Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Free Software Foundation has defined Four Freedoms related to software. These freedoms apply to users of software, not necessarily developers. In the view of the FSF, these freedoms are ethical in nature, so much so that they argue that software which violates these freedoms is unethical.

Forty percent of German university students now have access to Linux and management solutions from Novell

An Interview with Kir Kolyshkin,Project Manager for OpenVZ.

Many in Health IT are moving to all over-the-web 'asp', software-as-service Electronic Medical Records services with total centralized control of data. John C. Dvoraksounds off a note of caution for such a trend with the recent Windows Genuine Advantage server outage which should be a wakeup call for those moving to 'online everything' applications:'What is often lost in individual analyses of how to proceed with your data-processing needs is the concept of"being at the mercy of a single company." It's something that you need to avoid at all costs. This Windows Genuine Disadvantage pothole should make all users rethink their strategies...' He further notes that this outage"happened to Microsoft, not to Alabama Joe's Server Farm and Toaster Repair." a note of caution indeed.

One of the fundamental principles of Linux kernel development is that user-space interfaces are set in stone. Once an API has been made available to user space, it must, for all practical purposes, be supported (without breaking applications) indefinitely. There have been times when this rule has been broken, but, even in the areas known for trouble (sysfs, for example), the number of times that the user-space API has been broken has remained relatively small.

With an avalanche of last-minute commits, the KOffice Google Summer of Code students finished yet another great Summer of Code. We had some very exciting projects this year, and most of them were as great a success as last year.

Since our previous peek at the state of wireless networking in Linux, which is moving forward in an excellent fashion, the new unified Linux wireless stack (mac80211) has been accepted into the mainline 2.6.22 kernel. This is the new common base for all Linux wireless drivers. There are no drivers yet that use mac80211, but inclusion in the kernel is a huge step forward. Linux developers are hard at work porting old drivers and writing new ones, and this should attract participation from additional developers who now have a nice unified wireless networking stack to build on, instead of the previous mish-mash.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 102 for the week of August 20th. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue102

If you use the Opera browser on multiple machines, you'll inevitably run into the problem of keeping your bookmarks in sync. While you can store your bookmarks using services like del.icio.us, you might want to opt for oSync -- a synchronization utility that has a couple of clever features besides the ability to keep bookmarks and notes in sync.

A distributed computing project named "Artificial Intelligence - Reverse engineering the brain" has been launched on Linux. The goal is to use the power of distributed computing to build a large scale artificial intelligence system.

Perhaps Creative Commons' LiveContent 1.0 CD would work better if more clearly defined. Its Web page enthuses that the project is"an umbrella idea which aims to connect and expand Creative Commons and open source communities," adding that it"works to identify creators and content providers working to share their creations more easily" and"works to support developers and others who build build better technology to distribute these works." In other words, LiveContent is a sampler of free content and free software, but this purpose seems lost in a cloud of rhetoric, even to project members. The CD suffers from lackluster presentation, a mediocre assortment of samplers, and a lack of explanation.

Linux's global uptake and acceptance into the mainstream marked a milestone when the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) announced that their exam totals have topped the 150 000 mark and that their rollout is gaining momentum.<br /> <br />

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: "Pencils down" marks the end of the Summer of Code for 2007. Python highlighting support, with work on a new, handwritten lexer in KDevelop. A data engine and associated Plasma applet for KGet. Start of the Plasma-based Wikipedia and Service Info applets for Amarok 2. Wikipedia integration, and other improvements in the Step physics simulation package. A console added to KAlgebra. New graphical themes for KGoldRunner. XMP metadata support in Digikam. More progress in the unobtrusive search dialog for Kate. Usability work across many applications. No mixer functionality in Phonon for KDE 4.0. The start of development on KChart 2.

OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt highlighted a recent commit to the NetBSD source tree saying, "if anyone had any doubt that our insistence on freedom was important, just read this." The referenced commit message describes an effort to work around issues with a binary blob included with NetBSD, something strongly avoided by the OpenBSD project.

LXer Feature: 26-Aug-2007

A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source.

Linux-based application platform vendor Trolltech expects a higher growth rate in the second half than the first six months but said growth for the full year may fall below the approximately 40% recorded for each of the three previous years.

I plead guilty to past transgressions. So, call me a hypocrite if you will. I don't care anymore. I refuse to get stuck in the past because the present and the near future is fun.Indulge if you will in recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images experienced as intrusive and distressing. The obsession with Microsoft in Open Software communities is excessive and unreasonable and a product of the mind. My only hope is that such thoughts, impulses, and, or images can be expunged by logic or reasoning, which is contrary to the notions in the psychiatric community.

When Microsoft announced its plans to build a brand new hypervisor into a future version of Windows Server, it seemed to me that a much simpler path to baking virtualization into Windows would be to join the ranks of vendors developing and shipping products around the open-source Xen hypervisor project. Microsoft must have judged that relying on an outside source—and a General-Public-Licensed one, at that—for a piece of technology as central as a hypervisor would be too risky or uncomfortable, leading the Redmondians to opt instead to go it alone.

In the continuining discussion about how GCC treats the volatile keyword, Linus Torvalds noted, "I just have a strong suspicion that 'volatile' performance is so low down the list of any C compiler persons interest, that it's never going to happen. And quite frankly, I cannot blame the gcc guys for it." He went on to explain, "that's especially as 'volatile' really isn't a very good feature of the C language, and is likely to get *less* interesting rather than more (as user space starts to be more and more threaded, 'volatile' gets less and less useful."

Doctor Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita, announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference on Thursday.