Showing all newswire headlines

Sun Microsystems Inc, a hardware maker that Oracle Corp is buying for more than $7 billion, may have broken a U.S. law prohibiting companies from bribing foreign officials, Sun said in a regulatory filing on Friday. "We have identified potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the resolution of which could possibly have a material effect on our business," Sun said in a 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said Oracle was aware of the matter before it agreed to buy Sun.

The Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor MP, today announced a bold and substantive “ Teacher Laptop Initiative”. This is part of a critical strategy to take forward the objective of improving Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning. The initiative aims to ensure every teacher owns and uses a laptop, by providing them with a monthly allowance which will cover the purchase costs as well as the costs of connectivity. The details of the initiative are attached [PDF].

[They will buy you a laptop, as long as it has "XP or higher" on it - Scott]

A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.

A cool little screensaver I found online. A bit dated, but still very cool.

Digital storage is fragile. I'm sure this not news to you. If you have any computer files from the 1990s can you still read them? Are they on a readable medium? In a readable format? It is a chronic problem for businesses, but I think it's a more significant problem for normal, everyday people. Is the history of you and your family going to survive beyond the latest fad file format or storage widget?

They might be, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal becomes law. Although the idea of Microsoft paying billions of dollars might sound an appealing prospect, one knock-on consequence might be that open source coders would also be liable for any damage that errors in their software caused.

Transferring data off TiVo devices to watch them on laptops or desktops has often required expensive proprietary tools. Here are reviews of three free, Open Source tools that allow you to do this.

Huge under-utilization of virtualized servers is caused by inefficiency in migrating VMs across servers, to accommodate load spikes. As a result, an immense amount of wasted power and resultant carbon footprint and other ecological side-effects are created. A new software technique overcomes this

Android, Ubuntu, LiMo and Moblin have been battling it out in the Open Source mobile Operating system space for Mobile phones and Netbooks. Now, Novell has teamed up with Intel to push Moblin, instead of a version of OpenSuSE.

Coreboot.org released an almost-final 0.90 version of open source BIOS flashing firmware it says was nine years in the making. Flashrom offers Linux and UNIX users a BIOS flashing mechanism they can call their own, with support for 150 flash-chip families and 75 chipsets, Coreboot.org says. By its very nature, BIOS firmware is operating system-independent, since it loads before a computer's OS in order to identify, test, and initialize the device's processor, memory, graphics card, and peripherals. But, updating a BIOS to incorporate bug fixes and other improvements requires booting a computer into an operating system, then using the latter to run BIOS flashing software.

The release two weeks ago of WINE 1.1.20 brought some cleaner Direct3D code, but there really was not much to get overly excited about. The release of WINE 1.1.21, however, is different. With the release today of WINE 1.1.21, work is now underway in supporting Shader Model 4.0 in this open-source project atop Linux and other operating systems. Shader Model 4.0 is the shader language that is used by version 10 of Direct3D.

The saga of SCO v. Linux, known variously as SCO v. Novell, SCO v. IBM, SCO v. Everybody and their Mother, may be coming to a close. Yes, we know this comes as a shock — if anyone needs a moment to compose themselves, or, you know, dig out a case of Dom, we'll wait — but it may well happen faster than any of us ever expected.

Last month the US Election Technology Council (a trade association of US voting system manufacturers) released a white paper on open source and voting systems titled "Open Source - Understanding its application in the voting industry". The report came to the conclusion that the use of open source software for democratic elections is probably a bad thing - although the reasons given were less than convincing.

The night of May 7 a petition against Internet censorship hit the magic number of 50,000 signatures required for consideration by the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament.

MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), the efficient, open industry standard for video encoding, has made huge strides to become the industry leader in all areas – it plays on mobiles and MP3 players, it's used by HDTV and Blu-ray Discs, and cameras and HD camcorders record in it. H.264, currently the most efficient video compression algorithm, is also, since Adobe integrated the codec into its Flash Player, used for web videos and now Microsoft is also adding H.264 to Silverlight 3. Nevertheless, there is one important snag with H.264 – from 2011, license fees will be required from sites streaming video using this technology.

Intel & Novell today announced broad efforts to closely collaborate & encourage OEMs & ODMs to adopt Moblin, an optimized open source Linux software platform for enabling rich Internet experiences on Intel Atom processor-based netbooks & other mobile systems.

Eucalyptus is an Open Source project that allows users to create and manage 'Private Clouds', and is API-compatible with Amazon's EC2. The founding professor, Rich Wokski, recently launched a company, backed by $5.5M in venture capital. Here's why he did so.

University of California, Berkeley, officials said Friday that hackers infiltrated restricted computer databases, putting at risk health and other personal information on 160,000 students, alumni and others. The university said data include Social Security numbers, birth dates, health insurance information and some medical records dating back to 1999. Personal medical records — such as patient diagnoses, treatments and therapies — were not compromised, officials said. The databases also included personal information of parents, spouses and Mills College students who used or were eligible for Berkeley's health services.

Version 9.04 of the multi-platform XBMC Media Center is released. Codenamed Babylon, the software comes with massive and in part, impressive changes.

My choice has fallen on the Eclipse IDE, I know there are many good perl editors out there and I don't have any knowledge about which is the best choice for what job. I do know the choice of editor is very personal and there are even people who use vi as a Perl IDE. My main reason for using Eclipse is because I've read about it on a forum and many people seemed to like it (and it's free). It seems to be a bit of overkill to write my very simple pieces of code in a full fledged IDE and I know it has some downsides too.