

The One Laptop per Child program is a nonprofit, philanthropic organization, so how can Intel, a 500-pound gorilla, compete against a philanthropic project like OLPC? This competition would barely be newsworthy if OLPC was a for-profit company… competition is just a standard part of doing business in the corporate world. As I said in Part 1 of my series exploring the ongoing “battle” between Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC laptop project and Intel’s Classmate PC, my philosophy (shared with many Intel execs) was to embrace OLPC and win them over, and to not trash them in the press, especially given OLPC’s philanthropic mission.

Google's Chrome browser has as Spartan a user interface as possible, but the browser's Omnibox also turns out to be a window into a much more elaborate view of the browser. That's because Chrome users can type several commands into the browser's address box to uncovers a wealth of nitty-gritty detail and an amusing Easter egg.

There is an international move aimed at providing one laptop per child has already been implemented in such countries as Uruguay which has just celebrated their having reached 100,000 laptops for their children. Other countries in the programme are Thailand and Pakistan, according to Ian Thomson from SPC (Secretariat Pacific Community) of the Forum Secretariat.

In response to the growing blogging ecosystem and Web phenomena like the Slashdot effect, the developers of the Habari blogging platform have built features into their core software to tackle the increased attention blogs receive, both from innocent viewers and exploitative attackers, while making it easier for users to manage and administer their blogs. Most blogging software start out with a simple WYSIWYG interface and store data in back end databases. Some applications evolve into more complex blogging engines with bolt-on accessories. Habari, by contrast, was written from the ground up to handle things like comment spam and traffic overloads.

A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open-source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education. And France is not stopping: This summer, an economic commission set up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy recommended tax benefits to stimulate even more open-source development.

Software developer Red Hat bought an Israeli company in a bid to gain a competitive edge against Microsoft and smaller rivals that provide computing services for complex networks. Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat said Thursday that it paid $107 million in cash for privately held Qumranet, which sells software that helps computer systems run multiple programs more efficiently on less equipment.

Content-filtering proxies restrict Internet access privileges for users or groups across an entire network. They must be able to block unwanted content through keyword, URL, DNS, MIME, and image filtering. They need to authenticate and log a user's Internet activity by monitoring and generating detailed reports of URLs accessed, and they must integrate antivirus or malware protection by accessing a reliable antivirus server. Fulfilling all these functions may be a lot to ask, but SafeSquid delivers on all counts.

SCO is offering full-day training on Porting and Packaging on SCO OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7.1.4 Workshop. A hands-on workshop walking through porting of open source applications and packaging.

[They want me to pay $500 bucks to learn how to port open source to their stuff? They've got some moxy that's for sure. - Scott]

A top Debian contributor has been left "pretty disappointed" by elements of the Debian community for failing to comply with the conditions of the GNU GPLv2 license. Daniel Baumann, who maintains the Debian Syslinux bootloader package, has said Debian components were being released only in binary form without source code - resulting in problems for Apple Macintosh users.

Standards like POSIX are meant to make life easier for application developers by providing rules on the semantics of system calls for multiple different platforms. Sometimes, though, operating system developers decide to change the behavior of their platform—with full knowledge that it breaks compatibility—for various reasons. This requires application developers to notice the change and take appropriate action; not doing so can lead to a security hole like the one found in the Postfix mail transfer agent (MTA) recently.

The release of Google's Chrome browser is a welcome development for those who belong to the ABM category - the Anyone But Microsoft group. They don't mind a monopoly, they just don't like the Microsoft monopoly. The prospect of having Google dictate the course of their digital lives is apparently pleasing to these folk, who see the company as some kind of cuddly teddy bear - a big bear, sure, one that embraces you, fine - but, hey, it's a warm, soft embrace so who cares?

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.