Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open...and Shut By Silicon Valley standards, Red Hat is a loser. It doesn't have an app store (though it once tried to create one). Its chief executive isn't a fresh-faced kid (though Jim Whitehurst doesn't look much older than 20). And its headquarters isn't in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, but rather in the comparative backwoods of North Carolina.…

Some people love Facebook, others hate it, and many have a little of both. It can be a great way to keep in contact with old friends and relatives, but it’s also a great way for third parties to harvest loads of free data that may not be used the way you want. Plenty of social sites have popped up over the years in the hopes of dethroning Facebook, but not many have had the goods, or really provided much that would entice a user to switch.

The promise of HTML5's <video> tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora.

Seems like everybody's running Ubuntu these days. It's become the default Linux distribution. I run it myself on several machines. But it's not perfect for everything. Linux is all about choice, and if you want something besides a standard system bogged down with all the bells and whistles, there are lots of choices.

You love tinkering with your computer. You've tried Ubuntu and Fedora, and they're good, but you feel something is not quite right. Maybe you don't like all those daemons loading on boot, or maybe you want to build your Linux desktop stack just how you want it? Perhaps you're completely new to Linux and want to learn exactly what makes a Linux workstation tick? It's time for you to try Arch Linux. Arch Linux is often called the binary Gentoo&emdash;an appropriate description. Arch gives you a full but simple command-line base to build on, but unlike Gentoo, Arch uses i686 or x86_64 optimized binary packages instead of source code.

Microsoft is embracing open-source on the web, offering a development kit that targets non-techie programmers. The company has released WebMatrix, a set for tools and templates for use with open-source PHP apps like WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, and Umbraco in addition to open-sourced .NET code. Nearly 40 open-source application partners are supporting WebMatrix, Microsoft said, with templates stored in an online Web Applications Gallery from Microsoft. The Gallery also provides links to more than 30 hosting partners for your finished sites.

We first looked at Linux Mint Debian Edition when it was released in September of last year. Just before Christmas, the Mint team released a new spin of the Debian Edition with features from Linux Mint 10 that’s better than ever.

From the user's side, that is. From the side of a whole world full of people who will eventually determine whether Linux has a future as a viable home/office alternative to Windows. If they don't, it may be destined never to rise above the magical 1% of do-it-yourselfers adventurous and persistent enough to study it, work at it, and ultimately learn to use it. Blessed are they who labor at Linux, for they shall be called geeks.

NCR announced two all-in-one POS (point of sale) systems that run Novell's SUSE Linux for Point of Service. The RealPOS 25 and RealPOS 50 include integral touchscreen displays and can be placed on a counter, pole, bracket, or wall.

Google has announced that it will be removing the support for H.264 video from the Chrome browser's <video> tag. "Our goal is to enable open innovation" said Google of the planned removal which will allow the company to focus exclusively on royalty free and open source based codecs. WebM and Theora video codecs will be left as the only HTML5 video codecs supported by Chrome, both of which Google consider consistent with "open web principles" because they are believed to be unencumbered by patents and require no licensing fees.

Like many people, I get almost all of my news online. To get it quickly and efficiently, I use a newsreader to skim the RSS or Atom feeds from sites (like LWN) that I find useful. Until recently, I'd been using Google Reader as the best option to manage and read my feeds — but after hearing about the Mutt of newsreaders, I decided to skim the open source options for news reading to see if I could make the switch.

The Linux Foundation announced its 2011 event schedule, plus a new open-invitation conference called LinuxCon Europe, scheduled for Oct. 26-28, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic. Meanwhile, the Linux.conf.au conference is still set to go off Jan. 24-29 in Brisbane, Australia -- despite expectations of historic flooding.

Cisco Systems unveiled a suite of Linux-based & Videoscape& IPTV hardware and software that blends TV and web content a la Google TV. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless plans to ship 4G LTE versions of Cisco's Android-based, enterprise-focused Cius tablet and Linux-based ISR routers.

Two and a half months after VLC core developer Rémi Denis-Courmont submitted an infringement of copyright complaint, Apple has removed the iOS version of VLC Media Player from its App Store. Apple is now reported to have told Applidium, the team responsible for porting the open source media player to iOS, that the application was removed because the dispute between the parties involved could not be amicably resolved.

We are excited to announce that ActiveState is the proud recipient of an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award! Komodo IDE has been named Best Python IDE, coming out on top against nine other Python IDEs tested. Komodo specifically got top points for ease of installation, documentation and ease of use--things that we pride ourselves on as well.

Recently, there has been some discussion about a 1000 core processor or as I like to call them many-core processors. Indeed, a research group has proclaimed they have created a 1000 core processor using an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Such discussions and research stunts are good as they generate ideas, discussions and set milestones, or in this case Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs). The reality of a 1000 core processor, however, is going to take a huge fundamental (and probably painful) change in the way computing is done.

If you're looking to setup video surveillance, Linux can help! ZoneMinder is the most popular open source video surveillance server. It runs on any Linux distribution and supports USB and network cameras. Remote pan/tilt/zoom controls are even supported. It features a web-based GUI and mobile phone access for configuring, viewing, and replaying video feeds. It supports multiple users and user access levels, along with several different languages.

The price of hardware has reached a point where extra drives (or single, massive drives) is not an issue for desktop users. But when you have multiple users using a single machine, keeping their usage down is imperative. The last thing you want is to find yourself with a full partition. One way to guard against this is to enable per-user quotas.

For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel's new processors.

There are two kinds of Linux users in the world – those who use Gnome and those who dislike KDE. You can't blame them – to call KDE releases so far a disaster would be something of an understatement – but the tide has now turned.Over 16,000 bug fixes and 1,700 new features later, the KDE developer unveiled KDE 4.5. The release has started popping up in many Linux distros, and it looks and feels stunning.