Showing all newswire headlines

Microsoft is adopting technology from EMC's RSA security division for Windows to police data and prevent loss and theft of information. The companies announced Thursday Microsoft will license RSA's data loss prevention (DLP) engine for future versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and "similar" products. Microsoft would not be drawn on whether the DLP engine will be built into Office or the forthcoming Windows 7. Office would be logical move given it features the Outlook client used by Exchange and is where potentially sensitive documents can be created in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Wow, the competition among open source browsers is getting so heated that you have to stay on top of the day-to-day goings on with the pre-release versions. We've written before about Google Chrome winning speed tests, and I keep hearing people cite it as the fastest browser. Meanwhile, CNet has been posting speed results showing very strong performance from the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (it is indeed snappy). Now, there are some new performance results out that show the nightly builds of Webkit--the open source rendering engine within Safari and Chrome--posting the fastest performance of all.

Boxee announced today that it has added Netflix video downloads -- including the ability to browse Netflix’s media library from within Boxee -- to its A/V media center platform for Linux, Mac, and (soon) Windows PCs. This Boxee enhancement also marks the first time Netflix instant downloads will be available to users of desktop PCs running Linux.

Novell's latest quarterly results, released Dec. 4, offer good news and bad news for the open source movement, according to The VAR Guy.

The Internet is full of software and hardware forums, tips, tricks, and howtos from all kinds of people. It is a wonderful thing that there are so many generous users sharing what they have learned. Chances are you'll find better information from these outside sources than on the official project sites. Naturally the quality is pretty uneven because it's people from all walks of life contributing-- young, old, non-native language speakers, and so forth. Nobody expects Nobel-winning literary excellence, but there are a few simple techniques for writing better documentation that anyone can learn.

Imagine being able to charge cell phones just by shaking them....Basically, M2E makes use of the Faraday principle which states that a "moving magnet could induce an electrical current in a wire coil," to quote what's written in the M2E web site. The charger has a chamber equipped with a wire coil. Now, when the charger is moved, a magnet moves through the coil creating the energy. M2E, however, tweaked the technology so that even "subtle micro-motions" are translated into energy.

[I found this through Groklaw and after reading it I am left asking the same question PJ did; "Could this work for the OLPC XO, so kids don't have to rely on electricity to recharge batteries?" - Scott]

Developed in co-operation with Microsoft and released as open source, the OpenXML Document Viewer extension for Firefox translates Word 2007 documents saved in the Open XML format into HTML for direct display in the web browser. While fonts, formatting, images, tables, hyperlinks and diagrams can be converted, the original layout does not necessarily get preserved, as some technical elements might not translate into HTML code. The plug-in is still in its early development and currently only works with Firefox 3 for Windows and Linux. A Mac version and a plug-in for Opera are to follow by mid 2009. Surprisingly, there is currently no mention of an add-on for Internet Explorer.

Paul Ferrill takes us on a tour of Novell's Open Enterprise Server, which is built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). OES has all the bells and whistles that modern network admins require: cross-platform interoperability, domain services, user management, migration assistance, Web-based management, and more.

Today IBM announced that it has teamed with Canonical and Virtual Bridges to offer a Linux-based virtual desktop computing environment. With this product, IBM hopes to emphasize and increase adoption of its Lotus collaboration software, as well as promote the use of Linux (Canonical's Ubuntu) by way of Virtual Bridges' VERDE desktop virtualization platform.

One of the top executives at SugarCRM has moved on to join Pentaho, where he's now building the open source BI company's partner program. Here's the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

IBM announced the availability of a "Microsoft alternative" virtual desktop that uses virtualization technology from Virtual Bridges and incorporates Canonical's Ubuntu Linux and IBM's Lotus applications. Based on Virtual Bridges's Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment (VERDE), the desktop environment is far more affordable than running Microsoft desktops, claims IBM.

Ubuntu has once again opened up a call for submissions to anyone interested in being a part of the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. If you're a musician, artist, photographer, or all-around creative genius and would like to enter your work in the current competition, you've got until February 9, 2009 to submit something to the judges.

In a long-term project, the OpenOffice team wants to thoroughly rework the free office software's user interface. This was already widely expected to happen with version 3.0, which no longer looks contemporary in many users' eyes. In addition, the office suite's menus have become so cluttered and badly structured that users find it impossible to locate certain functions – a problem Microsoft addressed with the ribbon feature in Office 2007. Ribbons have replaced the classic menus of Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint in the latest Office, and will come to Paint and Wordpad in Windows 7.

Sun Microsystems, it is generally felt, lost the desktop to Microsoft a long time ago. Aware of this, Sun in recent years evangelized mobile as Java's habitat - mobile is, after all, where Microsoft's at its weakest. It's with great ceremony, then, that Sun's marking the fact it comprehensively missed that JavaFX Mobile deadline by returning to the desktop with the scheduled launch today of JavaFX Desktop 1.0 - now just JavaFX 1.0. Linux, meanwhile, is the new Java for mobile it seems. Linux looks set to grow in the mobile space, with ABI Research last year predicting there'd be more than 127 million devices using Linux by 2012, up from 8.1 million in 2007.

Bouncing along the bottom of a recession is not where most people think of doing long term planning. But open source doesn’t think first about money, so the Open World Forum has taken a long, hard look into the deep future of the year 2020. (I will be 64 when that year opens, hence the headline.)

The FTP team at the Debian project have decided that the Affero GPL version 3 licensing (AGPLv3) is consistent enough with the guidelines of the Linux distro that software with the licensing can go into Debian's main archive.

There is no doubt that people are leaving Windows, many going to the Mac and some are turning to Linux. This is partly due in part to dissatisfaction with Vista. The reason isn’t important. What is happening to the Linux community is. We see that Windows users are having an impact on the Linux community that we may not have anticipated. Windows users aren’t used to choice. For them the array of choices that Linux presents is confusing.

From the "it's not Linux, but it's got the same apps" files: Sun has rolled opensolaris 2008.11, loaded with open source applications that are well known to Linux distribution users

If you use GUI then you can right-click on the pictures and see properties. But can you see the image properties (or metadata) from command line interface? Yes! you can do that using identify command. Here is how.

There are a host of Linux certifications, such as the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Novell's Novell Linux Certified Engineer (NLCE), and the Linux Professional Institute's entry-level LPIC-1. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols looks for the answer to the question, How much help are they for turning your Linux expertise into a Linux job?