Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In many ways, Scott Widdowson is your typical electrical engineer. Most days, when the weather’s good, he bikes the 15 miles along the Ottawa River to his company’s offices in the west end of the Canadian capital. Once there, he settles in for a day of reading technical specifications, poring over computer textbooks, or prying apart consumer electronics — logic probe in one hand and a soldering iron in the other.

Google has announced it has completed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. The company began the acquisition process in August 2011, paying $12.5 billion for the mobile phone and tablet maker; with over 17,000 wireless related patents and 7,500 pending patents, Google's acquisition is widely believed to be about that patent portfolio.

If there's anything important in this competitive world, it's the ability to tell one's friends from one's enemies. We here in the Linux blogosphere tend to be pretty good at that, but recently a surprising turn of events left us befuddled. Namely: Mozilla's decision to leave Linux support out of the initial release of its upcoming Web Apps marketplace.

Have you ever found yourself scrolling endlessly around your phone's chronologically arranged photograph album -- called "Gallery" in Android -- looking for a photograph you've captured? If you can remember the specific place but not the date, then Scalado Album may be for you. I say "may be" because there are some downsides to using it over the stock "Gallery" app, which I'll get to.

There are nearly 4,000 different types of devices running Android, OpenSignalMaps has found. More than 1,300 of them have custom ROMs that tweak the android.build model. Android brands are almost as diverse as the models, OpenSignalMaps discovered. Further, the application programming interface level, meaning the Android version, has also become more fragmented over time.

Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet? Or would it, perhaps, end up sweeter? That, essentially, is the question at the heart of the forking process, which in turn is at the heart of a key situation today. Namely: Now that we have LibreOffice, do we still need OpenOffice as well? In the wake of Apache OpenOffice's new update, that's been the question du jour down at the Linux blogosphere's Punchy Penguin Cafe.

The Xfce 4 desktop offers a vast array of customization options that will leave your desktop looking nothing like the default. Take advantage of all the excellent graphical user interfaces offered for all of your options, settings, and preferences.

Miro is an aggregator and viewing app that does it all. It's a BitTorrent client and a fully-featured podcast catcher. It's handy at finding and downloading many types of online media. Its built-in HD video player handles a large variety of file types. Miro Guide helps you find content, and the app can help sync media on multiple computers. Miro seems to have a bit of an issue with Flash Player, though.

Murmurs about Google's supposed plans to launch its own tablet soon are growing to a roar. Source code from Google and Samsung indicate that a Nexus tablet is in the works, Slashgear reports. "It seems logical that it will be a Google Nexus device consistent with the Nexus smartphone, but the problem is there's nothing unique about the Nexus smartphone," suggested Andrew Eisner, director of community and content at Retrevo.

Making a Linux distribution is easy, and lots of people have done it and continue to do it. All you have to do is get the source code and integrate the pieces you like and slap your logo on it. Making a commercial Linux distribution that makes enough money to cultivate innovation and stability in the kernel is not so easy, however. Very few companies have done it, but Red Hat is one of them – and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) marks its 10th birthday today.

ViSolve Healthcare IT offers OpenEMR consulting, customization, implementation, training and support. OpenEMR is one of the most popular open source EMR/EHR that is ONC-ATB Ambulatory EHR 2011-2012 certified. ViSolve Healthcare IT team has extensive experience with OpenEMR. As a prominent member of OpenEMR Board, ViSolve team has contributed significantly towards Meaningful Use Compliance and helped attain ONC Certification successfully.

TrueCrypt is a fully open-source tool for encrypting data. That data can be on a completely encrypted hard drive, or just an encrypted image file. Thankfully, the encryption works the same regardless of your platform, so Windows and OS X users can share encrypted files between computers. We really like to use TrueCrypt in combination with Dropbox, another cross-platform tool, to protect our data in the cloud. Pictured here is the OS X version of TrueCrypt, mounting an encrypted image as a local hard drive. Whether you are storing sensitive data or Grandma's secret recipe, TrueCrypt can keep your data private, even if it's stored on someone else's server.

One of the more interesting technical sessions last week at the UDS-Q summit was concerning the Ubuntu 12.10 plans for a system compositor, which would be based upon Wayland. While I still view it as unlikely to happen in any meaningful way for Ubuntu 12.10, other developers have since expressed their views as well...

Life is never dull here in the world of technology, but some weeks it's hard to remember that this is actually the real world, and not some epic tale of the battle between good and evil. We've seen plenty of examples of good pulling ahead in the struggle in recent weeks, of course -- but there's never any shortage of dastardly deeds being committed, either.

LXer Feature: 13-May-2012

In the LXWR this week we have all kinds of FOSS news including our own Dr. Tony Young asking how long a piece of string is, Dell announces Linux laptop designed for devs, Microsoft wants to restrict access to its OS..I know, I wasn't surprised either. Dinotrac asks for some advice, Larry the Software Guy gives an apology, Carla Schroder asks where Linux innovates or imitates as well as a Ubuntu 12.04 review. Enjoy!

For those of you who don’t already know about FAUmachine (FAU), it’s a virtual machine that allows you to install full operating systems and run them as if they were independent computers. FAUmachine is similar to VirtualBox, QEMU, and other full virtualization technologies. It is a project sponsored by the Friedrich Alexander University Computer Science Department in Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg*). FAU is a computer simulator that is an independent virtual machine project. The CPU is based on the virtual CPU in QEMU.

A short while ago, an article appeared in Linux Journal implying Git was the be-all and end-all of source code revision control systems ("Git—Revision Control Perfected" by Henry Van Styn, August 2011). I would like to challenge that assumption and declare to the world that the real perfect version control system is here, and its name is Mercurial.

Keep Everything. Share Anything. When a company like Google uses a tagline that includes the words "share anything" for a Dropbox-like cloud file storage system, my immediate reaction is "with whom?" Google, after-all, is a company that's made its money delivering ads based on what it learns about our habits. There's been debate about this very question since Drive launched.

My jet lag is gone, I've finally come back to ground, and at last I can start to sort out my experiences at the 10th annual Linux Audio Conference, held this year at CCRMA, the Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California USA. It was the first time the event had been held in the States, and the organizers obviously intended to make a good impression. I'll cut to the spoiler right now to let you know that they succeeded, with honors.

Precise Pangolin is a big step up in many regards. The new Ubuntu OS is friendlier with legacy hardware. It's peppier and more responsive. I find it is far less sluggish on my older gear. It flies on my newest hardware. However, while its Unity interface has been improved somewhat, it's still too limited and too confining, at least for some experienced Linux users.