Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Java training and education has never been easy. Not only are the language and its third-party and community offerings constantly moving targets, each developer has his or her own preferences, plug-ins inventory and habits. What's more, the"book knowledge" gained in many course settings can vary wildly from what happens in the"real world" of communities and teams.

Twitter is a social networking platform that keeps you in conversation by allowing you and your friends to follow each others' updates. The service lets users post and read 140-character updates, called tweets. With Twitter, you can do social networking on the fly, from your mobile phone or at your desktop, from a Web browser or a Twitter client. Twitter clients make the service more usuable by automatically checking for updates from your friends and allowing you to easily post your own updates. I tested four Twitter clients for Linux on a desktop running Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Why sell somebody else's product line when you can do a better job offering your own? That was the question that ultimately pushed Jan Hichert, CEO of Astaro, and two other cofounders to develop their own Internet security solutions for a market they viewed as needy of attention -- the small- to medium-sized business segment.

Xen.org, the developer of the open source Xen project, on Wednesday announced the release of the Xen 3.3 hypervisor engine. The product is the result of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software and security vendors.

NASA has confirmed that a laptop aboard the International Space Station has been infected with the W32.Gammima.AG worm, and admits this isn't the first time it has happened... Well, what do you know, it seems that the latest International Space Station mission has an uninvited guest in the shape of a worm that managed to stowaway for the ride.

So Microsoft and Novell are extending their two year old partnership. Is anyone really surprised? Similar, if smaller, deals are announced by other partners on an almost daily basis. The truth is, the deal is not nearly as insightful as the reactions to it in the free and open source (FOSS) community. I'm not talking about the extreme reactions here. On the one hand, you have the market-speak of Novell, which ignores the profound uneasiness that the community has about deals that, in the words of Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, concern "building a bridge between proprietary and open source software," let alone involving a company that is perceived with profound distrust.

One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues. As part of this effort, the SFLC has already published "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects." Its latest effort in public education, released last week, is "A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance," a 15-page guide for FOSS projects on how to avoid violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The guide is a practical summary of its subject, but its wording is unnecessarily legalistic, and its structure and omissions sometimes fall short of the goal of being a standalone reference.

US researchers have found a way to thwart hack attacks which intercept data passing from a PC to a website....To spread the word about their defence the trio of researchers have signed up a series of sites to act as notaries and have developed software worried web users can install to help protect them. Currently the software is only available as an add-on for the Firefox browser, Apple's OS X on Intel machines and Linux.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced its first summit for Linux end users. The Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit runs from October 13-14 in New York City, and will "provide end users a direct connection and voice to the kernel community," says the LF. Held at the Desmond Tutu Center, the event offers an opportunity for "sophisticated" end users to "learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers," says the non-profit organization.

No one saw this coming. Cisco, the networking giant, announced today it was buying PostPath, maker of the Linux-based Exchange server replacement PostPath Server. PostPath is best known as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Unlike other would-be Exchange competitors Scalix and Lotus Domino/Notes, which use a Outlook-compatible Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI) on the client PC, PostPath actually reverse-engineered Microsoft's MAPI and Active Directory (AD) protocols. This means that, from the network and Windows PC's viewpoint, PostPath actually appears to be an Exchange server.

Quebec's open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company's products rather than using free alternatives. The lawsuit by Facil was lodged with the Quebec Superior Court on July 15 and made public on Wednesday. In it, the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp.

This is my second attempt to write this introduction [1.]. My intent was to outline methods that took external inputs and converted them into content that would be inserted running web pages. However, my plans went astray. It seemed the mere mention of the word security subverted my intentions. This rewrite is aimed at regaining my balance.

Dell is going after emerging markets with a new line of low-cost computers. The Vostro notebooks and desktops are the company's first models targeted specifically at China, India and a handful of other Asian, African and Latin American nations. The systems will sell for about the equivalent of $440 to $475.

Suppose someone wants to send you a large file. They could try to send it via email, but many email servers impose limits on file size. They could try sending it over during an instant messenger or Internet Relay Chat session, but that's slow, as the file actually gets transferred twice: once to the chat server, then to your machine. File transfer services like RapidShare and MegaUpload are fine, but not for confidential information. Of course, you could set up an FTP server on your box, but you don't want to leave that door open all the time. Luckily, there's now an easy solution: droopy.

The much anticipated spanning tree edition of Networking 101 has finally arrived. Yes, you too can have a network that survives multiple exploding switches. Read on. The spanning tree protocol was invented by Dr. Radia Perlman, distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems. Dr. Perlman devised a method by which bridges can obtain layer 2 routing utopia: redundant and loop-free operation. Think of spanning tree as a tree that the bridge keeps in memory for the purposes of optimized and fault-tolerant data forwarding.

In a new twist to the Psystar saga, the Mac cloning company is to countersue Apple claiming anticompetitive business practises because the Mac Operating System is tied to Apple only hardware. Rudy Pedraza has become something of a love him or loathe him figure in the Applesphere. His company, Psystar, started selling Mac clones this year under the guise of the OpenMac which quickly became the OpenComputer and then added the OpenPro to its range.

My name is Adrienne, and I’m a graphic designer at Red Hat—I create meaning using type and image. The other day I stumbled upon a story involving music, sustainability, and open source. Needless to say, I was intrigued. Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain are the artists and creators behind Monome. At first glance, this cool device is simply a white square with a grid of buttons. It produces music and the buttons light up. It seems random, but the lights and music are synchronized.

Mozilla has announced the launch of a new feature for its Firefox Web browser designed to make it perform faster. Called"TraceMonkey," the feature is an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and will be built into Firefox 3.1, according to the company. To increase JavaScript speeds by an order of magnitude or more, Mozilla designed TraceMonkey with a new type of just-in-time compiler.

Mailboxes are going the way of phone booths. More of us are paying our bills online and using the Internet to send our correspondence, so the U.S. Postal Service has decided it needs fewer mailboxes. (WTOP) The first question that jumped to my mind is how does the USPS expect me to mail a letter when I cannot find a mail box? The second question is, will there be any letters twenty years from now? Or less? This is not as trivial a concern as you might expect.

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference& Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

[Hilarious, Editor for over a year and he is just now 'switching' Linux. - Scott]