Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Last August, the nail was poised over SCO's coffin when Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell never relinquished the copyrights to UNIX, but nobody really knew when it would be driven home. The decision meant that SCO could be on the hook for as much as $20 million in unpaid royalties. Not long afterwards, SCO filed for bankruptcy, but that Chapter 11 filing was only able to delay the inevitable trial to determine how much Novell was owed. That long-awaited trial began this week, and Ars was on hand to report.

While bored in an airport recently, I pored over the magazines at a newsstand and noticed that the new Harvard Business Review (April 2008) has an article on open source. Curious to know how the corporate types view open source, I got hold of the issue - at my local library rather than paying the Harvard-style $16 cover price - and read it. Here are my impressions.

This month'sHarvard Business Review features a case study of a company debating whether to open source its software. Here's a mini review of the article.Should KMS Choose Open Source? While bored in an airport recently, I pored over the magazines at a newsstand and noticed that the new Harvard Business Review (April 2008) has an article on open source. Curious to know how the corporate types view open source, I got hold of the issue - at my local library rather than paying the Harvard-style $16 cover price - and read it. Here are my impressions.

You can see YouTube videos everywhere nowadays: on blogs, Google search results, even some news sites. From time to time, you can even manage to find something interesting. This article will show you some Linux tools you can use to save and convert YouTube videos. clive is video extraction software for Flash content stored on sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Metacafe. The syntax is simple: clive video_url. The application takes the given URL, downloads the FVL file, and converts it into MP4 format by default. One smart way to use clive is to create a text file containing links to videos you want to save and pass it to the program by using a pipe. Use cat video.list | clive and be sure to separate each URL in the file with a new line.

Linux desktop distribution vendor Xandros and Web content management firm Viyya Technologies have announced they will jointly market integrated, Linux-based software for "netbook" and Mobile Internet Device (MID) devices. Meanwhile, Xandros has strengthened its collaboration with Microsoft on its mixed-environment BridgeWays management tools.

Users of GRUB legacy, which is version 0.97, are getting bitten by an e2fsprogs incompatibility that renders their systems unbootable. e2fsprogs is the utilities package for the Ext3 filesystem, so it doesn't affect other filesystems. Resident expert Carla Schroder explains the problem and details some fixes to get affected systems back up.

If you like the latest and greatest version of everything and you use an RPM based system you probably want to learn how to create RPMs. You don't have to, you can just download the latest source and compile and install it in /usr/local. This of course leaves your system in a state where your RPM database does not accurately reflect what is installed on your system. Again, this will work, but building RPMs isn't (usually at least) that difficult.

Virtually any photo manager lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, and applying effects to your photos. But even powerful applications like digiKam and F-Spot can't really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos. For that you need a batch processing utility like Phatch. This nifty tool can perform no fewer than 35 different actions on your photos, and its user-friendly graphical interface makes it easy to create advanced multistep batch rules.

The soap surrounding PsyStar, the company that offers a Mac clone for sale, just keeps on running. After the initial launch, the company was plagued by doubt and mystery surrounding its actual existence, but soon after videos started popping up of the OpenComputer out in the wild, beyond the company itself. Thanks to CNet, the company may now have fully redeemed itself.

In many ways, Andrew Morton's keynote set the tone for this year's Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) by describing the ways that embedded companies and developers can work with the kernel community in a way that will be "mutually beneficial". Morton provided reasons, from a purely economic standpoint, why it makes sense for companies to get their code into the mainline kernel. He also provided concrete suggestions on how to make that happen. The theme of the conference seemed to be "working with the community" and Morton's speech provided an excellent example of how and why to do just that.

It’s that time again. Time to plan for a new release of Ubuntu, I mean. There are some rather large things in this list and so I doubt all of them will be implemented in time but it is always better to dream big and get as much done as possible. Otherwise we’ll have everything done in a month and be left with nothing else to do (except fix bugs, of course). Before I start, let me remind you that none of this is official, I am not getting paid to do any of this, and this relies on other people getting things done too. If none of this happens, don’t be surprised.

Evans Data Corp. (EDC) has published the full result set from its annual survey of embedded systems developers. Priced at about $20,000, and entitled "Embedded Systems Development Survey 2007," the 180-page report addresses topics including embedded Linux platforms, working with multicore processors, and mobile development. EDC did not reveal any new results from the survey, beyond what it revealed in two summary finding reports from last Fall. In the first of those, CEO John F. Andrews alluded to "the growing move towards Linux" in embedded development. In the second, EDC noted that some 40 percent of the survey's 500 respondents were targeting embedded Linux.

In my post the other day about whether or not work in the ReiserFS file system would continue after Hans Reiser's murder conviction, I mentioned that this being an open source project, it wouldn't be hard for someone else to pick up where others leave off. And as it turns out, that's precisely what's happening: according to folks on the ReiserFS team, work on ReiserFS will continue.

In the beginning, we talked a bit about the holy war that wages onward between KDE and GNOME. Some of you aptly pointed out that there is a third desktop environment out there. It was never our intention to slight this desktop (we actually use it regularly). Like a mouse dodging to avoid the crashing footsteps of the desktop environment giants, Xfce is often included in discussions as an afterthought.

While I was in class, a professor tried to hammer Ubuntu and Open Source with comments that I have added below. Anyone want to help me with some ammo to put a foot in his proprietary mouth?

As a way of nurturing the developer community surrounding its open storage initiative, Sun Microsystems is putting together a cookbook of sorts. Sun has released a couple of recipes to help developers create storage units using its Solaris operating system.

I've been combing through Microsoft’s “get the facts” web site this last fortnight. Here Microsoft promise to reveal the “facts” on Windows vs Linux solutions. They cite company after company that abandoned Linux because it was slow and unreliable and generally hopeless, but opted for Microsoft servers and found unsurpassed profits, efficiency and general happiness. Yet, the headlines have little relevance to the case study. Microsoft’s PR department are insulting their audience. They are lacking in integrity. It’s time for the site to be pulled down. Here’s why.

I'D like to start by asking you a series of seemingly unrelated questions. Have you watched Shrek or Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone? Have you flown on Continental, Virgin America or Singapore Airlines? Do you drive a BMW, Fiat or Renault car? Are you serving in the United States Army? Have you ever bought anything online using Paypal? Have you ever stayed in a Sheraton hotel? Or travelled by train in Canada? Don't worry, I'm not about to try to sell you something; rather, my aim is to enlighten you. Unless you're a self-confessed geek like me, you probably don't care how all these things, and many more, are created, run or maintained. You just want to know that your car will start, your movie will play in synch with the sound, your hotel room is ready and your flight or train will arrive on time. That's perfectly understandable, but here's the thing.

Metro Health Hospital, a healthcare system serving 130,000 patients across Michigan, is already using what some consider the desktop of the future. The hospital has rolled out server-hosted virtual desktops to every employee no matter where they are or what client device they use.

Adobe Systems is throwing open its Flash and AIR file formats to speed delivery of Rich Internet Applications to billions of mobile devices with its tools and players. The company is expected to announce that - as of today - all restrictions on SWF for multi-media and vector graphics and FLV/F4V, for video on Flash, have been removed. Adobe is also publishing the device porting layer APIs for its Flash Player, the Flash Cast protocol and AMF protocol for the exchange data between a Flash application and database.