Showing all newswire headlines

The US Military is by turns cutting edge and clueless. On one hand, they embrace cloud computing and social media tools, yet think it's worthwhile to upgrade from Windows XP/Office 2003 to Vista/Office 2010 when Windows 7 and Office 2010 release are imminent (and it would make more sense to move large numbers of employees to Linux and OpenOffice and save the tax payers a few bucks). Like any large organization, they make good and bad decisions when it comes to technology.

It would appear that spam has managed to hit a new low by reaching a new high, and what a high: up 5.4 percent on the previous month to peak at representing some 90.4 percent of all email by volume. That really does suck elephants through a straw backwards, only 1 in every 10 emails not being some unwanted junk mailing. Sigh.

In part 1 ace coder Akkana Peck taught us how to use Python and PyGTK to bring up a window and draw lines and circles. Today we'll expand on that humble beginning and draw some pretty graphics.

At its I/O developer conference held in San Francisco this week, Google has presented a range of new products and promoted a web-based programming model as the future of software development. The new products include Google's Web Elements, which allow web developers to integrate Google products like Calendar, Maps, Custom Search or News into their web pages, simply by copying and pasting a few lines of code.

After nearly two years in the making, the KOffice project will release version 2.0.0 of if its cross-platform office suite of the same name this week, adding features like scripting support and a new shape library.

Many users keep their emails with webmail services, wedding pictures in photo communities and reading habits with social bookmarking services. What happens, though, when data is lost or websites fold? Archiveteam wants to help in those circumstances.

Specto is a Linux-based desktop application that allows you to watch for configurable events and get notified instantly when updates are available. Things that you can monitor include websites, emails, files/folders, system processes and connection ports.

If smooth-as-silk memory sharing and file caching bring joy to your heart, you know you're a Linux geek. And if you're a Linux geek, there's apparently no time like the summertime to indulge in the sheer pleasure of playing with cool stuff in the Linux universe. Some generous bloggers have tagged some of the shiniest treasures for us. What other gems are out there, friends? We'd love to know.

There are several ways to run Windows programs on Linux (virtualisation, WINE) and vice versa really isn't a problem either with Cygwin, or better yet, native ports thanks to the Windows variants of Gtk+ and Qt. Still, what if Windows support was built straight into the Linux kernel? Is something like that even possible? Sure it is, and the Chinese figured it'd be an interesting challenge, and called it the Linux Unified Kernel.

What does the U.N. and E.U. have in common with the World Bank and the European Central Bank? They want to exchange statistical data in an uncomplicated manner. Out of this need has grown the SDMX standard and its respective tools, as a case study by the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) information service has revealed.

PC/OS Developer Roberto J. Dohnert has announced the release of PC/OS 10 Open64 Workstation. The desktop distribution designed for 64-bit systems is based on Ubuntu 9.04 and includes all of the latest security and bug patches up to the 25th of May. All of the PC/OS editions, including OpenDesktop, OpenWorkstation and WebStation, utilise the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and focus on providing ease of use out-of-the-box.

Cobol, the venerable computer language so beloved of Y2K-fearing businesses, has hit 50 years young today, having been invented on the 28th of May 1959 at a meeting of the Sort Range Committee at the Pentagon. The news comes from Cobol specialists Micro Focus, who tell us that there are two hundred times as many Cobol transactions as there are Google searches ever day, and that here in the UK we're all using Cobol-powered applications a average of ten times daily.

With the Linux 2.6.30 kernel being prepped for release in early June, we have set out to provide a few benchmarks of this latest Linux kernel to see how it compares to its two earlier predecessors. While this new kernel may offer support for new file-systems (NILFS2, in particular), support for LZMA/BZIP2 kernel image compression, a new CPU architecture (Microblaze) and many other changes, are there any major performance regressions or improvements like we have spotted with our previous Linux kernel benchmarks?

This guide explains how you can set up an iSCSI target and an iSCSI initiator (client), both running Fedora 10. The iSCSI protocol is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows iSCSI initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) iSCSI target using normal ethernet cabling. To the iSCSI initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

The KOffice team is extremely pleased to finally announce version 2.0.0 of KOffice. This release marks the end of more than 3 years of work to port KOffice to Qt 4 and the KDE 4 libraries and, in some cases, totally rewrite the engine of the KOffice applications.

RedHat, one of the biggest contributor to open source and Linux, proved the world that the Open Souce service based model is profitable. RedHat introduces all the exiting new technologies in Fedora, the community driven distribution sponsored by RedHat.

Just five years ago, Vic Gundotra argued that web apps could never rival their desktop brethren. But that's when he worked for Microsoft. He works for Google now. And he sees things quite differently. In 2004, Gundotra and his Microsoft team - responsible for driving developers to Windows - pointed to an application called Keyhole as a prime example of the sort of desktop goodness that could never be duplicated on the web. Then Google bought Keyhole, a Windows app that stitched satellite photos into a pan-and-zoom-able virtual landscape, and just months later, it turned the app into a web service.

When you visit a Secure website in Firefox chances are that the FavIcon for the website is replaced with a Green bar with the details of the company. This is because of the default properties in Firefox to display detailed information of the website from the Extended Validation Certificate on the website. However, if the website doesn’t host a Extended Validation certificate then the website URL (link) in the address bar is not highlighted or in otherwords shows as a normal website URL.

Clement Lefebvre from the Mint development team has announced the release of Linux Mint 7 (code named Gloria). Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to be user friendly and provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and media codecs. The release is based on Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope), the 2.6.28 Linux Kernel, X.org 7.4 and GNOME 2.26.

This book is marketed to everyone who uses or wants to use twitter with an eye on being popular, either personally or professionally. I don't mean that in a frivolous way. Twitter has become an important tool for self-promotion of individuals and businesses. OK, I doubt that Bill Gates worries that the number of followers he has in any way affects Microsoft's profit margin (actually, I can't find the "real" Bill Gates on twitter, but there are a number of "parody" profiles with his name on them), however there are a number of "big bananas" on Twitter who tweet regularly for more than just a lark (if you'll pardon the "bird" metaphor).