Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When server and network management software from a proprietary software vendor costs ten times as much as an open source alternative, the decision to go the open source route might seem obvious.

Oracle has continued to stock up on acquisitions ahead of its developer fest this month by hovering up data integration firm Sunopsis. The database giant said it would use Sunopsis’ to add even more spice to its Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings, citing the target firm’s Extract Load Transform technology and its support for a wide variety of heterogeneous systems.

I recently received a letter from a computer pro who's nearing 80. He's disgusted by "how [Microsoft] things have developed, and how most software is put out there full of errors and omissions. Help is virtually none existent. One really has to dig to find answers."

The announcement last year that Apple was moving to Intel-based hardware might have seemed like a fatal blow to Terra Soft Solutions, a company best-known for the Yellow Dog Linux distro. However, Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft, says that the move may be a blessing in disguise. The company has moved on to bigger and better ventures -- including construction of the first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.

I don't make these things up. There really was a New New Internet conference held near Washington, DC, in September, and I went to it. (The conference organizers paid my travel expenses.) I listened dutifully to a number of keynotes and networked with some of the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, wanna-be entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists who seemed to make up the bulk of the attendees. I shot a bit of video, too, so you can get a couple of glimpses of what went on. But in the end, I was left with the question, "How much of this stuff is really all that new?"

What is the PHP scripting language? Why is it so popular? How does it work? How can I start using it? What's the latest version? These are all questions that the newbie Web professional (and others) ask, especially as PHP becomes the de facto standard rivaling ASP and JSP.

The fight for free access to information, especially educational, is an age-old battle. But with the open source software revolution, various online projects have been established to help people access free educational information.

Much is written about network security. There are many classes of product that have been developed to manage network access and to inspect traffic in order to identify anomalous behaviour.

With the job market constantly going up and down these days, a lot of IT pros have toyed with the idea of building a PC repair business, but they really loathe the idea of being at the butt-end of the stick when the next big Windows virus hits.

Translate.org.za has released a new South African keyboard that caters for all of the 11 official languages spoken in South Africa including support for previously ignored characters for languages such as Venda, Northern Sotho and Tswana.

Listen Up!...to the latest audio program on the site - What's Happening in the World of Databases.

Creative Commons South Africa, the local arm of the global alternative licensing movement, last week released an updated set of licences. Version 2.5 of the licences allow the author or rightsholder to specify with more detail how they wish their work to be attributed.

While many experts say phishers will continue to stay one step ahead of even advanced preventive measures, some security companies are developing new ways to keep the public informed about fraudulent Web sites and cut down on scams.

IPTV Firm Amino, which makes linux and Java powered set-top boxes and an interesting Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was represented at the show by one of the local distributors.

A company founded out of the Shuttleworth Foundation schools Linux project has started rolling out computer laboratories to schools in South Africa's North-West Province and plans to equip all maths and science-focused Dinaledi schools in the province with computer labs in 2007.

Ever feel like you're not getting the most out of your multiprocessor machine? The xjobs utility allows you to schedule several processes to run simultaneously to make the most of your system's resources.

When Thomas Andrews sent out a call to the Cape Town Linux Linux User Group to self-raise funds for a Futurex Cape Town 2006 stand last week, the community responded with vigour, donating R10 000 in the first day.

As an ardent C++ developer, I’m often traumatized by the amount of potentially useful software infrastructure that simply doesn't exist. When working in Java there are multitudes of frameworks and reusable libraries that allow many problems to be solved at high levels of abstraction without reference to the underlying technology. So why are there so many things the C++ developer must do by hand, which a Java developer can do by reusing existing code?

Linux or open source seems to thrive wherever Left governments rule. And as Kerala schools log Microsoft out and boot open source systems, Linux world is buzzing with excitement over possibilities in the communist-ruled states. Though West Bengal and Tripura have to go whole hog to adopt a free software model, ideological closeness is more than evident.

There’s no shortage of open source programmers out there. According to a recent study of 5,000 developers by research firm IDC, 71% say they have used open source software, and half reported that use of open source is increasing within their organisations.