Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

"Heroes of Might and Magic V is the next installment in the venerable and long-standing Heroes of Might and Magic series... The six towns that will appear in Heroes V are the humans, Haven, the demons, Inferno, the necromancers, Necropolis, the dark elves, Dungeon, the wizards, Academy, and the elves, Sylvan, with the dark elves being the new addition to the series.

Do you remember all the hoopla around the XP on the XO announcement in May? Where Microsoft gave us a press release, blog post, and a video, all announcing Windows XP for the XO laptop. Well, thanks to the sleuths on OLPC News Forum it looks like Microsoft may have faked two of the three. First, let's look at the official press release photograph showing XP on the XO. Now, take a very, very close look. Do you see what teapot sees?

[Looks like Microsoft 'massaged' another video to me. - Scott]

Matt Asay wants Red Hat to make its Spacewalk project a true community. (Illustration by Rob Dunlavey for an Oregon State story on family businesses.) That’s a noble goal. But what I’ve observed over the last few years is there is a big difference between the noble goals of community and what many businesses want.

continue to explore the legal implications of building the GNU desktop using Mono. As readers may be aware, this Web site, among several others, has been a critic of Novell's Mono for quite some time. We are now aware, based on the assessment of the SFLC, that Novell's Moonlight is a legal risk (or uncertainty at best). Fedora forbade it. The key worry though is that strategic direction gets changed to favour the Microsoft API in several places, which is akin to adopting or supporting Microsoft codecs. It gives a sworn enemy of libre software powers that can essentially eliminate the freedom of the desktop -- for good.

The Open Document Format (ODF) has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft's rival Open Office XML (OOXML) standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft's national technology officer said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.

I'm very excited to announce that the first Amarok->Cloud transfer has taken place. Just moments ago, for the first time ever (as far as I'm aware), a track was sent up into the Cloud from a desktop media player, escaping the local collection prison. This track shed the chains of limited accessibility, and is no longer doomed to obscurity, lost in an sql database in my home directory.

OpenClovis today announces industry first Test automation product for COTS-based distributed computing platform. OpenClovis Test Automation Environment (TAE) demonstrates OpenClovis' continuing commitment to help accelerate migration to COTS-based computing platform for network infrastructure devices.

I started this blog post when I was on paternity leave with my first child, thinking I'd get it finished over a few days in my spare time. Fool. As any of you with children know, there is no spare time with a newborn. So, here I am now, having lived with - and used when I can - an Ubuntu Linux laptop for the last couple of months. I've been trying it out alongside my usual laptop (Sony Vaio running Windows XP), my new MacBook Pro, and a Vista notebook that we also have in the house.

CodeWeavers, developer of software products that allow Mac and Linux users to run popular Windows software, has released CrossOver Mac 7.0 and CrossOver Linux 7.0. Both version of CrossOver 7.0 include support for Microsoft Office 2007, including Outlook 2007, newer versions of Quicken, and the Adobe CS and CS2 line of products, in particular Photoshop.

The OpenSUSE Project has achieved a new release of its free desktop and server distribution. OpenSUSE 11.0 features a redesigned installer, KDE 4.0, GNOME 2.2.2, and the flashy Compiz Fusion 3D window manager, and over 200 new features.

Matthew Dillon continues to make significant progress on his HAMMER clustering filesystem for DragonFly BSD. He labeled the latest release 56c, noting that it, "represents an additional significant improvement in performance, [also including] bug fixes and most of the final media changes." A significant improvement in write performance was obtained by making the filesystem block size automatically increase from 16K to 64K when a file grows to larger than 1 MB. One remaining media change is required to optimize mtime and atime storage, at which point HAMMER will go into testing and bug fixing mode.

What started as an effort to package software not included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux has grown to be the most interesting part of Fedora for some ISVs. Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, or EPEL, is not a mass rebuild of all Fedora software for Enterprise Linux. It is a disciplined set of packages with a maintenance philosophy that aligns with Enterprise Linux.

openSUSE 11.0 was one of the most anticipated Linux distro releases of 2008. Despite a few bugs in the final code, which was released yesterday, it was worth the wait. The openSUSE version of KDE 4 alone is worth the download, and the improvements to the software manager make customizing a pleasure. I used the 4.3GB DVD version, but live CD versions are also available. In either, the first thing you might notice is the beautiful new installer. The layout is similar to that of previous versions, with a large interactive window and a progress list to the right, but with an elegant new color scheme and stylish graphics. And the beauty is not only skin deep -- there are a lot of changes under the hood in this release.

Microsoft recently survived a bruising battle with the open source community over the ratification of Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard, a process that is now facing a number of appeals. The company also recently announced support for the competing Open Document Format in its forthcoming products. Here Paulo Ferreira, Microsoft South Africa's Platform Strategy Manager, talks to Tectonic about the future of XML, Microsoft's relationship with the open source community and why standards are important.

I was offered the chance to have an initial look at Novell's latest Linux offering openSUSE 11. It's a distribution I've tried in previous versions but often had trouble settling on. It seems very popular on enterprise desktops along with Red Hat. I got a copy of the KDE4 LiveCD and gave it a spin.

Red Hat has a desktop Linux plan. It’s just not the same desktop Linux plans that everyone else has. As Jim Whitehurst told me in an informal gathering of Red Hat executives and press, “There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?”

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they are often quite useful. Bash arrays have numbered indexes only, but they are sparse, ie you don't have to define all the indexes.

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way. Customer One should not be able to see Customer Two's files, for example. And neither customer should be able to browse the filesystem of the server. I was also asked to define a process whereby our support staff could add new jails as needed.

Speaking on the first day of the Linux specialist's annual user conference in Boston, Whitehurst said his company need to work on its approach to "mundane" issues such as its own internal systems and managing customer records. "There is still a lot we need to do around execution. One thing I have heard from customers and partners over the last few months is that we are basically kind of tough to do business with — great technology but not necessarily the easiest company to do business with," he said.

Novell announced the official release of OpenSUSE 11 yesterday. It's the latest version of the community-driven Linux distribution and includes significant new features like the KDE 4 desktop environment and the PulseAudio sound server. We tested both the GNOME and KDE flavors of OpenSUSE 11 by installing from the Live CD images. These work reasonably well and provide an installation experience comparable to that of Ubuntu and Fedora.