Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This week IBM announced it would be supporting Oracle's OpenJDK. At first glance it seems like "Great!" Isn't it good that two big supporters of Java are getting behind a single open source project? Well, in my personal opinion, no. It is bad. Bad for Java. I'll try to explain why.

Akkana Peck completes her introductory series to CouchDB, one of the newfangled distributed "NoSQL" databases. In Part 2 we learn more fundamental ways to manage CouchDB with Python.

The Free Software Foundation has announced the initial criteria of the "Respects Your Freedom" hardware endorsement programme. Under the programme, the FSF will endorse products that comply with its conditions, which include; using only free software in all parts of the product, ensuring the software can be built using only free software tools and allowing user installation of modified software. The non-profit organisation is seeking to get feedback on these criteria and hopes to use the process to raise the interest of hardware manufacturers.

During OpenOffice.org's tenth anniversary, Oracle announced it will participate in ODF Plugfest, one of the conferences aimed at furthering the Open Document Format interoperability, held October 14 - 15 in Brussels . Oracle also stated they would continue developing, improving, and releasing OpenOffice.org as open source software.

While we already know that by the time KDE Software Compilation 4.7 rolls around it may optionally support OpenGL 3.0 within the KWin compositing manager, but with time KDE's Plasma may begin using more OpenGL too. Aaron Seigo has written a lengthy blog post about what he hopes to achieve with Plasma and its library going a few releases out into the future. This includes a rather extensive rework of Plasma and its drawing, which would include the use of more OpenGL to allow for greater hardware acceleration.

This week's entry looks at a unique new audio editor, some important updates, and a very cool programming environment for graphics (and much more). As always, some tasty treats are cooking in the Linux audio kitchen.

Over the last few years, it has become clear that one of the most pressing scalability problems faced by Linux is being driven by solid-state storage devices (SSDs). The rapid increase in performance offered by these devices cannot help but reveal any bottlenecks in the Linux filesystem and block layers. What has been less clear, at times, is what we are going to do about this problem. In his LinuxCon Japan talk, block maintainer Jens Axboe described some of the work that has been done to improve block layer scalability and offered a view of where things might go in the future.

With the arrival of Ubuntu 10.10, the list of reasons to try Linux for your business just got a little longer. The free and open source operating system is now more user-friendly than it's ever been before while still offering the many security and other advantages it has over its competitors. If you're among the legions of new Linux users out there, congratulations on making a smart move! Now that you're on your way to a lifetime of freedom from high costs, vendor lock-in, constant malware attacks, and the many other disadvantages associated with Windows and Mac OS X, you should be aware of some of the classic mistakes Linux newcomers sometimes make.

For those of you that have been wondering about the state of hybrid graphics support for notebooks running Linux, sadly the situation has yet to improve, which still puts it in shambles.

Today’s announcement that IBM is going to join forces and work with Oracle on OpenJDK is good news for Java, and by extension for Eclipse. All of us who live within the Java ecosystem need to recognize that this fundamentally strengthens the platform, enhances the business value of Java and offers the hope of an increased pace of innovation.

IBM has announced its intention to join the OpenJDK project, the official open source Java runtime effort that is led by Oracle. IBM's move to take a more active role in OpenJDK could end the company's commitment to Apache's Harmony project, and it should dissolve a long-standing stalemate that has hindered collaboration in the Java ecosystem.

Android is behind the second-quarter successes of HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, reports iSuppli. Meanwhile, global smartphone sales during the quarter reached 60.4 million units, up from 55.8 million units during the first quarter, representing a growth of 8.2 percent, says the research firm.

Last week, Miguel de Icaza, a vice-president at Novell, announced the release of version 2.8 of Mono, a project he set up to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment. De Icaza is extremely punctual in announcing these Mono releases. However, there is one release which he hasn't spoken about for more than a year - and which, I think, he would like everyone to forget about. The release that I'm referring to is something De Icaza promised on July 6 last year when Microsoft issued a clarification about the licensing of some portions of .NET - C# and the common language infrastructure, allowing developers to use both under the terms of its community promise.

Oracle sought to dispel any doubts about its commitment to OpenOffice.org on Wednesday, announcing its participation in the ODF Plugfest event in Brussels this week and talking up future development plans for the open source productivity suite. Programmers and testers at the vendor "will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community," Oracle said in a statement. The company welcomes community contributions to the code base, it adds.

The London Stock Exchange has completed the first “dress rehearsal”, a test with its customers online, of a new Linux-based system due to replace Microsoft-centric architecture. The Millennium Exchange system, based around Linux and Sun Solaris Unix, and using Oracle databases, will replace the Microsoft.Net-basedTradElect platform on the main stock exchange on 1 November, and is intended to be one of the fastest exchange systems in the world with trading times of 0.125 milliseconds. The exchange completed the switchover of its separate dark pool, or anonymous, trading platform Turquoise from different systems earlier this month.

At the Qt Developer Days in Munich, Germany, Sebastian Nyström (VP Application and Service Frameworks) and Lars Knoll (Qt's R&D Director), outlined the future development of Qt, the open source GUI framework. The feature most requested by customers is more performance and this is now a primary focus of development. With the in development Qt Scene Graph, the plan is to accelerate Qt by reducing the complexity of the graphics rendering pipeline from three stages to one, making full use of GPU acceleration where it is available. Another project, Lighthouse, offers similar hardware acceleration for developers who are creating embedded devices.

In previous posts, I have highlighted some of the outstanding new native Linux games that are coming out soon or have been out but may not be well known. For many Linux gamers, however, the pool of native Linux games is still too small. As most already know, it is possible to play some Windows games in Linux using Wine. Additionally, there are two prominent commercial spin-offs of Wine that are both designed specifically for gaming: Cedega and CrossOver Games. At one time, there was little difference between the three, other than the graphical configuration interfaces. But over time, each has developed its own feature set and, in some cases, support for Windows functionality that the others do not possess.

Acer announced a dual-boot Windows 7/Android netbook, featuring Intel's dual-core Atom D550 or single-core Atom N450 processors. The Acer Aspire One Happy offers a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, up to 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard disk drive (HDD), plus 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, Ethernet, three USB ports, and eight hours of battery life, says the company.

Despite respectable download numbers from AppWorld and other markets, BlackBerry applications have been a second class citizen for some time. Hiding beyond the ubiquitous email, calendar, and contacts, the application environment sits — often unknown and unseen.

In the Free Software ecosystem, nearly everybody has heard about KDE. People associate us with a great desktop environment and some interesting applications. On other desktops there may be installations of KDE software, but those people may not know a single KDE application. This is why Torsten Rahn and Bastian Holst went to INTERGEO this year to present Marble.