Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

According to the corporate cartels, so-called p2p 'pirates' are the scourge of the Net, "devastating" honest, hard-pressed the entertainment and software companies and forcing helpless support workers into hard times. However, David Choi and Arturo Perez have a somewhat different view, suggesting the phenonmenon of online piracy is a valuable source of innovation to the industries, as well as to entrepreneurs.

The diction and style tools put a GNU face on an old Unix feature. These tools read text input, either from a file or the standard input. diction checks the input at the sentence level, and marks wordy and trite phrases, cliches, and the like, while style works on the overall document, giving a summary of the writing style with a number of readability tests.

Live Linux CDs are popping up all over the place. Mainstream distributions like SimplyMepis let you try before you install, as does Ubuntu and Linspire. There are also specialized distributions like Knoppix and Dynebolic. One Gentoo Linux-based distribution, called Sectoo, might also warrant a "live" look.

MySQL is a significant atom of a LAMP server. This amazingly fast database system is synonymous with PHP applications. Understanding the potentially complex details of views, stored procedures, merge tables, clustering, to name a few, can give your organization a competitive advantage. Pro Mysql, written by Micheal Kruckenberg and Jay Pipes and published by Apress, is a highly detailed account of the more advanced features of MySQL 5.0.

Print-on-demand sites like Lulu allow you to create and publish your own book. If you're primarily a writer, you might be tempted to hire a professional designer to create a cover for your book. Before you do that, consider creating a simple yet elegant book cover using the open source Kooka scanning software and the Inkspace vector drawing application

One the face of it, it should be a simple thing to own what you create and to exchange it. In practice, it doesn’t work out so well. The game industry has been plagued by rising costs, missed deadlines. Some of the blame can be laid to competitive pressures drives developers to add more. Some of it, honestly, has been the result of a lack of discipline.

Alioth, another server of the Debian Project, has been broken into. Script kiddies made use of a hole in PmWiki, which has been known since the beginning of this week, to insert PHP code, thereby installing an IRC proxy.

Ever since the birth of the free software movement, its defenders have struggled to explain just what "free software" is. If it is free, how do coders eat? And how do businesses that support the software – IBM, Hewlett-Packard – make any money from it?

[Like I was saying in a thread about MS, what is the really imporant issue?, corporations making money. Even Lessig knows that. - Scott]

In July 2005, news emerged of Sun Microsystems' first foray into open source identity management with the Open Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project. Now, more than a year later, the project has been formally launched. Sun has kept to its word with OpenSSO and is releasing source code for the significant chunks of its Java System Access Manager required for web-based single sign-on, including session management, policy and federation as well as administration capabilities.

Geotagging is the association of geographic location information with an object. A geotag comprises three pieces of information: a name and longitude and latitude values. Once files are geotagged, they can be indexed and searched based on the geographic information they contain. Here's how you can tag your photos, documents and other files so you can search for place-related information on your PC using Google Earth.

It's those dratted legal expenses again, I think, although they are down a bit, but still in the millions this quarter. "Because of the unique and unpredictable nature of this litigation, the occurrence and timing of litigation-related expenses is difficult to predict, and will be difficult to predict in the future," they say in their press release.

Sun Microsystems is hoping to leverage the popularity of Red Hat's JBoss, with software making it easier to use NetBeans with the application.

We released etch d-i beta 3[1] a couple of weeks back. So far, things seem to be going generally OK in testing. Daily builds of business card and netinst images and weekly builds of full CD and DVD sets have since restarted, and we plan to continue with those.

AML is shipping two new portable data terminals based on embedded Linux. The basic M5900 and ruggedized M5900i for industrial applications target batch data collection applications, including inventory control, factory floor management, price verification, shipping/receiving, and asset tracking.

Code certification is a lightweight approach for formally demonstrating software quality. Its basic idea is to require code producers to provide formal proofs that their code satisfies certain quality properties. These proofs serve as certificates that can be checked independently. Since code certification uses the same underlying technology as program verification, it requires detailed annotations (e.g., loop invariants) to make the proofs possible. However, manually adding annotations to the code is time-consuming and error-prone.

The Linux VServer Project has completed a new stable version of its kernel patches. The project took the opportunity to combine its announcement of the new Version 2.0.2 -- the first release declared to be stable after some eight months of effort -- with a Wiki-based redesign of its website.

South Korea will try to tackle one of its lingering problems--a chaotic street and address system--through a new open-source project.

Opera Software will resell Adobe's Flash Player 7 SDK (software development kit) to customers of its Opera for Devices SDK. The agreement should simplify the licensing picture for Linux device designers interested in deploying a "full Internet" browser that supports Flash-based browsing, or Flash-based user interfaces, the companies say.

PyKota is a robust Linux-based open source print quota and print accounting system that runs via LDAP, MySQL, or PostgreSQL on the back end and CUPS and Samba on the front end. At our school, we have found it to be a powerful application capable of managing printers, users, groups, and accounting information using any currency.

It's 2007, and you want to upgrade all your PCs' operating systems after the infamous March 2007 XP Meltdown. You know, the virus attack that actually melted computers running XP, but couldn't touch machines running any other OS? Never heard of it? Well, play along with me, OK?