Showing all newswire headlines

Industry titans Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are getting rave reviews this week about innovative new approaches to Internet search and communications, respectively. Even Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak told a reporter that Microsoft's new Bing search engine looks "astounding" and that he's "a big fan, now." There's much to like. In a nutshell, Bing does more to surface information you're probably looking for than Google does. For example, if you search for a company, one of the top results will present links to customer service, store locator -- that kind of information.

How difficult or easy is it to obtain one of the much-touted "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licences for Microsoft patents that are part of a technology like Mono? Judging by the frequency with which references are made to such licences by those who back Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza's bid to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment, it's surprising that no-one has ever ventured to test this claim.

Today I’d like to take a quick look at a distribution still in the early stages of development, but one that in my opinion, holds massive potential. That distribution is Chakra Project and it’s based on Arch Linux, which I reviewed not too long ago. The idea to create a liveCD displaying the virtues of Arch and KDEmod is a noble one. I tried out alpha 2 this week to see how they were getting on…

The FBI has confirmed reports that it was forced to shut down it's external unclassified email network "as a precautionary measure" following the discovery of a virus infection. Wonder if it was a Windows system, bet it was!

SourceForge Inc., which runs projects like the SourceForge.net open source software site and the Slashdot news site, is taking over the Ohloh open source directory.

The best thing anyone can do to continue making the Internet more closed, restrictive, and prohibiting is to use Adobe Flash as it exists today. The Internet was created to allow for the open and unconfined infrastructure to share information; yet, it is being used today for the opposite purpose: to stop this information torrent.

Novell reported Thursday that its Linux Platform revenue climbed 25 percent year over year in the midst of one of the worst recessions in history. Talk about Linux swimming against the economic current.... Novell's problem is that outside its Linux Platform and Identity Management businesses, which both grew, its other lines of business stumbled -- Workgroup was down 14 percent, while Systems and Resource Management dropped 2 percent.

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, will help the company gain some search share against Google and has features that users will find helpful, but it is in no way a quick fix for the company's poor position in the search market, analysts said. As expected, on Thursday Microsoft revealed a rebranded and expanded search engine, which it's promoting as a "decision engine" aimed at helping people better organize search information and find what they're looking for more quickly. The news came after months of speculation about what Microsoft would call its next iteration of Live Search and what new features it would have.

If you're not on a flat-rate ISP data-plan, and your ISP made you pay extra last month such as myself. You might be interested in monitoring your total home bandwidth usage. A nifty little feature of most routers or ADSL modems, is support for SNMP. In this blog I will be writing a Windows batch file and using net-snmp tools on Windows to poll the ADSL router for SNMP usage data, then a python script will post-process the data to generate a total monthly usage report. The same python script and snmpget command can be used on Linux and other platforms

Svartalf, a member of the Phoronix Forums and developer for Linux Game Publishing, recently asked our readers on the forums to provide a wish-list of games they wished to see ported to Linux. There ended up being an outpouring of interested Linux gamers with more than 1,120 replies! Svartalf shared that "[the] effort that actually did much more than I'd hoped for" and "as it stands, we've got one on contract (stalled though...) and one complete game as a result of this thread."

Linux, as a standalone operating system, is much more secure than most operating system. Anything though that works with the Internet is vulnerable to attacks on the Internet infrastructure. Recently, though, attacks against the DNS (Domain Name System), the Internet's address system, have become more common. To help secure your connection to the Internet, Fedora now includes DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) by default. Since I use Fedora, and its relatives RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and CentOS for some of my Internet servers, I really appreciate this added level of security.

Bizarre Linux Pictures from strange foreign lands.

NComputing announced a partnership with the United Nations to bring 1,000 Linux-based NComputing desktops to schools in developing countries, says the company. NComputing also announced that several electric utilities in the U.S. and Canada have qualified its "one-Watt" devices for purchase rebates and rate discounts.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, January 2009 (Issue 28) is available to download. You can find it at the PCLOS Magazine website. If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list .

From the 'better late than never' files: Fedora Linux 11 was originally scheduled to be out this week (May 26th), but that got bumped to June 2nd and now is being pushed back another week to June 9th. Fedora staffer Jesse Keating noted that there was a late bug discovered in anaconda storage that is triggering the push back.

A few days ago I downloaded a video file (.flv) from a website. I wanted to convert the video from .flv to .avi (I know it’s not a free format, but I needed to). I searched over the Internet and found out about FFmpeg. FFmpeg is a command line tool used to convert multimedia files between formats. Not only it converts video files but it also converts audio files.

Pure, unadulterated FOSS is, of course, free to distribute as one pleases. What happens, though, when a private company grabs a piece of FOSS, adds a little of its own secret sauce to the mix, and creates a new application? How free is the software then? The answer depends in part on the license under which the original application operated and what exactly you want to do with the newly created software.

It appears that great minds think alike (or in the case of open-source software and the close-ties between Google and Mozilla, share-alike). Within a week of each other both Mozilla and Google have announced new initiatives to allow for extensions to their browsers to be written using regular HTML / JavaScript and CSS, greatly lowering the bar for developers to join in. Strap on your Mozilla Jetpack and take a peek at extensions for Chrome.

The Eclipse Foundation has published the results of the global Eclipse Community Survey 2009 in The Open Source Developer ReportPDF. The Foundation held the survey from mid-April to mid-May in order to get developer feedback on the tools and software that they use. The organisation wanted to learn how the respondents used open source software and how they interacted with the Eclipse community. Nearly 1,500 participants took part in the Foundation poll, of which 27.8 per cent were from Germany, followed by 15.7 per cent from the United States. Only 0.6 per cent of participants were from the United Kingdom. Approximately 80 per cent of the respondents worked for companies that are not members of an open source consortium.

If you are interested in HPC clustering and don't know where to begin, you are in the right place. All to often HPC beginners jump right into building hardware without understanding the nuances of HPC clusters.