Showing headlines posted by dave

Society is better off when consumers have choices and when products compete with one another on the basis of functionality and price, and inventing is facilitated when inventors share their ideas. USENIX supports the right of programmers to choose whether to charge for their programs or to make them available for free, and we oppose any attempt to change the balance inherent in our intellectual property laws.

Magellan Technology of Sydney, Australia, is using embedded Linux to build advanced RFID tunnel readers capable of reading 50 words of data from 500 stacked tags in under one second. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, is intended as a work-saving replacement for bar-code scanning, and is expected to gain market traction in 2004, in part due to mandates for adoption set by Walmart, the US Department of Defense, and others.

As a result of some good feedback I received earlier this week from Mandrake Linux founder Gaël Duval, I have implemented some internationalization features into LXer. Click to read more.

When Joseph L. Guallar-Esteve was laid off from IBM in the summer of 2001, he thought it would take months to find another job in technology. After all, he had seen some of his friends remain unemployed for nearly a year before finding work. But Guallar-Esteve had an edge: He knew Linux. The free open-source software is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Microsoft's Windows for running large computer networks and desktop PCs. That surging demand is good news for technology workers familiar with Linux.

Taiwanese embedded software firm EzHomeTech is shipping a Linux implementation for inexpensive consumer-electronic devices based on Sigma Designs system-on-chip (SoC) processors. It is also offering an application stack that enables such devices to be used as low-cost PCs or notebooks costing less than $100.

The global spread of freely available Linux software is the biggest competitive threat to Microsoft Corp. and other developers that keep the inner workings of their programs under wraps, Red Hat Inc. Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said on Thursday.

Sun critics claim only making Java open source will guarantee its ubiquity and its power as a weapon against Microsoft, and this week IBM adopted the popular publicity tactic of the 'open letter', calling on Sun to open up the Java specifications.

The Board of Directors of Usenix, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, has followed up SCO's campaign of sending letters to US Congressmen urging them to speak out against the use of Free Software with a campaign of their own.

In response to an open letter from IBM asking Sun Microsystems Inc. to join the company in developing an open-source version of Java, Sun plans to meet with IBM to discuss the issue, Sun sources said.

...with the surging interest in Linux, combined with the new FreeBSD Unix foundation for Apple's Mac OS X operating system, dowdy text commands are seeing something of a renaissance.

With the server market's heavy pricing pressure, revenue growth has typically been far less than unit shipment growth--when any revenue growth could be found in the last three difficult years. But in Linux servers, revenue growth outpaced unit shipments, according to fourth-quarter figures from market research firm IDC.

Like any new company trying to break into a market with several established players, Pingtel has an uphill struggle. According to PBX analyst and regular BCR contributor Allan Sulkin, Pingtel has been battling companies such as Vertical, Altigen and Shoreline.

Somebody had to do it, and why not Nmap? By restricting SCO was redistributing GPL'ed code, Fyodor has taken a step applauded by many (your editor included), but also raised the question of Open Source(tm) complaince, and started what could become an interesting story to watch over the coming months.

[Look for updated from your distribution shortly.] "Metamail is an implementation of MIME, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, a proposed standard for multimedia mail on the Internet. Metamail implements MIME, and also implements extensibility and configuration via the "mailcap" mechanism described in an informational RFC that is a companion to the MIME document."

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew at 11.4% to $13.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2003, marking the third consecutive quarter of positive growth. Worldwide server unit shipments grew dramatically by 22%, compared with the year-ago period. A favorable exchange rate was one factor leading to the very strong quarterly results, but the market grew 3% without the effects of the currency exchange rate.

One of the best-known network security scanners will no longer be available with the SCO Group's products, with its developer saying he had terminated the company's rights to redistribute any version of the program with its products.

Black Adder is theKompany's Python IDE. However, this simple answer, while accurate, does not do Black Adder justice. Black Adder offers Python developers a convenient interface for managing python files, easily navigating classes, debugging python scripts, database connectivity via mxODBC, and, of course, creating GUIs in Python using pyQT and QT Designer. As an added bonus, it does all this on both Windows and Linux.

An integer overflow in brk() system call (do_brk() function) for Linux allows a local attacker to gain root privileges. Fixed upstream in Linux 2.4.23.

Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft Corp., appears to take delight in the troubles that Munich is having as it switches 14,000 city computers from Windows to a rival Linux operating system.

ByteEnable explains Hyper-Threading, runs some benchmarks and shows you how to get the most out of a Intel Pentium4 HT enabled processor upgrade.