Showing all newswire headlines

Many Windows users ask the same questions over and over again. Here are the true to life answers to those questions.

Snowl came out of conversations in the Mozilla community starting in 2007 about how to improve messaging on the Internet," Mozilla developer Myk Melez told InternetNews.com. "Its goal is to find ways to help users track and participate in conversations wherever they happen, not just on social networks."

I didn't want to write this column. I live as Windows-free an existence as most people can these days. Of course I have to run Windows as part of my job, in order to make sure that Samba, the software I write, will interoperate correctly with all the multiple Windows versions out there. I also have to install some Windows applications using the Open Source Wine project, which emulates Windows on Linux well enough that some binary Windows applications will install and run straight off the DvD. Like most people, there are some Windows applications I just can't do without, although in this case it's my three year old son who finds an amazing amount of joy in his toddler games, none of which have yet been ported to Linux. Wine works amazingly well these days for this sort of thing, well enough that my wife no longer complains about the computer "being hard to use".

[What part of (W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator - WINE, do people not get? Call me a stickler but if its not an emulator, then why do we let people get away with saying it is? - Scott]

Andrew Shebanow didn't imagine that asking for feedback about how Palm's app store should work would open up a flood of input. He also didn't expect the move would change his job description. But now both have happened. On Jan. 8, Shebanow, who is working on a third-party application distribution system for Palm's new operating system, posted an item on his blog looking for input from developers on how that system should work. He threw out a few questions, such as: how should application updating and installation work; should Palm offer payment processing or leave it to third parties; should application trials be available; and how should Palm handle featured applications.

Fear not the command line! Akkana Peck reveals one of the great secrets of the Linux command line, and that is you don't have to be a great typist--there are plenty of fast shortcuts and help for everyone. Many of them are easy to remember, like CTRL+U for Undo, and CTRL+W for "erase last Word." Come on inside to learn more.

ITTIA announced the availability of its DB-SQL lightweight, Linux-compatible SQL R-DBMS (relational database management system) for Freescale's ARM-based i.MX family of system-on-chips (SoCs). DB-SQL can support embedded-systems database functionality on i.MX-based devices including PDAs, portable media players, and industrial measurement systems, says the company.

IBM announced today that it will increase the number of technical inventions it makes freely available to others by 50 per cent, and seek less patent protection for its inventions, in an effort to stimulate worldwide innovation and economic growth. The company successfully filed 4,186 US patents in 2008, more than any organisation has achieved before, according to the IT giant. "IBM's leadership in the strategic use of intellectual property is based on balancing proprietary and open innovation," said IBM director of research John Kelly.

Google has its own alternative to Twitter, Jaiku, which it acquired in October of 2007. It hasn't gone far on its own, but Google has just announced that it will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase and will open source it.

Cloud-computing platform vendor Joyent said Wednesday it is buying startup Reasonably Smart, a maker of a "direct, open-source competitor" to Google's App Engine framework for quickly building and deploying Web applications that run on Google's infrastructure. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Like Amazon Web Services and others, the Quebec-based Joyent sells scalable computing infrastructure. Reasonably Smart's toolset will provide its customers with a "write-once/scale forever" Web application framework, according to a statement

Marketcetera, the leader in open source platforms for automated trading, today announced general availability of the new Marketcetera Automated Trading Platform. This first production-ready release of the most popular open source trading platform for traders, hedge fund managers and broker/dealers offers new features that include robust complex event processing (CEP) capabilities and enhanced strategy development for faster testing and deployment of algorithms.

The economic crisis has hit the worldwide PC industry hard in the fourth quarter of 2008, causing it to suffer its worst growth rate since 2002. The normally high growth market of Asia has seen its worst result on record, while the US PC market nose dived in the final quarter of the year, according to a new report.

There are important lessons for open source in the Nortel bankruptcy, some good and some bad. First, phone companies are liars. That’s a good fact to know.

Although Eeebuntu is meant for Eee PC netbooks, it runs fine on the Acer Aspire One & Gary Rennie published a great tutorial on how to run it from a SD Card.

SugarCRM is a webbased CRM solution written in PHP. SugarCRM is available in different flavours called "Editions" ("Community" (free), "Professional", and "Enterprise"). In this tutorial I will describe the installation of the free Community Edition on Ubuntu 8.10. With the modules My Portal, Calendar, Activities, Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases, Bugtracker, Documents and Email, SugarCRM Community Edition offers everything that can be expected from a CRM solution.

He has gone from dead to having cancer to suffering from hormone problems in the space of a few short weeks, now the Apple CEO is taking six months off work to recover. So just how sick is Steve Jobs?

At this year's CES show, there was no shortage of netbooks, which have become a surprisingly strong challenge to the whole traditional notebook market. I remain surprised that more people in the open source community don't herald this trend as extremely positive for Linux, because Linux is making its way onto millions of netbooks and pre-loaded open source applications arrive with them.

[Yes they can come pre-loaded with Linux. But I know how many were actually running Linux at CES, one.- Scott]

More proof open source is infiltrating (and redefining) the IT channel: Red Hat’s partner network now exceeds 1,300 companies — up 84 percent from 713 companies in January 2008, The VAR Guy has learned.

The Linux Community is having an on-again off-again love affair with Dell. It's been a rocky affair since Dell decided it would bump the positive side of their ledger by offering the Linux Operating System on their products. There have been some embarrassing public displays of affection and there have been equally public spats, with a few pots and pans thrown... So it goes with passionate couples. A word of advice is always welcome though and I might offer one of the afore-mentioned parties a bit of it now... Duck.

Ubuntu Podcast Episode #17 covers the Ubuntu article in the NY Times, 2008 "Best of" by Linux Format magazine, EXT4 in Ubuntu 9.04, new ARM notebooks, and much more.

Since the moment I purchased my MacBook, I’ve sworn it was the best computer I’ve ever owned. It’s light, durable, elegant, the screen is bright and crisp, the built-in iLife software works brilliantly, and OS 10.5 is stable and fast. What’s not to like, right? Well, there’s this recession going on. I consider myself very lucky to have a couple of decent-paying jobs (tech director and blogger) and to have been able to spend some serious money on hardware and software upgrades in our schools before the economy completely tanked. It’s very clear, with guidance from the state and an Obama stimulus package with unclear benefits to schools (just how do we get on the list for retooling to meet 21st Century needs?) that for at least the next two years, we need to make every dollar stretch.