Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open source is truly the best way to unlock the value of information technology, Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative, said at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit here Sept. 20. "Open source can give you a common operating platform for real, and if you use Linux as a leveler, the individual ships will all right themselves rather than colliding into one another," he said, pointing to the fact that even Microsoft submitted two of its licenses to the OSI for approval, although as a company it remains ambivalent toward open source.

Nowadays, many machines are running with 2-4 gigabytes of RAM, and their owners are discovering a problem: When they run 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, their extra RAM is not being used. Fortunately, correcting the problem is only a matter of installing or building a kernel with a few specific parameters enabled or disabled.

When I began my career as an assistant architect 12 years ago, I used AutoCAD R12, 3D Studio, CorelDraw 6.0, and Photoshop 4.0 for architectural drawing and 3-D modeling. Today, many architects still use their later versions, but those bulky packages provide many functions an architect will never use. Luckily, there are several open source alternatives that are well-suited for architects -- QCad in place of AutoCAD, Blender instead of 3DMax, Inkscape in place of CorelDraw, and the GIMP as a substitute for Photoshop.

Moonsoon Multimedia has used embedded Linux to build a consumer DVR (digital video recorder) with remote multimedia file serving capabilities. The Hava -- recently implicated in a GPL violation court case -- aims to let the user access live and recorded TV content from broadband-connected locations.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia on behalf of two BusyBox developers. The suit alleges that Monsoon' s new product Hava, and its firmware, distribute code borrowed from BusyBox, a collection of UNIX utilities for embedded systems, but aren't making the source code available, as is required under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Daniel B. Ravicher, SFLC legal director, says, "This is the first time that either myself or anyone else that I know of in the United States has actually had to go to court to force compliance with the GPL."

IBM's recently announced embrace of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite project has already borne fruit, with the beta release of IBM's free Lotus Symphony. Does the new word processor, spreadsheet and presentation trio have what it takes to put the Lotus brand back on the office application map?

GNOME 2.20 was released yesterday. Even though I use GNOME regularly, I normally don't get excited over new releases, because most seem to offer little more substance than previous versions, with most of the work being done under the hood. This time, though, GNOME has a solid list of new features and upgrades. It's worth taking a look at even if you aren't a fan of this desktop environment.

Lulatech, a software development consortium, are in the process of accepting applications for an internship and training programme. Students will receive training and practical experience in a variety of IT-related fields. All software used in the course will be open source.

No matter whether you are working on an article, an academic paper, or a novel, research is a crucial part of the writing process. And as with any research, you need a place to save your notes, ideas, relevant links, and text snippets. While there are tools like Basket Note Pads and the Zotero Firefox extension, wouldn't it be nice if you could store and manage your stuff directly from within OpenOffice.org? This is not only doable, but also easy to implement using just a Base database and a macro.

Linux users in the United Kingdom could face a greater threat from Microsoft than previously thought, but experts agree that British open source users are in far less danger than US users from Microsoft's claim that open source software infringes its patents.

When I talk to organization X (fill in your favorite health care entity, government or medical society) they never fail to utter the dreaded statement:"We are vendor neutral." followed by a dramatic long pause.

At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner. In his opening keynote at the third annual Gartner Open Source Summit here Sept. 19, titled "The Gartner Open Source Scenario for 2007: The risks and rewards for mainstream IT," Driver said the research firm believes "open source is defined by the license, period. Almost all of our customers are scrambling to create an open-source policy, as almost none of them have one as yet."

Congratulations to the successful students and their FreeBSD Project mentors for participating in another productive Google Summer of Code. This program encourages students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break with generous funding from Google. We have had a total of over 50 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program in 2005, 2006, and 2007. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, filesystems work, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We have gained many new FreeBSD committers from previous summer of code projects already, and more are in the process.

This year, Amarok had two summer of code projects under the KDE umbrella. Both of these projects have finished while remaining in continued development and were extremely successful. Read on to learn about two innovative additions to the Amarok project.

It's been a good week for anyone praying for the demise of Microsoft Office. Google unveiled its long-awaited, web-based PowerPoint competitor. IBM took the wraps off the free Lotus Symphony, a complete suite of MS-battling tools. And now we have a new version OpenOffice.org. Version 2.3 popped up on the OpenOffice website while no one was looking.

"Ahoy me laddies (and beauties)," Linux creator Linus Torvalds began,announcing the seventh release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel,"time for the traditional'Talk Like a Pirate Day' kernel release!" He noted,"now, last year we had a full release (2.6.18 was immortalized on TLAP-2006), but this year I'm chickening out, and we're just doing what is hopefully going to be the last -rc release for the 2.6.23 series." Full source changes can be viewed via thegitweb interface. Linus also offered a brief summary of the changes:"I'm not including the diffstat, because it got blown up by the resurrection of the sk98lin driver - because skge that is supposed to supplant it doesn't handle some of the hardware. Oh well."Apart from that, we had some mips, powerpc and xtense updates, and various driver tweaks. Things like the USB autosuspend revert should make people happier, and some more clockevents fixes should help suspend/restore on i386."read more |rsync.net - Secure Offsite Data

BinHost, a Web hosting and Internet services company, launched in 2000, "a time when discussion and email lists were not particularly easy to find a home for," says Justin Newman, BinHost's founder. Even back then, Newman built all of his infrastructure and services on open source software. As Newman has expanded his venture into telephony services, he still believes that open source saves business owners time, energy, and money.

The August print edition of Advance for Health Information Executives has a tour-de-force article by Bruce Wilder, MD, MPH, JD page 49 entitled 'Getting Beyond Economics' that is simply pure champagne. In addition to espousing the virtues of FOSS and WorldVistA EHR it contains such gems as: 'The move toward a universal EHR is much more than the introduction of a new technology in medical care. Universal implementation of proprietary EHR systems has the potential to wrest control of the doctor-patient relationship from doctors and their patients. Unfortunately, most doctors and their patients don't have a clue that this could happen -- and already is happening -- right under their noses. And, they will be paying for it!

Mozilla, on Sept. 19, ditched the ability to run arbitrary script from the Firefox command line, a quick fix for a year-old QuickTime bug that could be used to take over user systems. Security researcher Petko D. Petkov on Sept. 12 posted proof-of-concept code showing that the low-risk, year-old QuickTime bug could easily be turned into a high-risk attack on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Skype and other programs.

KDE's window-specific settings feature gives you a fine level of control over the way windows behave. It lets you change settings such as minimum/maximum size, position, overlay, and transparency. The GIMP uses multiple windows to select tools, tool options, and other items used in the process of image editing. By changing the default behavior of the various windows used by GIMP with KDE's window-specific settings, you can improve the GIMP interface.