Showing all newswire headlines

When ZDTV (later renamed TechTV, then G4TechTV and finally G4) first broadcasted its signal across the airwaves, I was intrigued by the ongoing enthusiasm that was expressed for a little operating system called Linux. Mention was made of the OS on The Screen Savers, Call for Help, and pretty much every other program on the network.

[Very strange editorial. One try with Red Hat, circa 1998, followed by one try with Mandrake "a few years later", and then this writer dismisses GNU/Linux as not worth the effort: "I haven't installed another distribution of Linux since that time [...]"!

As much as I dislike Microsoft Windows, and despise the consistently unethical behavior of Microsoft, I have at least given each version of MS Windows a chance to show me that it is not as untrustworthy and antagonistic to the user as the previous versions. In each mutation, MS Windows has become less trustworthy and more antagonistic toward the user, even as it became more filled with "features" and eye-candy.

If I followed this author's model, I would be rejecting MS Windows based on experience with MS Windows 3.0 and 3.11. Likewise, I could dismiss Apple based on the shortcomings of the Apple II and Lisa, compared to a commodity PC with Kanotix or SUSE or Debian GNU/Linux today. I just don't understand the purpose of the article. -- grouch]

As Mozilla prepares to release updates for its calendar applications Sunbird and Lightning, project developers are calling on the user community to participate in the final stages of testing. Mozilla has proclaimed today as Test Case Writing Day, and users worldwide are encouraged to participate.

Looking for the best way to get ready for the Linux Certification exam or just want to improve your Linux skills? With these top LPI exam prep tutorials you will be on your way. The topics, in order, include: Linux Kernal, System startup, Filesystem, Hardware configuration, Networking Configuration, Mail and News, Domain Name System, Web services, File and service sharing, Network client management, System maintenance, System security, System customization and automation, and Troubleshooting.

One thing most people are bad at is remembering things -- anniversaries, deadlines, schedules. Computers, on the other hand, are very good at tracking things -- so long as you have a way to tell them to do so. Remind, a GPLed calendar and alarm application from Roaring Penguin, is a good way to keep track of your appointments and commitments on your computer so you don't need to worry about keeping them in your head.

Health IT Strategist isreporting that a bill has been introduced to congress to unify the DOD and Veterans Affairs EMR/EHR software systems:'...Joseph Dal Molin - a director of the not-for-profitWorldVistA, which promotes the use of open source VistA software - said that if the DOD used VistA"[i]t would lower software costs for both organizations." He added that if the DOD adopted the VA's EHR architecture, both organizations would benefit from individual and joint development efforts...'

Free Software is often believed to only benefit developers. Of course, in reality every one of us is affected by our ability to use, enhance, and redistribute code. This story serves as a reminder that our entire infrastructure is growing more and more dependent on these abilities with each passing day.

his introductory article explores what it means to be a mashup, the different classes of popular mashups constructed today, and the enabling technologies that mashup developers leverage to create their applications. Additionally, you'll see many of the emerging technical and social challenges you face when you deep-dive into mashup development.

The second beta version of developer platform Mono 1.2, based on the open-source framework .NET, is out! The Mono project has two goals: it both makes running .NET-based applications on a Linux platform possible and provides developer tools with which developers using Linux workstations also become able to write .NET applications.

Your daughter has just been in a car crash. She falls unconscious on her way to the hospital, but not before she is able to tell the paramedics the name of her doctor. This is vitally important because the emergency room won’t know that she’s an insulin-dependent diabetic with a penicillin allergy, but her doctor will be able to give them her relevant medical history. Or, at least he would be if he’d renewed the tech support contract on his medical records software. He didn’t, though, and now his information—and your daughter’s—is locked away in a proprietary database he can’t access.

In addition, the core services in Leopard Server, including Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, Cyrus, iChat Server and QuickTime Streaming Server, are now 64-bit.

There are more than a handful of education-focused Linux distributions available for parents eager to get their kids up to speed with computing, but there aren't that many applications focused on younger children. One of the best though is GCompris.

FROM zero to 200 million downloads. That's the record that the Firefox browser has achieved since Version 1 was introduced in November 2004.

[...]
Last February, I listed a couple of useful extensions, including Fasterfox, which speeds up the retrieval of Web pages. Here are a few other favorites that I've added since then:

Red Hat Fedora release engineer Jesse Keating announced the release Aug. 7 of the second test version of Fedora Core 6, which is based on a 2.6.17 kernel and utilizes the GNOME desktop.

While Steve Jobs shows off the new Apple product lineup and Leopard OS at the developer conference this week, the company also quietly extends its open source arm by releasing a number of its products into the open source community including kernel sources for Intel-based Macs and the launch of Mac OS Forge.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in ext3 when handling an invalid inode number. This can be exploited by sending a specially crafted NFS request with a V2 procedure (e.g. V2_LOOKUP) that specifies an invalid inode number.

SOLUTION: Grant only trusted users access to affected systems.

Okay, maybe not the beach - if you're spending a couple of weeks sunning yourself abroad you might want a break from technology, even in paper form. But if you're on the lookout for some more weighty reading matter on where all this technology is leading (or just want to make your own robot), we've picked out 10 recent books worth checking out. No, not including the Long Tail one - that's got quite enough recommendations online already.

The developerWorks online trials program lets you try out Rational Application Developer features without downloading and installing it on your own system. Developers can quickly design, develop, analyze, test, profile and deploy high-quality Web, service-oriented architecture (SOA), Java, J2EE, and UML portal applications.

The easiest way to sound like a professional when you talk about photography these days is to grumble about the deficiencies of RAW file converters. The ability to save pictures in RAW format rather than JPEG or TIFF is what distinguishes a "pro level" camera from a consumer device. But rather than mentioning your camera's specs outright, the shrewd move is the heavy sigh followed by lamentations about your tireless search for the perfect software to properly manipulate your beautiful work. Let's take a look at how to do it using Linux and open source.

We liked this version of Ubuntu, with its very fast, new graphical installer based on the Live CD Faster system startup and login, simplified menu organization, graphical shutdown process, easy access to power management settings with GNOME Power Manager It also now includes GNOME 2.14.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2, X.org 7.0 and a plethora of included application choices, but there's still no VPN wizard, and playing DVDs should be simpler.

[The author describes the act of installing: "After clicking on the Install icon, I followed the prompts until the installation was complete." Sounds like a real nightmare, doesn't it? Seriously, the author presents a very good review, complete with screenshots and "warts". One of the "warts" the author points out, DVD playing, is a problem in the U.S. due to the lobbying of the movie cartel. -- grouch]