Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Four months after being announced, the End Software Patents project (ESP) is launching a new Web site with arguments for economists, computer scientists, lawyers, and lay peoplemen about why they should support the project. Prominent on the site is the publication of a report on the state of patents in the United States during 2006-07, and a scholarship contest that will award $10,000 for "for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under US law."

Com One's Phoenix Wi-Fi radio is a home music appliance built on an embedded Linux foundation. Phoenix lets you stream music or play podcasts as easily as you can listen to a car radio, once you tell it what you want to hear. Its ability to play Internet radio is nice -- but is it worth its price? The radio is attractive enough in a shiny white plastic kind of way. It's smaller than a boom box -- about the size of three transistor radios (remember them?) side by side. The main controls include a five-way circular control pad and a knob that changes the music volume and moves through device settings during setup.

After a slow start, add-ons for OpenOffice.org are finally starting to reach a critical mass. When I last wrote about add-ons for OpenOffice.org in September 2004, the examples were relatively limited, with extendedPDF the outstanding example. Today, extendedPDF remains a must-have -- so much so that Debian versions of OpenOffice.org include it as part of the basic packages -- but the choices have expanded dramatically. There is even a web page that is slowly beginning to rival the Firefox extension page.

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will allow your computer to continue to function for a period of time when mains power is lost. This can help you to smooth over short-term (1-5 minute) loss of power by running from the UPS battery. When the UPS battery is running low, the UPS can signal your computer to shut down cleanly. With a UPS you can avoid lengthly filesystem or RAID checks due to abrupt power loss. Here are some tips on UPSes in general and how to set one up to protect a Linux machine, even if the model you have lacks explicit Linux support.

Today we're going to dig into ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a good tool for managing your Linux sound devices. It's good for managing multiple sound devices, and it works in all Linux environments including other window managers, or no X Windows at all.

Sun has claimed that completing its purchase of the open source database developer MySQL will enable it to become the most complete provider of open source server software. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive, said in a conference call on Tuesday that the US$1 billion acquisition "completed our capability to deliver a holistic, secure, open source platform for networks", providing the last, key piece in a software stack that now rivals Microsoft's.

Medsphere, an open-source VistA vendor and their customers, gave a talk on their system and their strategy at HIMSS yesterday. Relative to the number of vendors present at HIMSS, very few held a session at the "University" section of the tradeshow. Medsphere did and highlighted several of their key successes. Overall, I was impressed. Read on after the gap for my review of the session.

There are lots of ways that software gets included in Fedora releases. Because Fedora is a community-powered Linux distribution, the most common (and likely the easiest) method is when a community member packages and “owns” the task of building it for Fedora. This story follows that process.

TheDailyPlate.com is a free, online eating journal with a lot of features that make it useful for the health conscious. The site is developed completely in PHP on MySQL, Apache, and Linux. LAMP was a natural choice, the founders say, because so many other Internet companies have experienced success with the now-ubiquitous platform.

Product revenue grew 9 percent year-over-year - Achieved non-GAAP operating margin of 10 percent

From the concept of copyleft to the status of community projects, free and open source software (FOSS) raises endless legal issues, many of which are subject to rumors and misconceptions floating around the community. To help reduce the confusion for those managing software projects, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has released a freely distributable guide entitled "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects."

The combined KDE/Amarok booth and developer room at the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brusssels was a great experience (as usual!). Many people showed up from the KDE and Amarok communities, and we had a hard time fitting all our cool hardware and people in the booth. Luckily, the talks drew quite a crowd, and the booth became less busy as the day progressed. Read on for an overview of FOSDEM 2008 from the KDE perspective.

Most portable audio players can play music encoded in the MP3 audio format, but some consumers also have music in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, or even WMA files. How do you change from one format to another when you need to? Here are some of the best audio conversion tools available in Linux. One of the simplest and most elegant ways to convert audio files is by using the audio-convert script. It makes use of Zenity to display GUI messages and windows, but does the rest of its work from the command line.

News that Microsoft is to be hit with yet another fine from the European Union has naturally attracted plenty of attention, but it has also raised the old questions of whether such interventions by governments are justified or even do any good.

Even the most basic digital cameras can store a lot of useful information about photos in the EXIF format, including exposure time, aperture settings, focal length, and metering mode. The EXIF metadata can also contain the photo's geographical coordinates, which provide the exact position of where the photo was taken, but only few cameras on the market support this feature. However, you can add geographical information to your photos (i.e., geotag them) even if you don't have a fancy camera or GPS receiver using the Geotag tool.

The 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced. KDE leads the popularity list in the category Desktop Environment with a rocking 52% percent of the votes leaving competing contenders in its dust. Among the users on Linuxquestions.org, KDE is being praised for its high level of integration, for the number of applications and of course for Konqui being the cute mascot it is.

The organizers of Open Source Software Summit (OSSummit) Asia are now looking to hold the conference in mainland China. The event, organized by the Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, was originally set to be held in Hong Kong in November last year, but was postponed due to the lack of response.

Imagine standing on the road. An oncoming car is heading rapidly towards you. You have a choice to move, or to stay. Now consider that in business you need to choose a server platform wisely but often Windows shops become entrenched because it is the status quo. A couple of user experiences show why you ought to think about it more.

Version 7.0 of the open source operating system FreeBSD was released early this morning with a host of features that promise significant improvements in performance and SMP scalability. FreeBSD 7.0-release is available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, and powerpc architectures. The version for the sparc64 architecture will become available in a few days.

Last summer, Microsoft said that February 27, 2008 would be the single biggest day of releases in its 30-year history, promising major updates to its server operating system, developer tools and database.