Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Japanese manufacturer Shimafuji is readying a two-inch cubed computer that runs Red Hat Linux on 1GB of flash. The Space Cube is equipped with a MIPS-based NEC VR5701 processor, 64MB RAM, and numerous I/O connections, including a Firewire-like "SpaceWire" port designed for spaceflight.

Fayandria Foley helped reel in big bucks in July with one of the year's most curious fundraisers. She helped pull together an American Cancer Society Relay for Life, which is typically a walkathon locally. More than 2,000 showed up -- or didn't, actually. Everyone at Foley's relay stayed home to participate.

Microsoft are poised to launch a new $USD 300 million advertising campaign this week, starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld among others. The marketing types responsible are intending to counter Apple’s successful "I’m a Mac" line, but the slogan picked out is simply on the wrong foot from the start and is thwarted by Linux immediately.

It's hardly news these days when RHEL or Suse Linux boots Windows or Unix off a server. And we know that commercial software vendors are paying plenty of attention to commercial open source. But have you ever heard of a community version of the open source operating system displacing one of the popular commercial distributions? That's exactly what happened in Germany's third-largest public TV and radio station, according to a new report on community Linux by analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group.

On a superficial level, Novell’s third quarter, which ended July 31, 2008, didn’t look that good. A closer look reveals though that Novell did quite well in general and extremely well with its Linux business. According to the company press release, “For the quarter, Novell reported net revenue of $245 million.” This was up from Novell’s net revenue of $237 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. “Income from operations for the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $1 million, compared to a loss from operations of $10 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. Loss from continuing operations in the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $15 million, or $0.04 loss per share, due to a $15 million impairment charge related to our auction-rate securities.”

I received an email recently from a young man in Brazil who wanted me to come to his university and talk to the students and faculty about using Free Software. I am normally happy to advise universities to use Free Software, but usually this is done in conjunction with some large conference held at the university or some other venue. I just do not have the time to visit each and every school. But I did investigate the university of the student and found that Microsoft was indeed a sponsor of the University. In fact, the university had a large banner on the front page of their web site talking about Microsoft as a partner. It was the first time I saw a university advertising a commercial firm on their home page.

"Poky Linux" and Matchbox developer OpenedHand announced that it has been acquired by Intel Corp. The U.K.-based embedded Linux services team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Center, and will focus on Moblin development for mobile Internet devices and other mobile devices.

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.

Minsk, Belarus-based product development firm Promwad has announced a design win for a Linux-based home-automation touchscreen panel. Promwad says it designed the "smart home multimedia control panel" in eight months, for a Swiss automation start-up called Incyma, using a Cirrus Logic EP9307 processor and Poky Linux.

Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.

According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent. If Linux server vendors want to continue to grow, at some point they're going to have to come to grips with Windows, rather than eating into the low-hanging Unix fruit.

PDF files are a lot like democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill. PDFs are a lousy way to move documents around, but the alternatives are worse. I hate PDF files. Portable Document Format is a benevolent monopoly by Adobe, which created the format and sets the standards for its development.

KDE 4.1, released last month, brought a great number of improvements to the popular desktop environment. It's the best desktop I've ever used -- but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. 2009 will see the release of KDE 4.2. Here are 10 features that would be great additions to a future KDE release that I hope the developers will consider.

How to react to the news that an earlier flaw in Debian's random-number generator has been used to fuel an honest-to-Linus exploit, especially after yesterday's post? Welcome to the tip of the iceberg. It's been said, somewhat cynically, that one possible good reason we don't see more Linux exploits scurrying around in the wild is because Linux doesn't represent the same kind of attack surface for criminal hackers as Windows does. True, Linux still doesn't have the desktop market share of even the Macintosh -- but it's become that much more interesting as a target because of the number of server and infrastructure systems that use it.

Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife. "I wish to humbly apologize to society for my crime," Reiser said in a statement before his sentence was pronounced. "Every human life is sacred. I took the life of a human being and I'm very sorry for that."

The August 2th "Linux Product Insider" features Memopal Online Backup, gNewSense 2.1, Super Talent Pico D USB Drive, SEH's PS56 WLAN Print Server and the new book Building Embedded Linux Systems.

Intel has acquired embedded Linux specialists OpenedHand. The London based company, with offices in Paris and Helsinki, offers software development and services in the mobile embedded Linux field. OpenedHand maintains a number of open source projects such as Matchbox, an X Window manager for small devices, and Pimlico, a compact personal information manager. Intel say that it will continue to support these OpenedHand led projects.

In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: "use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default." Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise.

Enterprise organizations are tapping the benefits not only of using open source software, but contributing to it by using the Eclipse model. The Eclipse Swordfish, Tigerstripe, Open Financial Market Platform and Open System Engineering Environment projects are all based on code contributed by end-user enterprises. As an indication that the open source model is beginning to mature and move beyond just independent software vendors (ISVs) and into the enterprise, Eclipse Foundation leaders say a new trend in Eclipse indicates that enterprises are beginning to develop and contribute code to Eclipse projects.

Google is gearing up to launch its Android Market -- the open source phone software's answer to Apple's iPhone App Store. Staying true to the open model, the platform will allow more instant developer access compared to Apple's approval-based system and will also offer a set of tools for developers to track their business progress.