Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Earlier this year, Google introduced its Google Drive cloud storage service. Cloud storage is a model of networked on-line storage where data is stored in virtualized pools of storage that third parties generally host. Hosting companies operate large data centers, and people who require hosting buy or lease storage capacity from them. The data-center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to their customers' requirements and expose them as storage pools, which the customers themselves can use to store files or data objects. Physically, the resources may span across multiple servers.

The city of Munich has hit back at Microsoft in a row over whether the city's plan to use open-source software is cheaper than using Microsoft's products. The city is currently migrating 13,000 computers from Windows NT 4 and Microsoft Office 97 to a custom build of Ubuntu and OpenOffice as part of its 'LiMux' project. A further 2,000 computers will stay on Windows but are being switched to OpenOffice. The move began in 2004 and will be completed in the autumn of this year.

Ubuntu-driven smartphones will be available to customers in October 2013 according to the Wall Street Journal, which cites Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth from a presentation given in New York on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reports Shuttleworth as saying that the new phone operating system would be available in "two large geographical markets in October", but he wouldn't say where those markets were and declined to identify carrier or handset partners.

With LibreOffice 4.0, the Document Foundation has bumped the major version number of its office suite for the first time since the project split from the OpenOffice.org code base. This version increase is more of a cultural and symbolic change than it is an indicator of major new features. Nonetheless, LibreOffice 4.0 introduces a number of functional improvements and underlying polish to the open source office package that is worth a look.

The Calligra developers have released version 2.6 of their office suite for the KDE desktop and its mobile-focused Calligra Active version, which is QML-based. Calligra 2.6 is the first production version of the modular office package that includes Calligra Author, a writing and editing tool specifically for e-book creation. With Calligra Author, the developers hope to meet the needs of groups like novel authors who want to write long texts but do not need complicated formatting. The tool is also supposed to take into account the unique aspects of e-books.

The folks over at http://www.iheartubuntu.com recently put up a challenge to the Linux community to get Netflix to work natively under our beloved OS. Thankfully, Erich Hoover stepped up to the challenge and patched the Wine Project in a way to allow Firefox/Silverlight to be installed and actually work with Netflix's DRM'd Silverlight!

Some GNOME developers are planning to implement an app format that allows developers to provide their Linux programs in distribution-independent files that can be installed as easily as smartphone apps. A sandbox model is supposed to isolate the apps from each other, and from the rest of the system, in a way that goes further than the isolation in current Linux distributions. Various developers worked to conceptualise such "Linux apps" at the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest, which was held in the run-up to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels. At the hackfest, the GNOME developers also declared JavaScript as the de-facto standard for GNOME programming.

Wink, a software package for creating tutorial and presentation screen shots, works reasonably well when it works at all. However, getting it to run may not be worth the bother, given the better alternatives available. Wink's premise is a good one for anyone who needs to create a show-and-explain presentation on how to do things with a computer.

Fedora 18 was published a month ago and now it is available in versions for the ARM architectures known as ARMv5tel and ARMv7hl in the Linux space. The Fedora Project is providing pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3).

Berkholz, a long-time X.Org and Gentoo contributor and employee of RedMonk, also reiterated facts about the X.Org Foundation not being accepted to the Google Summer of Code project last year and other shortcomings. His development statistics on X.Org slowing down in the past few years incorporates not only code activity but also mailing list messages, contributor count, and other metrics.

If you ever find yourself in a situation in which your computer doesn’t start, and you’ve already tried the “Last Known Good Configuration” option and it doesn’t work, what else can you do? SystemDiscs has a solution that might actually take you away from your frustrations with an automatic repair application called Easy Recovery Essentials (EasyRE, in short). This is a great software that allows you to repair your Windows and backup your files even if you can’t boot into Windows, and we have a giveaway too. Read on for more detail.

MapBox has launched an alpha version of the new web-based map editor for the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project. The new editor is called the iD editor and is built using JavaScript and the D3.js data visualisation library. Development was funded as part of a grant by the Knight Foundation, announced in September, to develop new tools for the OpenStreetMap project. iD will eventually replace the OpenStreetMap project's current editor, Potlatch 2. In contrast to its predecessor, iD does not depend on Flash to run. The new editor was developed in conjunction with Richard Fairhurst, the original author of Potlatch 2.

Awesome Window Manager offers three simple themes for users that need a change. Here you can get a brief look at the default themes, along with instructions to sample them for yourself. Although style choices may be limited, this is one of the most efficient window managers available.

Recently, I’ve been frustrated... sad... angry. Just over a year ago, a friend and fellow member of the free culture community, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, committed suicide. He was 22. Just one week ago, an acquaintance, a friend of many close friends, and—really—a role model, just one year older than myself and networked with many institutions and individuals I have come to work with and/or admire (such as MIT, the Berkman Center, the EFF, Creative Commons; frankly, there are too many individual people to list) committed suicide. Aaron Swartz was admired for his bravery to stand up for his ideals, and the work he put into the world demonstrated no less than exactly those ideals. I followed his actions with awe and complete understanding.

Groovy is one of the most-interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There's the conundrum.

Six years after the launch of the IcedTea project, developer Andrew John Hughes feels that it's time to take stock. Questions were previously raised over the role of the project, which aims to make it possible to use OpenJDK using only free software build tools for GNU/Linux platforms, when OpenJDK 7 was released.

You just think that's a Chromebook beckoning you with an open source OS, easier upgradeability and fast connections to the cloud. All those qualities could make it a Linux netbook in disguise -- or at least what the netbooks of a few years ago promised before they all started selling preloaded with Windows. The key? More manufacturers buying into the flexibility of the Linux kernel in the Chrome OS.

The transaction will be financed through a combination of cash and equity contributed by Mr. Dell, cash funded by investment funds affiliated with Silver Lake, cash invested by MSD Capital, L.P., a $2 billion loan from Microsoft, rollover of existing debt, as well as debt financing that has been committed by BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse and RBC Capital Markets (in alphabetical order), and cash on hand. There is no financing condition.

Developers at Google and Mozilla have demonstrated interoperability between their implementations of WebRTC, allowing them to make video calls without plug-ins. WebRTC is being developed within the W3C and IETF communities as a future standard for HTML5-capable browsers to allow them to create HD video quality connections, between servers and browsers or between browser peers, without resorting to third-party or non-standard plugins. Two different web browsers being able to communicate using WebRTC is a significant milestone in that standard's development. Using the current Chrome 25 Beta and a recent Firefox Nightly, Todd Simpson, Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and Hugh Finnan, Google's Director of Product Management were able to video chat from their respective browsers.

The ApacheCon NA 2013 conference is coming up. The event takes place 24 February - 2 March 2013, at the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers, in Portland Oregon. Registration for the event is now open, and you can find more about the conference, and registration here. In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2013, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from influencers in the Apache community. The first in the series ran here. In this second post in the series, Patrick McGarry (shown), a community manager for Inktank, the consulting services company that helps users to learn and deploy Ceph, discusses open source and disruption.