Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google responded to Microsoft's patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola over Android smartphones, saying the legal action "threatens innovation." Meanwhile, analysts speculate on the timing and target of the lawsuit, with one analyst calling it payback against Motorola for abandoning Windows Mobile, and another suggesting the lawsuit is covering fire for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 release.

Goldman Sachs is downgrading Microsoft from "buy" to "neutral," lowering its earnings estimates for the current fiscal year by 4 percent, and dropping its price target for the stock from $32 to $28. The reductions come in an extensive, strongly worded report on the Redmond company, released by the firm tonight. "We believe the intrinsic value of shares cannot be unlocked if the status quo remains, and we have increased caution near term on a more elongated PC refresh cycle, combined with the newer threat of notebook cannibalization from tablets, where Windows does not yet have a presence," write Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar and associates in the introduction to the report.

OpenOffice.org Draw is all about objects -- items inserted into a document, each of which can be edited independently. In fact, whether you insert a picture from a file or create an object selected from the primitives (basic shapes) in the Drawing toolbar, everything in Draw is a frame. Even text in Draw is an object, and behaves differently from ordinary text in Writer. For this reason, knowing the basics of objects is essential for all work in Draw. Learning more than the basics, however, can be next to impossible because of several ongoing problems.

On the back of the news that Microsoft (MSFT) is suing Motorola (MOT) for patent infringments related to Android, Steve Ballmer tells the Wall Street Journal that HTC is paying a license fee for its use of Android...and that other Android manufactures may be forced to do the same.

So you broke down and finally set up a Linux machine on your network. And this time it's not a server! You're running one of the more recent distributions (let's say either Ubuntu 10.04 or Fedora 13) with the GNOME desktop. Here's the thing: you need to allow other users, those using Microsoft Windows-based machines, to have access to specific directories on that Linux box. How do you do it?

LXer Feature: 04-Oct-2010

In this week's LXWR OpenOffice.org gets liberated, a nice review of Linux Mint, The GNU Project celebrates its 27th birthday, Jono Bacon talks about how Ubuntu gets built, a case for Linux in schools, Rad Hat's CEO makes it on Mad Money, Microsoft sues Motorola because of Android and a LXer Feature by our own Hans Kwint on the choices Windows and Linux users both have. Enjoy!

To put the Maverick Meerkat through its paces, I ran it on my reliable old laptop companion a Lenovo ThinkPad R61 This 2008 notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also tried it out on one of my usual desktop operating systems testbed PCs: a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

While GCC 4.5 has been around since this past April, if you are still living with GCC 4.4 for whatever reason (like being hit with a massive performance regression), you may be pleased to know that on this Sunday afternoon there is the GCC 4.4.5 release that's now available. GCC 4.4.5 was delayed a bit, but it's here and offers up bug-fixes but no major new features.

Love it or hate it, we all know Flash, but Microsoft’s equivalent, Silverlight, is a bit less well known. With Silverlight you can stream video and create animations, in fact you can even use it to create Windows sidebar widgets. However, in what may come as a bit of a shock, Microsoft Silverlight doesn’t play nice with Linux. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but true. To remedy this, the folks at the Mono project have created Moonlight – an open source implementation of Silverlight. If you find yourself wanting to access a Silverlight-only broadcast or game, but not wanting to install a second operating system for the privilege, we’ve got you covered.

Debian's "testing" distribution is where Debian developers prepare the next stable distribution. While this is still its main purpose, many users have adopted this version of Debian because it offers them a good trade-off between stability and freshness. But there are downsides to using the testing distribution, so the "Constantly Usable Testing" (CUT) project aims to reduce or eliminate those downsides.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Orlando for the Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" release, it looks like performance testing may finally be discussed at length by Canonical and the Ubuntu developers.

In my previous Dropbox article, I highlighted that Dropbox had released apps for the Android, iOS and Blackberry platforms. These enabled Dropbox users to access their data while on the move. However, the apps, especially the Android one, was very much in its infancy and there were a lot of basic functions that it lacked. Dropbox has recently updated its Android app and I thought it was a good time to review the app.

Google has expanded Android Market paid application support for developers to 29 countries, and boosted to 32 the number of countries where consumers can buy apps for their phones. The search giant has also replaced its Nexus One web store with Google Phone Gallery, a site where users may compare three Android handsets at a time.

Microsoft has filed suit against Motorola, alleging that the mobile phone maker's Android-based smartphones violate nine of the Redmond company's patents. Motorola promised to "vigorously defend" against the allegations, citing the strength of its own intellectual property portfolio.

[We all saw this coming from a thousand miles away.. - Scott]

One of the core statements Oliver Diedrich makes in his article The hype is over is that commercial open source software has outlived itself. According to the author, an important reason for this is that most of this software belongs to the "open core" category – products where only the software core is available under an open source licence, while other components which are equally important for professional environments are provided via classic proprietary licences

Dell's recently tipped seven-inch Android tablet will ship in a few weeks, going head to head with the new RIM PlayBook and a rumored seven-inch version of the Apple iPad, says an industry report. Meanwhile, Dell is also readying a 10-inch Android tablet for release next year, says the story.

Canonical is preparing to augment its Ubuntu One cloud synchronization service with a new music streaming feature that will enable users to stream songs to their mobile phone from their Ubuntu One cloud storage account. During the initial stages of beta testing, the streaming feature will offer compatibility with the MP3 file format and Android-based devices. Canonical plans to extend support to the iPhone and possibly other products at a later date.

Last December, we wrote about our immersive Google Earth environment, Liquid Galaxy: eight 55-inch LCD screens showing Google Earth in a unified, surround view. Since then, we’ve taken it to a lot of conferences, built Liquid Galaxies in Google offices all over the world and even put one in the Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif. We love watching people try it for the first time. Almost everybody wants to see their own house first; but then they start to explore, and we can never guess where they’ll choose to go next.

While many Linux gamers were looking forward to seeing the Primal Carnage game on Linux in the coming months, it looks like you may have to guess again, at least for a launch in tandem with the Microsoft Windows version. The developers have now switched from the Unigine Engine to using the latest Unreal Engine, which puts its Linux fate into question.

Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Dell, Intel, Facebook and Hewlett-Packard have all come out in support of Microsoft’s efforts to upend a patent infringement verdict that ordered the software giant to pay $290m in damages. Microsoft is hoping to convince the US Supreme Court to rethink how the country’s judicial system decides the validity of patents.