Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Formula One motor racing is no longer about famous car marques, its about precise science and using technology to shave another fraction of a second off a lap time, and Linux is playing a pivotal role in helping the race teams achieve this. As a technical sport motor racing demands of its participants a close understanding of the technologies that can help them. F1 motor racing is probably second only to the aerospace industry in the application of aerodynamic simulation and wind tunnel technology. It is a testament to the rapid advance of Linux in high performance computing that most teams in Formula 1 have been using Linux systems in their aerodynamic and engine workshops for a number of years.

I read Negroponte's statement presenting the OLPC XO as a platform for Windows in the most ironic circumstances possible: during a week of preparing, under a deadline, to migrate personally to an XO. I made this decision for one specific reason: freedom. The IBM T23s that I have used for many years are adequate in practice, and the system and applications running on them are entirely free software, but the BIOS is not. I want to use a laptop with a free software BIOS, and the XO is the only one.

Twitter is a popular social networking utility that's gaining popularity as a micro-blogging tool. Registered users can post messages -- also called Tweets -- via the Web interface, but many prefer to use desktop applications that offer additional functionality and move Tweeting out of the browser entirely. Qt Twitter Linux is a barebones KDE client developed with Qt and C++. Since it was built using Twitter's APIs, messages sent via this tool appear instantaneously in Twitter's timeline as if they were sent directly from the Web-based interface (all Tweets show what app the sender uses by default). While Qt Twitter Linux doesn't come with handy features such as search and archive, it's great for dashing off quick messages.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.1 Alpha1. With the soft feature freeze in effect, KDE 4.1 provides a first preview of what can be expected from KDE 4.1, due in late July this year.

With libraries of thousands of fonts to handle, designers need a way to quickly locate fonts and organize them into meaningful categories -- such as by the project that requires them -- and to disable fonts when they are not in use so that they don't clog system memory. Although as recently as two years ago the GNU/Linux desktop lacked a font manager that met all these needs, it now has four that either meet them or are likely to.

If you want to be notified when and how a Web site has changed, you can turn to either netstiff or urlwatch to keep and eye on things for you. Both of these tools monitor Web sites for changes and allow you to see a diff-like output of exactly what has changed. You can also use netstiff to monitor FTP sites for changes.

Microsoft Tuesday said it plans to become a major management platform vendor to battle the likes of CA and HP and said it would extend its System Center software to encompass Linux and Unix-based machines.

Participation by big open source vendors is helping attract new interest in Linux user groups in Asia. Khairil Yusof, president of the Free/Open Source Software Society (FOSS) in Malaysia, said in an interview that the group's members have benefited by sharing knowledge with others from different technology backgrounds during its monthly meetings. New members are able to listen to talks ranging from a wide spectrum of topics such as desktop usage to running an open source software business, as well as "personally meet local and international developers", said Yusof.

There is an air of disquiet again on Planet GNOME - and once again the reason behind it is the way the site is administered. For the second time in six months, a developer from the GNOME desktop project has openly accused the project's media spokesman, Jeff Waugh, of being unresponsive to requests for changes in a GNOME service that Waugh looks after.

reStructuredText is a lightweight markup language intended to be highly readable in the source format. With it, you can produce beautiful HTML, PDF, XML, and even S5 documents from plain text files. reStucturedText is a part of Docutils, an open source text processing system for processing plain text documentation into more useful formats. Docutils is written in Python, and you will find a package for it in most Linux distributions, though you can install it from source under Linux and Microsoft Windows.

That's the question raised by Britt Blaser in “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…”. It's also one suggested indirectly by Phil Hughes in Our Internet. Democracy is by nature "our government". The open source twist on that we put it together and can hack improvements to it. Think of elected officials as committers and maintainers and you start go get the idea. The analogy isn't perfect, because by nature open source code is purely practical: it has to work. While government often does not. All government is buggy. In the worst cases it crashes outright and is replaced or supplemented by corrupt alternatives.

Following our interview covering KDE in Japan last week, we now turn to South Korea. Cho Sung Jae tell us about the Korean KDE Users Group, including some of the problems of using KDE with Korean and just how fast their broadband is.

Sportsvite.com, a kind of MySpace for ballers, exists because Steve Parker and a few friends wanted to find a better way to organize softball leagues and other casual sports teams in their New York neighborhoods. Parker, who lists badminton as a favorite sport on his Sportsvite.com profile, says he has always been an advocate of using open source, and thought it would be a great idea to build an Internet service that would make it easier for people to team up for amateur sports.

Without much fanfare, the open source security area is growing rapidly. Here are top contenders from anti-virus, firewalls, forensics, intrusion detection, and more.

While large cheap hard disks allow you to keep your audio collection in a lossless format such as FLAC on your home network, when you are on the move you probably want to squeeze the most out of every gigabyte by using a compressed format. This article takes a look at three tools aimed at making audio conversion for portable music players a painless task.

Recently Products Editor, James Gray, caught up with IBM's Inna Kuznetsova, Worldwide Director for IBM's Linux strategy. They discuss IBM's Big Green Linux intiative and IBM's own power-saving move to Linux on its own data center.

Skype has released, in beta, a Java version of its softphone that will run on a wide range of cellphones. But every time you make or receive any kind of call you will pay for a mobile voice call. The beta version of 'Skype for your mobile' works on about 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson and is available worldwide with a feature set that includes chat, group chat, presence (seeing when your contacts are online), and receiving calls from Skype users, and through SkypeIn.

The Debian GNU/Linux operating system continues to generate interest from developers around the world, keen to sign up and contribute code to the open-source project now in its 15th year. But this popularity has been a mixed blessing. The project came under fire recently when programmers who wanted to get on board were unable to sign up and become registered participants.

Black Duck Software, a company best known for its services and software for the procurement and re-use of open source software, has acquired Koders, and with it the popular Koders.com search engine for free and open source software code (FOSS). Black Duck plans to integrate Koders' search technology into its own product line, while promising to enhance the Koders search engine while leaving its basic nature unchanged.

Yesterday, I read Doc's interview with Bob Frankston in the May 2008 Linux Journal. That, in turn, got me reading other things that Bob has written. Finally, that inspired this NicaLiving post. We know we have to seriously address communications connectivity with the Geek Ranch project. I have been thinking about regular telephone service, cellular service, streaming video, Internet connectivity and even helping the community get some connectivity as a bunch of separate items. The interview and other reading got me thinking that this is one problem -- the transport of bits.