Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

ISO’s JTC-1 directives were designed to provide a fair, consensus-based way to design standards that are portable, interoperable, and adaptable to all languages and cultures. The OOXML proposal has suffered from two basic problems: (1) voting irregularities, and (2) the use of a fast-track process for a complex, new, large specification that has not received adequate industry review. The resulting specification was driven almost exclusively by one vendor, has not achieved industry consensus, and has had thousands of issues logged against it, largely due to issues involving implementability, portability, and interoperability.

The Joomla website proclaims that, 'Joomla is one of the most powerful open source content management systems on the planet.' Sure, they're biased about their collaborative open source creation. But there's no arguing that Joomla is quickly becoming one of the top content management system platforms on the Internet.

One of the remaining gaps in the GNU/Linux desktop is an editor for producing Flash content. When viewing Flash files, users can limp along with Adobe's proprietary player or the still-incomplete although free Gnash player, but the best they can do for Flash creation is employ the limited ability of OpenOffice.org Draw to export to the format. Considering the often trivial uses to which Flash is put, this lack is not entirely lamentable, but the fact remains that nothing remotely comparable to Adobe's Flash CS3 Professional. Salasaga, which until recently was called the Flame Project, is an effort to fill this gap by providing the functionality of Adobe Captivate for producing Flash computer tutorials and animations.

Those of us who were using Linux full-time around the turn of the century will remember that the state of web browsing on Linux was a little scary then. The only real option available was the binary-only Netscape 4 client; it was buggy and old. It really seemed like the web was going to move forward without Linux, and that there was not a whole lot we could do about it.

"Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. We look forward to welcoming more new contributors and projects this year," begins a page listing all the projects planning to participate in this year's GSoC. Among the numerous planned participtants there are many kernel projects, including DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Git, GNU/Hurd, Linux, Minix, and NetBSD.

"Free" has been a founding concept in the Linux world since before there was Linux — or GNU/Linux, if you prefer. In his history of the GNU project, Richard M. Stallman begins, "When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking."

Two things annoy me a lot when I'm browsing the Internet. First, I hate unclickable links, where I have to select the text link, open a new tab, paste the link, then press enter. I'd much rather deal with links that I can just click to open. The other issue is being forced to manually edit a URL in the address bar if I want to browse up one level on a site. Linkification and Uppity are two Firefox extensions that make my annoyances go away.

The world has been turned upside down for Linux developers, thanks to Microsoft's approach to its mobile platform--today it's the most open functioning platform on the market, says new Linux Australia president Stewart Smith. The star of application-rich mobile phones, Apple's iPhone, has been met with criticism from the open source community and even confusion by major software developers like Adobe.

One of the most noticeable differences between Linux and Windows is the directory structure. Not only is the format different, but the logic of where to find things is different.

Linux has always been the operating system of the geeks and nerds. For some reason Linux has never been able to capture the market like Windows and OS X have managed to do. The main reason for this has been the so called unfriendliness of the Linux OS. But things are changing now with distros like Ubuntu etc..

Although I regularly use KDE, Xfce, and other desktops for GNU/Linux, I keep returning to GNOME. Sometimes I use the default Metacity window manager, and other times the quicker Sawfish, but, with either choice, GNOME has an uncluttered look that allows me to focus on my work rather than my software. It also contains enough customization that I can easily set my increasingly long list of preferences with a minimum of effort.

Microsoft's Office suite could have plausible challenger on the desktop for the first time since Lotus gave up trying to take on Redmond a decade ago. With developers struggling to get OpenOffice 2.4 out the door, details are emerging of the features users have to look forward to in the upcoming bullet point release, version 3.0.

When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most "modular" yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS.

[I thought this might be of interest to our readers even though it is not FOSS related. - Scott]

On the 12th and 13th of March the 4th OpenExpo took place in Bern. /ch/open oranises the fair every 6 months alternating in Bern and Zurich. A wide variety of talks grouped into three different tracks accompanied the fair. This year more than 30 OpenSource Projects took the opportunity to present themselves and their work to a wide audience. KDE and the Amarok team was among them.

LXer Feature: 23-Mar-2008

In this week's roundup we have an early look at KDE 4.1, the Supreme Court rejects Microsoft's Novell appeal - 12 years later! 25 Simple Games for Linux, CodeWeavers to release CrossOver Games, A Wine 1.0 release in our lifetime and reviews of Spicebird and Clonezilla. To wrap things up we have two FUD articles, an old argument about Linux viruses and Apple fixes some Open Source Vulnerabilities.

During my article on Amiga emulation on the Linux platform I had deliberately neglected to mention AmiKit as there appeared to be only MS Windows based executable installers and zip archives on the AmiKit web site. After the article went live, Mike kindly informed us there was indeed a Linux friendly archive of AmiKit. I emailed the AmiKit author, Jan Zahurancik, requesting a link to it as there was no link to be found on the AmiKit web site, only MS centric archives. He duly replied with 3 links, which Jan has requested I do not show here as they were not and are not public versions, to AmiKit in zip and lzx format as well as a link to a PDF file showing how to get AmiKit working on the Linux platform.

Here’s the scenario, a friend of mine just bought a new laptop. When he was buying it, he indicated that he did not want windows on it (which should make it cheaper). The response from the vendor: “We can’t do that, it comes with Windows”. When he became a bit more aggressive, they indicated they could give him one without Windows (Vista SP1), but it would cost an extra $70!

In many African countries, few people have access to computers and the Internet. Experts say this is hindering development and preventing students from being able to compete for jobs. At a conference in Dakar this week, software experts, government officials and students came together to look at how open-source software, which is free for anyone to use, could make technology available to more people. Kari Barber has this report from Dakar.

After nearly 2 years of non-stop development, FreeSWITCH has evolved from an idea and an empty directory into a fully operational soft-switch capable of withstanding the loads 8-10 times as large as anything else they were able to deploy in the past with other software according to the reports from our early adopters.

At first blush, Microsoft hounds might want to pounce on Apple's release of over 80 vulnerability fixes this week. But before anyone bears that red M tattooed on their chest, you should take another look at Apple's updates.

[How's this for a loaded article title? Interesting how updates became vulnerabilities - Scott]