Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Next Tuesday at OSCON in Portland, I'll be giving a 3.5 hour tutorial titledOpen Source Clue Training: How to Market to People Who Hate Marketing.As I prepare for that, I thought I'd share some of the curriculum I've come up with. I'm looking for constructive feedback, suggestions and Stories From the Real World that might be useful to the tutorial. Here we go...

OTTAWA -- Day two of the eighth annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) was more technical than the first. Of the talks, the discussions on the effects of filesystem fragmentation, using Linux to bridge the digital divide, and using Linux on laptops particularly caught my attention, but Dave Jones' talk titled "Why Userspace Sucks" really stole the show.

Aged geeks should remember the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) well. The hacker group was particularly famous for its easy-to-use Back Orifice spyware trojan released in 1998, which was as good for corporate espionage as it was for humorous office pranks. So it's with some irony that CDC has released an open source client that secures your instant messenger communications over the Internet.

The Open Management Consortium, founded in May, is a grouping of small companies seeking to bring open-source business models to systems management, an area dominated by larger companies. Although it is still fledging, the organization is already in discussion with larger software providers to join the group and support it financially, said William Hurley, a co-founder of the consortium and chief technology officer of start-up Qlusters.

I have a column (/var/opinion) in an upcoming issue that deals with my struggles to get a MythTV system working. The column ends with a tease about yet another column on Linux standards. I don't want to spoil either, so I'll leave it at that. However, I have another beef about the way my MythTV system is shaping up, or more accurately, falling apart.

The events program and speaker list have been announced for the fall Embedded Systems Conference, set for Sept. 25-28 in Boston. The event will feature 160 exhibitors and 82 classes in eight tracks. A Linux/Open Source track features classes from well-known embedded Linux trainer/consultant Bill Gatliff.

For now, Internet service providers are prohibited from discriminating against connections to particular sites on the Internet: they are required to treat traffic to Google exactly the same as traffic to Yahoo! or MSN. This principle of equality is called "network neutrality." However, large telecommunication companies are lobbying congress to scrap the network neutrality rules that have been in place since the birth of the Internet. We don't have to look far to see why this is a bad idea.

[They are chomping at the bit to be able to block content from subscribers to then charge for access to it.- Scott]

LXer Feature: 22-Jul-2006

Lobby4Linux founder, Ken Starks (a.k.a., Helios) recently went to Washington to take the fight for freedom - whether it's software or media - to the hallowed halls of Congress. Now he faces an even greater battle - a battle for his very life.

Advances in technology have revolutionized the way people live, learn and work, but these benefits have not spread around the world evenly. A digital divide exists between communities in their access to computers, the Internet, and other technologies. The United Nations is aware of the importance of including technology development as part of a larger effort to bridge this global digital divide. This article looks at how various United Nations agencies use free and open source software to meet the goal of putting technology at the service of people around the world.

Linux users are flocking to the stay-connected, work-anywhere contemporary lifestyle. R Cubed's LS1250-L Linux laptop is just right for these active mobile professionals.

Fluffy Spider Technology (FST) will reportedly port its user interface technology to ERTOS, a micro-kernel based real-time Linux implementation likely to be used in Qualcomm mobile phones. FST's "FancyPants" UI technology has already been embedded in a multimedia-enabled mobile terminal used in New York City taxis

Behind the firewall: If your company is averse to openness and transparency and is unlikely to change, then this article is not going to interest you much. Unless, of course, you are considering a change of direction.

File permissions are usually confusing to newer Linux users. Most 'newbies' are not accustom to implementing file security because of thier DOS/Windows background. Why do we need file security? It is primarly needed to ensure data protection and privacy from other system users. In other cases, file security is needed to prevent 'normal users' (as opposed to system administrators) from changing configurations or accidently damaging a system.

World over, the benefits of the open source system are increasingly being acknowledged by the government sector. In India, Red Hat and Novell, the two major players in open source technology, confirmed the importance of its adoption in the government sector. In India, open source technology is fast gaining ground with the government in various fields like rural computerization, promotion of e-Governance, department intercommunication, etc.

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) version 1.2 was released last month, bursting with over 90 fabulous new features and improvements. Today we'll take a look at them and decide how fabulous they really are.

Closed source drivers for video cards have been a vexing problem for free software enthusiasts for some time. Open source drivers for most video cards exist, but fail to take full advantage of the cards' ability, leaving users with a choice between free and high performance. The good news is that the Open Graphics Project (OGP) is making progress toward a completely open video card. The bad news is that it will still be a while before free software enthusiasts will be able to use a completely open video card.

At the beginning of this month, what some claim is the first fully open source full length movie was released on the internet. Boy Who Never Slept written, directed, and starring Solomon Rothman and made for almost no money has now been viewed around 200,000 times. Every aspect of the movie is available online including: the raw footage, the finished product, the audio track, and script.

If you are scratching your head and asking "What's Ajax?", well, it's the new (really not so new) way of doing interactive web pages. It's how Google does Gmail, and more and more it's how a lot of web pages handle the need for smooth interaction with the public.

Will Woods, the new test lead for the Fedora Project, has only been in his position a few weeks, but already he has a clear goal in mind. Whenever Fedora is mentioned on Slashdot, he notes, "There's always someone who will comment that Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It's not true, and I want no one to have cause to say that ever again."

Linspire aims to take over the low-end desktop with its Linspire Five-0 Linux operating system. The San Diego-based company is taking a different approach to Linux by focusing on mimicking Microsoft Windows. Linspire looks to make links as easy as possible and boasts that its flavor of the open-source OS is the easiest to use. That could prove attractive to many system builders, which are always looking to differentiate their offerings from those of tier-one vendors.