Showing all newswire headlines

Are you an Ubuntu developer/Launchpad member who had fate conspire against you, keeping you from the the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week at the clandestine Google Crittenden Campus in Mountain View?

Imagine that I proposed to you the following argument. I have (let's pretend) added up all the fuel consumed in the process of getting WidgetCo's widgets from the factory to consumers. There's all the gas burned by the trucks that bring the widgets from the factory to the retail store. And then there's the gas each consumer burns driving to and from the store for widgets. And having added up the costs of all this carbon, I discover that WidgetCo is paying only a tiny fraction of the total cost of the fuel consumed in the process of getting widgets from the factory to the homes of customers. Now suppose I claim that this is evidence of some form of outrageous unfairness—WidgetCo is somehow forcing you to subsidize their shipping costs! (The widgets, by the way, are free.)

At least someone out there cares that you can't find your page ;) For this post, I spent a bunch of time goofing around with Telnetting to port 80 to try and force the binary modes (-8, -L), and some combination of those and the "no-escape" clause (...I mean, flag ;) and encountered terrible frustration.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and value investment firm, Southeastern Asset Management, Inc., today announced that they have entered into an agreement to add two new independent members to Sun's Board of Directors. Southeastern is Sun's largest shareholder and currently holds approximately 162 million shares, or 22 percent, of Sun's common stock. Under the terms of the agreement, Sun will add two new independent directors to its Board. The appointments, to be approved by both companies, will occur as soon as reasonably practicable.

LXer Feature: 09-Dec-2008

A point by point response to an article on Hackingalert.com entitled "What Are The Issues With Open Source Linux?" that hit our newswire yesterday.

Install SugarCRM community edition in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Server. SugarCRM is a complete CRM system for businesses of all sizes. Core CRM functionality includes sales force automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, project management, calendaring, and more. It supports MySQL and MS SQL Server.

“Ka-chunk... ka-chunk... ka-chunk... tick... tick... tick... Ka-chunk... ka-chunk...” That's just not a sound you ever want to hear coming from a hard drive. It's the sound of a hard drive trying to move it's read/write heads into a position that they don't seem to want to go to or its trying to read a sector that just isn't there anymore. Of course, modern hard drives have come a long way and are amazingly reliable, but if you work with computers long enough, you're bound to have one fail on you.

I was moaning recently about the appalling sloppiness when it comes to viruses et al.: they are practically all for Windows, and yet nobody mentions this fact. Here are two more egregious examples.

[All USB drives for the entire U.S. Armed Services has been banned in trying to stop the agent.btz virus? Wow! - Scott]

The goals of the Obama administration are in tune with — but in some technical respects, ahead of — the technological times. Unless certain standards-related dependencies are promptly addressed, the timely achievement of the president-elect's innovation and technology policy will be jeopardized. Unfortunately, the government does not have the historical competency to address these dependencies. What, then, is the new administration to do?

Last week, Net Applications reported Microsoft's operating system share had fallen below the 90 percent mark on the 40,000 or so websites where it gathers its traffic statistics. InternetNews is reporting that Net Applications made another interesting, if puzzling, discovery.

Pentaho, the open source business intelligence company, is gearing up to recruit more channel partners and solutions providers, The VAR Guy has learned. Here's the scoop.

Want to build your own Linux distro? Here's how to do it quickly and easily. If you've always wanted to create your own Linux distribution (distro), like I have, now you can by using a tool that was originally developed to create Virtual Appliances. SUSE Studio (still currently in alpha) is a web-based tool that helps you create Linux Virtual Appliances and complete bootable distros on CD/DVDs or USB drives.

Since the dawn of the distribution, there have been ways to remaster, re-spin, and otherwise rework a Linux flavor into something slightly different -- something that could be replicated and installed across multiple machines. These remastering tools are usually distribution specific (I first tried my hand with this several years back with Knoppix and the Debian live-magic live image creator) and vary in how forgiving (and permissive) they are when new users get too enthusiastic in choosing packages to add and remove.

Just in time for the end-of-year shopping season, Google Inc. is offering an unlocked Android phone targeted at developers but available to anyone. While the phone might be attractive to consumers and developers in the U.S., its price in other countries is putting off even developers. The Android Dev Phone 1 can be used on any compatible network, unlike the G1, the first Android phone on the market, which works only on T-Mobile's networks in the U.S. and the U.K. Developers can load their own applications onto the phone for testing. Previously, developers had to buy the G1 and subscribe to T-Mobile plans if they wanted to test their applications on a phone before adding their software to the public Android Market.

The main difference between Linux and Windows is that Linux is open source and windows are closed source. So? Well, that means that only Microsoft is authorized to change any part of the code of the Windows operating system. While in Linux, anyone can change it. The other problem is that the Linux Operating System doesn't receive the same level of support as Windows does. That means that updates and security packages are released with each new version of the Operating System (OS), but not as periodic updates as in the case of Windows XP's Windows Update.

[Saying that this article is 'slanted' and full of 'inaccuracies' as I will call them, would be an understatement of galactic proportions. - Scott]

Easier file renaming with renameutils. Ever been faced with a collection of files that need renaming and nearly gone mad from trying to do it manually? Lots of typing mv, or lots of right click -> rename. Enter qmv, part of renameutils.

If you're involved in healthcare IT and also have a fondness for open source, there's a newly formed group at LinkedIn that you may want to know about. The OpenVista Health Information Technology (HIT) group is looking for healthcare professionals who use the popular electronic medical record system and want to swap implementation and deployment ideas.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, December 8, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 35. Today's stories do not include a sad RIAA tale, but does talk about Google's open phone, an exploding open source cloud, yet another open cell phone OS, pay toilet Wi-Fi, Mandriva is either doing poorly or doing great, and how to fail your computing class.

This week's feature story takes a first look at VectorLinux 6.0 beta 2. Following up on last week's feature story about the impact of the global financial crisis on Linux distributions, Mandriva CEO Hervé Yahi responds to the community regarding the recent dismissals at the Paris-based distribution while Novell posts mixed sales results for SUSE Linux. In other news, Phoronix publishes the results of benchmark tests comparing the performance of the newly released OpenSolaris 2008.11 with the previous version, 2008.05, Ars Technica names Foresight Linux and openSUSE as its distributions of the year, and DragonFly BSD gets a closer look. Finally, we get progress updates on Linux Mint 6 and a preview release of Fedora-based Omega 10 Desktop.

Encryption is standard in a lot of applications these days, such as email, Web sites, VPNs, and wireless networking. There is a lot of snake oil and ineffective technology that lies in wait for the unwary; Paul Rubens gives a clear and understandable explanation of the power and benefits of Public Key Encryption (PKE), and why it revolutionized securing communications over untrusted networks.