Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A lot of folks have an unhealthily casual attitude towards securing their wireless networks. "Oh, it's nice to share" some say. Others think "I have nothing to interest a cracker, so why bother?" Both attitudes are inviting trouble. There is nothing to be gained from leaving your systems open to be used as warez, porn or mp3 servers, or Borged into a spam botnet. Or to find yourself struggling with slow network speeds because some freeloading hog is overloading your bandwidth.

Novell Inc might have signed a patent and interoperability deal with Microsoft Corp but it is not about to give up competing with the software giant and last week released a study that suggests its Linux desktop product is better value than Windows Vista.

The second beta of Json-lib 1.0, an open source Java library "for transforming beans, maps, collections, java arrays and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans." The function type from JavaScript is not part of the JSON format "officially" but it is supported as well.

All the best operating systems come on USB...So, you're tired of Windows and thinking of trying Linux. There are lots of good distros, RedHat or Novell have all the enterprise cred you might need. And there's a support community too, it's a no brainer...

The Electoral Enrolment Centre has consolidated electoral rolls on the open-source PostgreSQL database, replacing a group of disparate databases spread around the country. The updated New Zealand electoral roll management system, dubbed Mike, has been in the works since 2003 and is now in production, replacing a collection of Oracle databases with Visual Basic front-ends.

The Big Four providers of network monitoring and management tools have fined-tuned their products to cater to large corporations. What about small businesses that often find the tools bloated with unnecessary features? Companies like GroundWork Open Source offer more customizable solutions. GroundWork's VP of Products Tony Barbagallo thinks the industry is in for a change.

Following up announcement of its 'Unbreakable Linux' program last fall, Oracle Corp has unveiled extensions for its Enterprise manager administration tool, which will be bundled into two of its three Linux support tiers.

Building on the success of a pilot program at Texas Woman's University in 2006, Koha with Class provides library school classrooms with five hosted installations of Koha, free of charge. Koha is the first and most mature open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). The project is designed to give future librarians hands-on experience with library automation software and open source. Any college or university offering a program in Library and Information Studies/ Technology can participate.

When Damian Hickey set out to build an e-commerce system for reservations-based businesses, he was determined not to reinvent the wheel. By choosing to modify an existing open source e-retailing system he was able to accelerate the development process, but also took on board a score of additional problems.

Sun Microsystems Inc. unveiled a series of updates to the Solaris 10 (version 11/06) operating system (OS) designed to bolster Solaris' presence as a more strategic alternative to commercial Linux distributions. Sun officials say the company will make the effort to do so via the channel by offering higher margins and through Solaris support subscriptions priced at 20 to 50 per cent lower than those currently offered by Red Hat for its commercial Linux distribution.

The Free Standards Group (FSG) and Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), two of the major non-profit corporations dedicated to promoting open source software, are merging to form a new organization called The Linux Foundation. The new organization will be led by Jim Zemlin, the former FSG executive director, and for now will continue the work of both predecessors. The merger will be legally complete in early February, but work on the practical details will begin immediately.

It will take a few more years before the fate of the DRM patent applications filed by Red Hat's Alan Cox is known. Last week it came to light that Cox had applied for two patents, both to do with digital rights management.

OpenOffice.org includes dozens of options for how it behaves. Available from Tools> Options, they are divided into general settings for the entire office suite and settings particular to each application. General settings are available under the general headings of OpenOffice.org, Load/Save, and Language Settings.

Robert Day proposed a couple of new kernel code maturity configuration options for tagging code as either"deprecated" or"obsolete". He referenced earlier confusion around the attempt to remove devfs [story] in which it wasn't clear on the current state and future plans for the code. He explained,"using deprecated code is still technically fine, but using obsolete code should be something that raises a red flag of some kind." Aside from a little confusion between the differences in definition between these two words, general feedback was positive. H. Peter Anvin supported the patch,"if nothing else, it gives some middle-of-the-roadness to the continual'to remove or not to remove' debate." Robert also noted that the"deprecated" flag would be a useful sanity check when building a kernel,"this would seem to be a quick and dirty way to prune anything that is *supposed* to be obsolete from the build, to make sure you're not picking up dead code by accident.".

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KHangman becomes the latest application to migrate to SVG-based scalable interface rendering. KOpenBabel is merged and the beginnings of a 3d navigation system in Kalzium. Work expands in the Umbrello/KPlato Student Mentoring program. Support for the ComicBook Archive and other improvements in okular. Work on Picture, Video and Krita "Flake" shapes in KOffice. Improvements in both the KDE 3.5 and 4.0 versions of Konsole. Language detection in Sonnet continues to mature. Import of concept code demos in Decibel. "Simple-search" user interface work, and support for indexing binary data fields in Strigi. "liveui" moves back into kdelibs. dbmodeler, a database schema modelling application (part of the Season of KDE), is renamed "grama".

EnterpriseDB, maker of the world’s leading enterprise-class database built on open source, announced today that it has expanded its Asia Pacific operations with the establishment of a regional headquarters in Hong Kong. The company also announced that it has hired industry veteran Roger Durn as the region’s general manager. More information about the company and free downloads of EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, the company’s flagship product, may be found at http://www.enterprisedb.com.

Hopling Technologies and Fujitsu announced in September 2006 that they would collaborate on a Linux-based Hopling Board Support Package designed to make it easier for equipment manufacturers to add innovative applications to the standards-based Fujitsu solution. The reference kit, which includes a reference board utilizing the highly integrated MB87M3550 WiMAX SoC, software package and operating manual, will be available from Fujitsu in 1Q-2007.

Open source Could be on the short-list when it comes to application-buying decisions in 2007. While open source applications for collaboration, content management and CRM may not have reached the maturity level of Linux or the Apache web server, they’re getting there.

We have finally reached the concluding episode of this trilogy. Some of the extensions mentioned in this article are very well-known and some people might be wondering why I have left them for last. I've done so to highlight some extensions that are equally good but not as popular. The list below is the last of 10 extensions that we think should be included among the "Best of Firefox Extensions."

India has for some time now been touted as a key battleground for the global open source movement — more specifically, Linux. While the government does not have a proactive stand supporting open source, or even measures that help smaller Linux user groups to compete with IBM, Redhat and Novell, it is clear that open source software is making steady headway. But make no mistake: Windows is, and will remain, number one by a long margin.