Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

At a time when graphical DVD rippers and encoders propose to make the backing up of your movies just a click away, a text-based application may actually be the best tool for the job. I've tried graphical rippers such as AcidRip, dvd::rip, thoggen, and RippedWire, with varying degrees of success. However, I've also had my share of headaches. Most times, any crashes or problems I experienced were related to the graphical components of the application or the desktop. It's not pleasant (to say the least) to leave your computer eating electricity all night, only to find in the morning that the ripping and encoding of a DVD failed because of an error purely related to GTK+ or Qt. It's even more frustrating when you realize that most of these applications are front ends to command-line programs.

Washington State University bookkeepers scratched their heads this spring when David Cillay submitted an invoice, for about $50, for an island. It was awhile before they learned he was buying land in Second Life, the online immersive virtual world where WSU has begun offering courses for students from across the globe.

HTML Purifier is a project that helps you ensure that HTML is valid and does not contain cross-site scripting attempts or other nasty attacks. With HTML Purifier you can allow users to post HTML content without letting them insert nasty code that will run in the browser of anyone viewing that HTML. An assortment of plugins let you use HTML Purifier with CodeIgniter, Drupal, MODx, Phorum, Joomla!, and WordPress. To get an idea of the cleanups that HTML Purifier can perform, head over to the demo page.

The basic framework of the intellectual property (IP) regime aims to “close down access to knowledge” rather than allowing its dissemination, Professor Joseph Stiglitz said at a 5 July lecture on “Who Owns Science?” Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Professor John Sulston, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, launched Manchester University’s new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation.

The announcement by the GNOME Foundation that it is appointing Stormy Peters as its Executive Director confirms a suspicion that I've harboured for a while: that we are witnessing the evolution of major open source projects into new kinds of players in the computing world, ones that require full-time staff not just to run them, but also to articulate what exactly they are trying to do *beyond* the code. The pioneer in this field is obviously the Mozilla Foundation, which has grown from an apparently doomed attempt to hack the original Netscape Navigator code into something half-usable, to a high-profile, media-savvy outfit that is not just winning market- and mind-share, but starting to frame many of the most important discussions within the open source world.

One of the things that's bothered me to no end for quite a while is the ridiculously huge number of Linux distributions out there. 350+ active or semi-active and nearly 200 dead distros is rather pathetic in my opinion. I understand that some of this comes from the open source mentality of "if they won't change, then we'll fork the code and do it ourselves." That's where we got Gnome and KDE from, Compiz and Beryl, Debian and all of its derivatives, Xorg and XFree86, and many other forks and splits within the FOSS community.

Microsoft has told a European Union court that an antitrust fine of 899 million euros ($1.4 billion) against it is both excessive and disproportionate, the Court of First Instance said on Monday. On February 27 the European Commission found that Microsoft used high prices to discourage competition, failing to carry out sanctions imposed against it as part of a long-running case. Microsoft is appealing against the fine imposed in February.

The open source Wine program for running Windows applications in Linux shipped in final version 1.0 form, followed by the release of a commercial version. The Bordeaux Group has announced Bordeaux for Linux 1.2, which adds support for Microsoft Office 2007 and six months of tech support. The Greenville, South Carolina-based Bordeaux Group offers its $20 Bordeaux for Linux as an add-on to the free Wine (Wine is not an emulator), adding email support and a claim of easier configuration.

Why do you need an article on building slide shows in Impress? You don't, in one sense, because the application is simple enough for anyone who has ever seen a slide show to figure out. If you want, you can just plunge in and learn by doing. However, if you take the time to learn, you'll find that OpenOffice.org has two tools to help you organize and automate the process -- and, ultimately, to help you save time.

A Gartner study from earlier this year suggests that a skills shortage will leave companies scrambling in vain to find qualified help. However, open source developers say there's an adequate supply of potential employees with the skills they have. "The difficulty is not so much if they exist. It's finding the right people," says Jon Masters, a Red Hat Linux kernel engineer who also works on the real-time kernel team and helps support third-party drivers on Enterprise Linux distributions. He says that the supply of competent Linux and open source software types will be enough to meet the demand.

Developers have created an easy way to load Android, Google Inc.'s mobile phone operating system that is still in the works, on Nokia Corp.'s N810 open-source handheld devices. The development is of interest to people who are trying to build applications for Android rather than to general users. "So, from the point of view of someone who just wants to use his N800 and doesn't necessarily want to experiment for the sake of experimenting, what does running Android get me?" one person asked on the Internet Tablet Talk Web site that is sharing the technique for loading the software on the devices.

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company, today issued the following statement in response to Carl Icahn's latest open letter to Yahoo! stockholders:..

You probably know the open source 3-D modeler Blender for its animation tools, which have brought audiences short films Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny. But Blender can create realistic 3-D models for any purpose, as Allan Brito's Blender 3D: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery (Packt Publishing, $45) presents. This book approaches Blender as an architecture visualization tool, detailing the features built in to the editor and the techniques that make architectural modeling differ from crafting game or video effects.

The Gentoo Linux project team today announced the availability of its "2008.0" release of Gentoo. New features of the developer-oriented Linux distribution include an updated installer, improved hardware support, reworked profiles, and a switch from Gnome to Xfce for its LiveCD, says the team.

HP's entry into the sub-Mini-Notebook arena comes in the form of the HP 2133, a sleek-looking, brushed aluminum finished, lightweight but well built beauty. You can see the attention to detail in the engineering when you first open it up. From the sturdy hinge to the scratch resistant display and connectivity options you'll find just about everything you would expect in an ultra-mobile laptop.

Security vendor AVG has issued an updated version of its AVG 8 anti-virus software that fixes the fake traffic issue that has caused a huge online backlash amongst web masters the world over...

Open source technology luminary Stormy Peters has been appointed executive director of the GNOME Foundation, effective immediately. The GNOME Foundation is committed to the task of advancing the GNOME desktop for Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. As executive director, Peters will be responsible for marketing GNOME to the public and attracting new corporate sponsors and developers to the GNOME community. Peters says she brings the strength of her relationships with businesses and community members to her new job. "I've worked a lot in the past explaining how the community works to enterprises, explaining how enterprises work to community members and helping them work effectively together."

Alternative Find and Replace for Writer (AltSearch) has the ambitious goal of replacing and enhancing one of the most basic pieces of OpenOffice.org functionality. It's undermined by a chaotic interface, but if you have the patience to continue past first impressions, you will find AltSearch comes far closer to fulfilling its promise than you might initially imagine.

Well, July 4th may have come and gone, but another independence recently came to pass that could be almost as historic. That's Microsoft's independence from Bill Gates, of course, and it was a hot topic last week as bloggers at ZDNet and elsewhere wondered if the change might bring about a Redmond that's kinder and gentler to the open source world.

The call - both for the presentations to the main conference and for mini-conferences - went out on Friday, July 4, just five months after the 2008 event concluded. This will be the 10th LCA and the first to be held in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. The first conference, held in Melbourne in 1999, went under the name Conference of Australian Linux Users; there was no conference in the year 2000.