Showing all newswire headlines

Sometimes you stumble across a decent system, still working fine, but getting old. If the price is right, you might take it anyway. For most people in non-profit work, which is like running a business on a very poor budget, this is about the only way to get enough computers to get the job done. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an eMac running Panther. It cost almost nothing, so I took it.

Remember television? For most of its history, TV wasn't cable, satellite or YouTube. It was radio with low-res moving pictures. On the transmitting side it was an extension of radio, with transmitters on towers, mountains and high buildings, serving viewers with signals within a range limited by frequency and terrain. Like FM radio, TV was on VHF bands. In the U.S., channels 2-6 were spread from 54 to 88MHz (ending just below the FM band) and channels 7-13 ran from 174-216Mhz.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is now an ISO International Standard: ISO 32000-1. The change in status follows a decision by Adobe Systems, original developer and copyright owner of the format, to relinquish control to ISO. The move means that the ISO is now in charge of publishing the specifications for the current version (1.7) and for updating and developing future versions. Despite impressions that PDF has been a proprietary format owned by Adobe, PDF has long been an open standard. The move to have PDF declared an ISO standard reinforces the open status of PDF.

The contentious issue of software patents is rearing its head again, both in India and globally. The Indian Patent Office, for instance, invited companies and institutions to comment on its Draft Manual 2008 — Patent Practice & Procedure (software patents included) this April. The responses from companies are varied since they address the patents' issue across sectors. Of relevance here are those pertaining to software patents.

The VA Information Technology Connection 2008 (VA ITC) will take place from July 7-10 in National Harbor, Maryland. Come learn how Red Hat serves the government sector with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware suite. VA ITC 2008 highlights the establishment of a single Information Technology (IT) authority and the consolidation of multiple IT operational and development activities. This event supports the VA strategic initiative for IT and advances the realization of “One VA” from an IT perspective.

The sample bellow briefly demonstrates attaching SXDE ISO images to SNV_93 DomU as a block oriented device which could be mounted afterwards on /mnt folder at DomU to support Sun Studio 12 Express install on PV DomU via graphical interface provided by Sun Xvnc implementation.

Linspire Shareholders, When I left Linspire there were lots of assets in the company (computers, furniture, servers, trademarks, employees, and millions in cash), and virtually no liablities. What happened to these assets and cash? I have been contacted by several Linspire employees and shareholders, asking me what the Linspire asset sale to Xandros means. I put together this short video using "buckets" to try and explain what happened in very simple terms, based on what information was provided in the 3-paragraph "memorandum."

Just a day or so after Acer’s Aspire One goes on sale in Australia comes news that the Asus Eee PC 904 will shortly go on sale in the UK, muddying the waters over which is the best value ‘netbook’ to buy. Wow, yet another new Asus Eee PC? We know all about the Acer Aspire – an 8.9-inch model with 1024x600 screen, Intel Atom 1.6Ghz chip, 512MB memory and 8GB storage for Linux and 1.5GB memory and 120GB storage XP of memory, a keyboard that is 85% the size of a regular keyboard, USB ports, Wi-Fi, a webcam and more.

What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers. That statement may surprise you, since most people interested in computers have strong feelings about Microsoft. Businessmen and their tame politicians admire its success in building an empire over so many computer users.

They did it -- Mozilla now holds the world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, according to Jamie Panas, press and marketing assistant at Guinness World Records. Download Day 2008, designated by the Mozilla Foundation on June 17 in celebration of its 10th anniversary, saw the release of Firefox 3, the free Web browser for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. An intensive marketing campaign to set the first Guinness World Record of its kind, for the most software downloaded in one day, resulted in more than 8 million copies downloaded in one day, according to Mozilla.

Review of several KDE applications for listening and manipulating audio files, including Kid3, Amarok, soundKonverter.

After reading last three PolishLinux articles we are already familiar with DOS, and its emulator DOSBox. The time has come to make DOSBox communicate in a more user-friendly way. Here comes the GEM!

I found some evidence Google tried hard to protect user confidentiality, in some letters to the judge in the court docket of Viacom v. YouTube. After the Order [PDF; text here] issued, Google didn't give up, but is continuing even now by asking the court in a letter to reconsider the decision and let them redact personally identifiable data. They fought hard against Viacom's motion to compel [PDF]. And the evidence indicates to me that what happened was a kind of SCO-like maneuver on Viacom's part.

Looking at creation and display/monitoring commands for LVM on AIX. Part 1 of a 2 part post.

The Australian Federal Government is currently caught in a bind over an election promise to supply public schools with one computer per secondary school child, with the cost of deployment now looking to be much beyond what was budgeted. Both software and running costs, mainly electricity bills, are to blame. At least one state, New South Wales, is seeking more money from the Federal Government to deploy the PCs. Another state, Victoria, has accepted that these additional costs will have to be borne from state funds.

Sidux is a new Debian derivative that's still just a baby, born in January 2007. Sidux announced a brand-new release on June 26, Sidux 2008-02, so we're going to kick the tires and take it for a drive, and see what sets it apart from other children of Debian. Currently it offers a choice of the KDE or Fluxbox desktop, and it supports both 32-bit i686 and AMD64. There is also an XFCE variant. Before trying it out for yourself, be sure to read the Quick Start section in the excellent and exceptionally helpful Sidux manual before burning it to a CD.

It's time to get ornery again with the FCC. Fortunately, they're asking for it, by soliciting comment on this FCC rulemaking proposal for "Service Rules for Advanced Wireless Services in the 1915-1920 MHz, 1995-2000 MHz, 2020-2025 MHz and 2175-2180 MHz Bands. It's a chocolate-covered spider. The chocolate is cost. The rulemaking proposes making Internet access over that spectrum "free" — in the free-as-in-beer sense. Not the free-as-in-freedom sense. Especially not in the free-as-in-speech sense. And least of all in the free-as-in-markets sense.

"When in the Course of geeky events it becomes necessary for one project to fork..." beings the geek version of the Declaration of Independence.

This book came just in time...for my daughter, that is. She's a Graphic Arts major at a university in the Northwest and for some time, I've been trying to convince her to try working on a Mac. Please keep in mind, I'm not a Mac person. I do very well on my Ubuntu PCs, both at home and on the job, but I know that Macs are more or less the standard platform for the graphic design world. Fortunately for Jamie (my daughter), one of her uncles was willing to be generous and "donate" his MacBook to the cause (he was upgrading).

You may have seen some screenshots of the first alpha of Intrepid Ibex, but have you seen all the new features? Everything from a better Flash experience to encryption is part of the plan.