Showing all newswire headlines

What gives you a firewall, load-balancing, QoS, 3G support, RADIUS, wireless access point, HTTP proxy, VPN, VLAN, PPPoE, captive portal, and a host of other useful security, authentication, and network applications, all in a hundred megabytes? Zeroshell, the built-from-scratch Linux network appliance.

In a report on enterprise open source usage released this week, Gartner research director Laurie Wurster stated in rather strong language that companies could face a big intellectual property issue because they are using the software without understanding the IP implications of the licensing language. But is she exaggerating the danger and is there less complexity with open source licenses than with proprietary ones?

C Cod is a front end to your C, C++, or Objective-C compiler that lets you treat C more like a scripting language. C Cod comes with C Server Pages, which provides support for CGI so you can write Web applications in C or C++ and have them automatically compiled on demand.

If you thought the RIAA had cornered the market on heavy-handed, misguided lawsuits, think again. TorrentFreak reports that the Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) plan on pursuing a lawsuit against three US-based companies that develop P2P applications. Vuze, Limewire, and Shareaza are the applications targeted in the lawsuit. There is a fourth company named that's not a developer, or a P2P site -- it's a repository.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to set up ProFTPd with TLS on an Ubuntu 8.10 server.

It might be time to invest in a better umbrella, as over the last few days it seems as though pigs might be taking flight. It's not so much that Adobe is releasing a 64-bit Linux alpha version of Flash, it's that Adobe is releasing the Flash alpha for Linux before it releases versions for any other operating system.

The Dell IdeaStorm site was an inspired move by the company, providing a way for the market to tell a major supplier what to do, rather than the reverse, which has been the default for the whole Industrial Age. When the site first went up, it sustained what we might call an Insistence on Service Attack by Linux and open-source geeks. Since then, however, the pressure hasn't let up. At the time of this writing (on September 10, 2008 for the print magazine), the same kind of demand is there.

When I wrote the first addendum it was with a sense of disappointment, because I had to inform the readers that my assumptions were in error. That is, it was not possible to activate the update notifier for an unprivileged users [1.]. However, I had promised to pursue the issue on Canonical's Launchpad site by reporting my problems. Surprisingly, I am here now to report the success of that approach.

Alex Brown, in ODF – OASIS and JTC 1 Get It Together, refers to those like me, who have been vocal in our disapproval of ISO’s handling of office-document standards, as the “tinfoil brigade” with a “crazed oppositional narrative”. He even provides an illustration of the use of a shiny silver fashion statement. Is this fair? It should be noted that Alex is not alone. Back in July, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, one of the most balanced and thorough thinkers I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, noted with displeasure that some factions in the OOXML argument took positions that were not only passionately emotional but veered into the ad hominem.

In an exclusive interview, Stallman discusses his views on free versus proprietary and open source software, social networking sites and privacy issues.

Linux and Active Directory? It doesn't have to be a bad thing but tread carefully into that dark realm.

Yes, this sounds every bit as ridiculous to me as it probably does you. The Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France, or SPPF -- France's analogue to the RIAA -- is preparing to file suit not only against the makers of various P2P sharing apps, but SourceForge.net, which provides code hosting for many such projects. All together, now, in your best Stupefied Bill Maher Voice: What!?

That blur you saw at the edges of your vision just now? That would be the Internet continuing to move at light speed to your cell phone and other mobile devices. So Adobe's argument is, how can anything move that fast without Flash? The company is staging its MAX 2008 conference in San Francisco this week.

Today Sun announced StarOffice 9, their commercial office suite based on OpenOffice. Read the review to find out how good it is.

Everywhere you turn there are "brain training" games that claim to help you "lower your brain age" or "boost your brain power" and other such marketing hyperbole. Much like saying a certain breakfast cereal is "more satisfying" than other cereals, these claims are basically meaningless. As fun as they may be to play, brain training games have one fundamental flaw: the improvements you see the more you perform the exercises are not evidence of your brain becoming better, smarter, or faster. Instead, the improvements are the same sorts of improvements that you will see in almost any task: the more you practice, the better you get at it. You haven't gotten any smarter, you've just learned how to perform the task at hand faster and more efficiently which translates into a better score.

The UHM College of Education, in a joint project with Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation (HOSEF) and Pan-Pacific Distance Learning Association (PPDLA), has constructed a “new again” computer lab for Maili Elementary School. In cooperation with these organizations, the college raised funds to build the lab, using computers which were originally designated as eWaste. “What really made the project unique is that the computers were destined for the scrap pile,” said Dr. Paul McKimmy, Director of Technology and Distance Programs in the COE.

In 2005, when Slumberland faced end-of-lifecycle replacements of its proprietary Unix platform, its warehouse management system (WMS) vendor suggested a move to Red Hat Linux and commodity x86 servers. Seth Mitchell, the infrastructure team manager at the large furniture retailer, gladly agreed. Upper management wasn't quite as quick to jump on the open source bandwagon, but once the cost savings started rolling in, everyone agreed that it was a profitable decision.

When Microsoft announced it was planning to offer lightweight, web-based versions of some of its Office components, there was some speculation that maybe it could be used with alternate browsers. It seemed Firefox would be a likely candidate beyond IE, and some ventured to wonder about Safari.

KDE used to be a very nice desktop environment for Linux, I remember using it over the years in CentOS, Fedora Core, Kubuntu, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS. I used KDE 3.5.x in Kubuntu and thought it was the best desktop environment available for the Linux operating system. But what would a new Linux user feel about Linux if KDE 4 were the first environment they attempted to run?

Neither Ubuntu nor any other brand of Linux is ever going to make it as a mainstream desktop operating system. Listen to a roar of protests from some of the millions of Linux desktop users around the world. Very loud they are but in the scheme of things their numbers are tiny - they are a tinority.