Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Mozilla today released the final version of Thunderbird 2, the next generation of the organization's open-source email client. Key new features include message tagging, message history, and a new function to search for content within messages, among numerous other enhancements.

Technologists must involve themselves in Internet policy making or risk losing a free Internet, Creative Commons founder says.

Emmett is impressed with the additions to the latest up.time upgrade. Find out why he's calling this the"best browser-based monitoring software".

The South African department of education will likely look at a stronger free and open source policy in light if the recently-adopted national free software strategy, department director-general Duncan Hindle said this morning.

The Getting Things Done (GTD) method of time management is one of the simplest methods I've found, but until recently I hadn't had much luck in finding any Linux-compatible applications to help me stick to using GTD. A few weeks ago I stumbled on ThinkingRock, a Java-based app for following the GTD methodology, and tried it out. I've been pleased with its simplicity and ease of use.

Computerworld reported yesterday that Microsoft and Samsung have signed a new cross-patent protection agreement which specifically provides Samsung rights to any of the unspecified patents which Microsoft claims are being violated by Linux usage. In return, Microsoft is given rights to Samsung's extensive patent portfolio.

A recent discussion on the lkml examined the possibility of a Linux implementation of Sun's ZFS. It was pointed out that the file system is released under the GPL-incompatible CDDL, and that Sun has filed numerous patents to prevent ZFS from being reverse engineered. Max Yudin pointed out, "according to Jeff Bonwick's blog Sun issued 56 patents on ZFS, but I have no idea what they patented. Sorry, binary compatible ZFS reimplementation with GPL license might not be legal." David Litwin noted that he had been told by a ZFS developer to talk to Linux developers to see about getting non-GPL'd code included with the kernel. Theodore T'so replied, "that was totally useless answer from the ZFS developers. What he should have told you is to contact Sun management, since they are the only ones who can decide whether or not to release ZFS under a GPL license, and more importantly, to give a patent license for any patents they may have filed in the course of developing ZFS."

Firefox browser usage has increased substantially -- by nearly 5 percent -- in Europe over the past year, French web analyst firm XiTi reports. During the week of March 5 through 11, 2007, the open-source browser exceeded 24 percent share of Europe's browser market, according to the market researcher.

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel over to Germany to talk to the key to your personal information storage, a highly dedicated KDE-PIM developer (though hide any small animals when visiting his apartment!) - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Volker Krause.

The first non-C++ application in KDE's SVN has been moved from the playground module to Extragear. Guidance is a number of system configuration modules and a laptop power manager. The recent 0.8 release added a kcontrol module for setting up Wine and improvements to the power manager. One of the aims of KDE 4 is to increase the use of KDE bindings, such as Ruby's Korundum and PyKDE, which will make coding KDE easier for those who do not want to worry about pointers and compilers.

Sun Microsystems has partnered with Canonical to release a complete Java stack for Ubuntu users. The stack is made up from Sun's J2EE offering GlassFish, Java SE (JDK 6), Derby-based Java DB 10.2, and the NetBeans IDE 5.5. While Java components have been around for quite some time, this will be the first time users will be able to be able to easily download and install this stack. They're all just an apt-get command away.

Microsoft has launched an effort to double its user base to 2 billion by 2015, offering students in developing countries entry level versions of Windows and Office for next to nothing. It's also an effort to keep users in poorer nations hooked on Windows and away from Linux.

[XP Starter Edition? So there going to sell software that they won't support after 2008?. Eh, for three bucks... - Scott]

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt announced Wednesday that Robert Kolodner will serve in a permanent capacity as the head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).And, with the appointment comes a change in the way the position is structured– ensuring continuity beyond the current administration.

Agreement covers hardware and software products, including Linux, and is expected to accelerate product development for both companies.

What operating system do the heads of Fortune 500 companies run on their personal laptops? In the case of Michael S. Dell, president and CEO of Dell, it's Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Yes, the head of Dell Inc., with a market-capitalization of just south of $56-billion, isn't just saying that Dell will be selling Linux-equipped PCs in the near future -- he's already running Linux at home.

On Microsoft's Port 25 site, Hank Janssen has announced that Microsoft has released a plug-in Windows Media Player for Firefox. Well, that's the theory; in practice, DesktopLinux.com has been unable to download the actual file after trying to do so from both Linux and Windows systems.

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the "Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler". He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads." The patchset introduces Scheduling Classes, "an extensible hierarchy of scheduler modules. These modules encapsulate scheduling policy details and are handled by the scheduler core without the core code assuming about them too much."

While there are many contenders for the title of simplest wiki or easiest to use, Pawfaliki beats them all for two reasons: the entire wiki consists of just one PHP file, and it can be configured by anyone with little or no experience with PHP. This makes Pawfaliki a perfect tool for users who want to set up a personal wiki with minimum fuss, or small workgroups looking for a quick and easy way to share knowledge and collaborate.

Last week, two years since its last major release, the CentOS project released version 5 of its enterprise-focused Linux distribution. I downloaded it and put it to the test, and found that CentOS 5 has maintained its tradition of robustness and reliability while adding new features like virtualization.

MySQL's support tracking system, Eventum 2.0, has been released for free download.