Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Leave it to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) to distort the definition of"open standard" in order to serve the interests of Microsoft and its other members. The BSA doesn't like the European Commission's increasing interest in open source and open standards to deliver software interoperability.

Two evaluators recently returned to OLE Nepal's office after two weeks at Nepal's pilot schools. They are working on an early qualitative evaluation based on interviews with teachers, parents, and kids participating in the pilots. I have found the insights and feedback they brought back incredibly useful. This article will focus on one particularly consistent piece of feedback from the teachers: They want built-in lesson plans for activities on the XO and they want it explicitly defined in the lesson plans which learning objectives in Nepal's National Curriculum the activities satisfy.

LXer Feature: 06-Jul-2008

The big news this week was Xandros buying Linspire with all the respective fallout included, a review of 11 video players for, Linux's dirty little secret, Glyn Moody's "Sir Bill and Sir Tim: A Tale of Two Knights", Which Linux Distributions Are Dying?, Beyond the desktop with KDE4 and Carla Schroder's Sidux review.

Sometimes you stumble across a decent system, still working fine, but getting old. If the price is right, you might take it anyway. For most people in non-profit work, which is like running a business on a very poor budget, this is about the only way to get enough computers to get the job done. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an eMac running Panther. It cost almost nothing, so I took it.

Remember television? For most of its history, TV wasn't cable, satellite or YouTube. It was radio with low-res moving pictures. On the transmitting side it was an extension of radio, with transmitters on towers, mountains and high buildings, serving viewers with signals within a range limited by frequency and terrain. Like FM radio, TV was on VHF bands. In the U.S., channels 2-6 were spread from 54 to 88MHz (ending just below the FM band) and channels 7-13 ran from 174-216Mhz.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is now an ISO International Standard: ISO 32000-1. The change in status follows a decision by Adobe Systems, original developer and copyright owner of the format, to relinquish control to ISO. The move means that the ISO is now in charge of publishing the specifications for the current version (1.7) and for updating and developing future versions. Despite impressions that PDF has been a proprietary format owned by Adobe, PDF has long been an open standard. The move to have PDF declared an ISO standard reinforces the open status of PDF.

The contentious issue of software patents is rearing its head again, both in India and globally. The Indian Patent Office, for instance, invited companies and institutions to comment on its Draft Manual 2008 — Patent Practice & Procedure (software patents included) this April. The responses from companies are varied since they address the patents' issue across sectors. Of relevance here are those pertaining to software patents.

The VA Information Technology Connection 2008 (VA ITC) will take place from July 7-10 in National Harbor, Maryland. Come learn how Red Hat serves the government sector with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware suite. VA ITC 2008 highlights the establishment of a single Information Technology (IT) authority and the consolidation of multiple IT operational and development activities. This event supports the VA strategic initiative for IT and advances the realization of “One VA” from an IT perspective.

Linspire Shareholders, When I left Linspire there were lots of assets in the company (computers, furniture, servers, trademarks, employees, and millions in cash), and virtually no liablities. What happened to these assets and cash? I have been contacted by several Linspire employees and shareholders, asking me what the Linspire asset sale to Xandros means. I put together this short video using "buckets" to try and explain what happened in very simple terms, based on what information was provided in the 3-paragraph "memorandum."

Just a day or so after Acer’s Aspire One goes on sale in Australia comes news that the Asus Eee PC 904 will shortly go on sale in the UK, muddying the waters over which is the best value ‘netbook’ to buy. Wow, yet another new Asus Eee PC? We know all about the Acer Aspire – an 8.9-inch model with 1024x600 screen, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz chip, 512MB memory and 8GB storage for Linux and 1.5GB memory and 120GB storage XP of memory, a keyboard that is 85% the size of a regular keyboard, USB ports, Wi-Fi, a webcam and more.

What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers. That statement may surprise you, since most people interested in computers have strong feelings about Microsoft. Businessmen and their tame politicians admire its success in building an empire over so many computer users.

They did it -- Mozilla now holds the world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, according to Jamie Panas, press and marketing assistant at Guinness World Records. Download Day 2008, designated by the Mozilla Foundation on June 17 in celebration of its 10th anniversary, saw the release of Firefox 3, the free Web browser for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. An intensive marketing campaign to set the first Guinness World Record of its kind, for the most software downloaded in one day, resulted in more than 8 million copies downloaded in one day, according to Mozilla.

I found some evidence Google tried hard to protect user confidentiality, in some letters to the judge in the court docket of Viacom v. YouTube. After the Order [PDF; text here] issued, Google didn't give up, but is continuing even now by asking the court in a letter to reconsider the decision and let them redact personally identifiable data. They fought hard against Viacom's motion to compel [PDF]. And the evidence indicates to me that what happened was a kind of SCO-like maneuver on Viacom's part.

The Australian Federal Government is currently caught in a bind over an election promise to supply public schools with one computer per secondary school child, with the cost of deployment now looking to be much beyond what was budgeted. Both software and running costs, mainly electricity bills, are to blame. At least one state, New South Wales, is seeking more money from the Federal Government to deploy the PCs. Another state, Victoria, has accepted that these additional costs will have to be borne from state funds.

Sidux is a new Debian derivative that's still just a baby, born in January 2007. Sidux announced a brand-new release on June 26, Sidux 2008-02, so we're going to kick the tires and take it for a drive, and see what sets it apart from other children of Debian. Currently it offers a choice of the KDE or Fluxbox desktop, and it supports both 32-bit i686 and AMD64. There is also an XFCE variant. Before trying it out for yourself, be sure to read the Quick Start section in the excellent and exceptionally helpful Sidux manual before burning it to a CD.

It's time to get ornery again with the FCC. Fortunately, they're asking for it, by soliciting comment on this FCC rulemaking proposal for "Service Rules for Advanced Wireless Services in the 1915-1920 MHz, 1995-2000 MHz, 2020-2025 MHz and 2175-2180 MHz Bands. It's a chocolate-covered spider. The chocolate is cost. The rulemaking proposes making Internet access over that spectrum "free" — in the free-as-in-beer sense. Not the free-as-in-freedom sense. Especially not in the free-as-in-speech sense. And least of all in the free-as-in-markets sense.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. has touted its "green computing" image following a recent independent test that ranked Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5's power efficiency over Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on three different hardware platforms. The server tests rated power consumption on IBM, Dell and HP machines in three conditions: active mode optimized for power savings, active mode optimized for performance and quiet mode.

Acer’s Aspire One is finally on sale in Australia and represents Acer’s first true foray into territory already claimed by computers such as the Asus Eee PC, the HP MiniNote 2133 and the MSI Wind. Other manufacturers such as Pioneer Computers also have similar devices, and Dell’s upcoming “E” subnotebook will also be a challenger. But the Aspire One, at AUD $599 for the Linux version, with a $99 cashback via redemption through Acer making it only AUD $500, and AUD $699 for the Windows XP version, also with a $99 cash back, making it $600, puts additional pressure on the Asus Eee PC.

Lately, there has been quite some bitching on the fringes of the KDE project about KDE4 and the direction it takes. Some people go as far as saying: “Give us back our old desktop!” I beg to differ. The old desktop has served us well for thirty-odd years since its invention by Xerox. It is beyond its due date by now. We need something new that meets the reality we are living in now.

On June 11, Red Hat announced that it had reached a settlement in the software patent lawsuit it was defending against Firestar Software, Inc. and DataTern, Inc. This settlement is of interest to the community; it may point toward how how such cases may go in the future. Unfortunately, the amount of information which has been released so far leaves as many questions as answers, including the fundamental question of whether this settlement is as good for the community as Red Hat is claiming.