Showing all newswire headlines

With so many North American's itching to get their hands on a OLPC $100 laptop, why not taunt the caged tigers with a little more meat. I found these videos from Christopher Blizzard's blog. Christopher helped develop the modified version of Fedora Core for the OLPC and Sugar GUI, so rest assured these videos of an OLPC XO running Doom are not fakes.

In an announcement that many would have expected to have been made over a year ago, Corel announced this morning that it will provide "open, view and edit support for ODF" - and for Office OpenXML (OOXML), the format submitted to Ecma for adoption, as well. The announcement states that the new functionality will be just a "first step towards a comprehensive set of functionality for both formats," but does not specify what actions might follow, or when.

Open source business process management vendor Intalio Inc announced it has donated its BPMN process modeler to the Eclipse Foundation, a move likely to accelerate commoditization of the business process modeler category. Intalio's news follows hot on the heels of Tibco's announcement earlier this month that it has made the latest version of its Eclipse-based Business Studio business process modeling tool available free of charge.

The KOffice team today released the first bug-fix release in their 1.6 series. Many bugs in Kexi and Krita as well as in most other components were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs. You can read more about it in the announcement, and the release notes. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and SUSE.

The "niceness" of a process is a numeric hint to the kernel about how the process should be treated in relation to other processes contending for the CPU. The strange name is derived from the fact that it determines how nice you are going to be to other users of the system. A high nice value means a low priority for your process: you are going to be nice. A low or negative value means high priority: you are not very nice. The range of allowable niceness values is -20 to +19.

I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.

When I asked my son why he had snatched my laptop instead of using the Windows PC, he replied without hesitation: "Because Linux is better."

It's not that you can't run WoW (World of Warcraft) on Linux. With the latest CrossOver Office beta, you can do exactly that. Indeed, Lynch found that running World of Warcraft "ran so well that I began to get distracted from writing this review and started to get sucked into the world of Azeroth. I kept playing and didn't even realize that I was running WoW in a window on my KDE desktop in PCLinuxOS."

Can the open source approach to software development promote transparency and remove FUD -- fear, uncertainty and doubt?

I've been seeing a lot of Eric Meyer lately...well, at least his books and other references. About a week and a half ago, I reviewed his book CSS Web Site Design: Hands-On Training (Peachpit Press). A few days later, during my review of Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition - New Riders), I noticed that he was credited as the technical editor of the book's first edition. When I picked up my copy of O'Reilly's "CSS: The Definitive Guide" and saw that Meyer was the author I thought, "This guy gets around".

Ninety-five percent of cable television subscribers watch The Weather Channel, and TWC's Weather.com Web site, which provides current local weather information to every city in the United States, draws more than 30 million visitors each month. TWC's customers are local cable television facilities and individual Web site users. To manage those customers effectively, TWC chose an open source customer relationship management (CRM) application called Centric.

Hoping to level the playing field with Microsoft SharePoint and perhaps make a little open source cheddar, Dutch software outfit O3 is releasing its O3Spaces back office suite for OpenOffice and StarOffice. While it is far from offering all of the features of SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, it is definitely something that that open source and hybrid Microsoft/open source shops should consider for document management.

While the vast majority of recent Mac modifications have dealt with the headless Mac Mini, the Toolman decided to go a different route with his gutted 17-inch Apple Studio Display. As with most mods, he simply had too many enticing parts lying around without a proper home, and chose to combine them using whatever it took, resulting in a Mac-ish clone at worst, and a sweet all-in-one computer at best.

The Asian Institute of Technology will soon be home to an open source centre of excellence for "Linux on the Desktop" following the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations University. This will be the first centre of excellence of its kind funded by the UNU outside of Greater China.

ARM is now the third most popular architecture among Debian Linux users who run "popularity-contest," a Debian utility that anonymously collects user system data. ARM rose from seventh to third in nine months, largely thanks to Linksys's NSLU2, says NSLU2-Linux project lead Rod Whitby.

According to Unisys experts, 2007 will be the year that open source software attains the architectural backing and distribution channels needed to gain acceptance from enterprise customers as a front-rank vehicle for deploying enterprise applications to drive business growth and innovation at a lower cost per transaction.

Chinese government-owned TEM (telecommunications equipment manufacturer) and handset vendor Datang Mobile has joined the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) and will participate in the Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI) to improve the Linux kernel for mobile phones. Datang markets 3G infrastructure equipment and handset designs in China and globally.

The stable Flash Player plugin for Linux is crusty old version 7 -- trailing more than two calendar years, two major revisions, and one corporate buyout behind the Windows and Mac offerings. But now Adobe has finally unveiled a beta release of Flash Player 9 for Linux. Was it worth the wait? And should you install it now, or hold off a little longer for the official, stable product instead?

The One Laptop Per Child project yesterday received its first shipment of the low-cost Linux laptops that are intended for children in emerging-economy nations, project member Chris Blizzard reports on his blog.

Nominations close at the end of November for the first South African E-Commerce Awards. Members of the public are invited to nominate their favourite South African e-commerce websites.