Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I’m not sure why it bothers me: I use the word “Free” when I’m talking about “Free Software”, and “Open” when I mean “Open source”. I’m very particular about my words, that way. But that’s just me. I don’t expect another religion to follow the rules of my own, or vice-versa. So why do I expect others to use words in the same way that I do? And why do I feel so cross about “Open standards”, which come with proprietary documentation, a hefty price tag, and an NDA?

Yahoo! and Intel have announced a plan to bring computer-style widgets to TV screens. The idea behind the Widget Channel is to take familiar software technologies to an emerging platform. The two companies have teamed up because Intel's Media Processor CE 3100 is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed for use in consumer electronics products including Internet-connected set-top boxes and digital TVs, while Yahoo! already has the software that actually runs widgets, including the software libraries that support them.

Microsoft Wednesday said it would spend up to another $100 million to purchase certificates it will distribute to users who can cash them in for support on their Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers. The investment, which will come on Nov. 1, is on top of the $240 million Microsoft agreed in 2006 to spend on certificates as part of a five-year business and technology deal with Novell that also included intellectual property rights protection.

I know there is a great debate taking place about which operating system is better. Jack Wallen, host of the Linux and Open Source blog, started a lengthy discussion asking the question: Why would you choose Windows over Linux? I thought that was kind of funny, because recently I have been asking myself the opposite question: Who would choose to switch to Linux?

[Is it still FUD if he actually believes what he is saying? ;-) - Scott]

Following my piece on a proposed model for enterprise applications maintenance, two fresh posts, one from Matt Aslett at 451.com and another from Leigh Cauldwell offer alternative ideas around how the present conundrum might be solved.

As always, the 2008 Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas was full of cutting-edge computer security research, the latest in computer security vulnerabilities, and more than a little controversy. Since the beginning of the Black Hat conference 15 years ago, the show has always been a place for the elite of the computer security industry to release their latest work on what is known as "zero-day exploits." A zero day or "0-day" exploit is a previously unknown computer security vulnerability that is released before vendors like Microsoft have a chance to release a security fix. There were fewer zero-day exploit presentations this year than we have seen in the recent past, but the ones that were presented were big.

f you use Nagios to monitor your system and run openSUSE on a remote server the bash script presented here will check for online updates and is designed to be run by Nagios so that the result will appear on the Nagios service-detail page. The script is pretty unsophisticated as it just parses the output from the zypper command. A more sophsiticated solution might interact directly with libzypp, the library that provides zypper with its functionality. Of course, that's not possible using bash. Based on a quick scan of the libzypp documentation it appears the only current option for doing that is C++.

ominations are now open for the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest. The winner could be someone you know, or someone whose work you admire, but don't mull over your recommendation too long -- entries must be submitted by September 30.

Finally, finally, finally!! I and a few folks have been living with a secret. And of course I wanted to share this as soon as possible. But some events at work (the famous DNS Bug) kept me massively busy. And since work is - well work - you earn a living from it - it got priority. However this nonetheless does not make the secret any less important nor interesting. So, what is it about? What's it about? Hm, let's think... the title says "sugarize it". Sugarize what? As you probably know, sugarlabs.org became independant from OLPC with Walter Bender starting a new organization to continue the dream of an open source user interface for OLPC and for other laptops.

Microsoft is bumping up its monetary investment in its controversial partnership with Novell. Styling the deal as a so-called incremental investment increase, Microsoft will buy up to $100 million in Suse Linux Enterprise Server support certificates. The certificates are sold and exchanged for IT support from Novell for its Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

In the current economic climate, businesses of every size are looking to reduce their spending wherever possible. Open source software, which has no upfront licensing fees, is one way of achieving significant savings. However, in order to protect their enormous revenue streams, large software corporations have invested millions in spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about the security of open source software. In this post, I will examine and debunk five commonly held myths about open source security and why large corporations are promoting a “fear factor” mentality around open source software.

There are numerous documents, tutorials and guides detailing the workings and usage of cron, the de facto tool for scheduling jobs on Linux. While traditional cron jobs are executed at set times, inotify cron, or incron, is a cron clone that watches the filesystem for specified changes and executes the relevant commands. You can set incron to monitor a particular file or directory for changes and schedule jobs for when those changes occur. Fedora users can use yum to install incron with the yum install incron command. Once installed, you need to start the incron daemon before you can schedule jobs. The command, service incrond start, executed as root, will start the incron daemon on and the chkconfig incrond on command will configure it to be started at boot time.

Layer 2, the Data Link layer, is where Ethernet lives. We'll be talking about bridges, switching and VLANs with the goal of discovering how they interact in this part of Networking 101.

Olympics aside, summer 2008 will be remembered for at least two other reasons. It will be seen as a time when the noise over Linux as a platform for mobile devices reached a crescendo. Second: it marked Debian's fifteenth anniversary. Bringing both together, Debian developers have delivered a version of their Linux distro for Openmoko's FreeRunner handset.

According to its past and present marketing, Foresight Linux has three claims to fame: Its user-friendliness, its use of the Conary package management system, and its role as a showcase for the latest in GNOME. In practice, its latest 2.0.4 version is not more user-friendly than any other GNOME-based distribution -- if anything, it is slightly less so because of its limited software selection and package management -- but its other claims are enough to make Foresight one of the more distinctive modern distributions.

Clay Shirky is a leading thinker about how the Internet is changing the world. In his writing, especially the recent book, Here Comes Everybody, he detailed how the networked world allows people to form leaderless groups that still do useful work. Through illuminating examples like his calculation that Wikipedia was created in about the same amount of time that Americans spend watching commercials each weekend, Shirky argues that humans in the post-industrial age are just coming to terms with how to spend their "cognitive surplus."

It's becoming increasingly clear that one of the key players in the open source ecosystem is Mozilla. This is a due to two factors. The first is the continuing move to browser-based ways of working: think Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook and the rest. The rise of cloud computing, which is also implicitly browser-based, will only accentuate this trend. This makes Firefox, with its steadily-rising market share, a pivotal program, and the organisation behind it a major force in computing.

Following some developer complaints of slow progress, Google Inc. on Monday released an updated version of the Android software development kit as well as a timeline for future releases. In addition to fixing "tons of bugs," the update includes a "ton" of user interface changes, according to a blog post written by Dan Morrill, a developer advocate at Google. It also includes new applications such as an alarm clock, calculator, camera, music player, picture viewer and messaging application.

Proponents of open source software are trying to make a case for using the collaborative approach to conquer the world's most vexing medical problems. However, established practices of avoiding the spotlight and protecting vested interests in breakthrough results still hamper the collaborative process.

The Virtual Volumes View (VVV) project lets you index your data DVDs and perform searches to figure out whether a given file is backed up and what disc contains it. If you routinely back up a large amount of data onto DVDs, you can simply number your discs and keep them in numerically sorted order. When it comes time to find an image or digital video you burned to DVD, just use VVV to figure out the disc number and quickly locate the right disc in the pile.