Showing all newswire headlines

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Greenplum unveiled a data warehouse appliance built from open source software and general purpose systems. Powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and PostgreSQL, both the mature product of open source development, this breakthrough solution aims to deliver two orders of magnitude better price-performance over the competition.

When we first built our newsblog, existing blogging software was dumb and ugly. So we wrote our own blogware in Python, using Zope as the platform. It was beyond state-of-the-art. But blogging software grew up with lots of exciting features, while simply maintaining our custom-built platform became more and more painful for our guy with more important things to do. In the end, we gained a lot, and lost a little.

"Helping the Needy get Nerdy"

“The idea here is to bridge the digital divide,” says a zealous Cole Moeller, “to provide free access to all.” He’s been talking so much he’s completely ignored the veggie burger and fries sitting cold on his plate. “It will be a resource for and an integral part of the Missoula community.”

Five years ago, Tim Berners-Lee announced his vision of the Semantic Web. Now, the W3C has launched a new activity called the "Emotion Incubator Group," and its purpose is to take us beyond the narrow range of the emoticon to a Web that can incorporate information about emotions into Web pages.

The editors of popular Mac website ResExcellence have switched to Linux and made public their complaints about the Mac community. Judging by most comments posted by readers they are not making any friends.

Thanks to Anonymous Reader at Ed Foster's Gripelog for getting me started thinking on this storyline. This is one side of an actual conversation with Microsoft tech support, recorded 2-3 years from now.

Sabayon Linux is quite a new addition to the family of KDE distributions.

Network printing is a leading cause of high blood pressure and premature hair loss in our long-suffering network administrator demographic. Fortunately, the FOSS world, as usual, does its best to mitigate our suffering. Today you shall learn how to use CUPS and Samba together to set up automagic client printer installations.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about how Red Hat is working towards becoming the standard for the desktop market here in the U.S. In addition to that, I have just learned that Novell is working to front a full scale assault on Microsoft's Vista as they ready their own Linux distribution, SuSE 10.1 and that super-cool xgl feature based on OpenGL.

No; this time it’s no open letter from me, or from us. It is from Floris Kraak, and it was published in LWN.net here. For those of you who need an update about why binary & closed source (video) drivers are to be considered evil, read this - and please also follow the comments, like in the above article as well.

After the dotcom doldrums of the past five years, there is a new wind blowing through the world of commercial software. It's open source, but not as we know it. The first-generation start-ups like LinuxCare, TurboLinux and even Red Hat, were essentially service companies. Today, an increasingly-favored approach is to employ dual licensing to create two revenue streams: one based on providing services for free software and the other through traditional commercial licenses to products that are generally based on the free software version.

Back in the mid 70s, Saturday Night Live (SNL) arrived on late night TV with a radically different approach to live entertainment. The first few seasons represented a true experiment in network television, departing from the cookie-cutter prime time variety shows of the era and introducing a new brand of raw, energetic - and irreverent - comedy.
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In the past few years, a similar upstart has emerged to confront the mature, staid proprietary software market.
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New OS players are emerging, and software powers such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are making serious accommodations to the growing threat.

EDA Company Honored for Key Contributions to Open Source Parser for Liberty(TM) Library Format

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS), a world leader in semiconductor design software, announced that Electronic Tools Company (also known as E-Tools), a leader in EDA (Electronic Design Automation) data interchange tools and services, has received Synopsys' sixth annual Tenzing Norgay Interoperability Achievement Award for its key contributions to the parser for the open source Liberty(TM) library format. The Liberty parser developed by Electronic Tools Company is currently in use by over 50 EDA companies and 100 end-user companies.
[...]
Liberty, the de facto standard in the EDA industry, was amongst the first to use an open source model for standardization.

The latest, and perhaps most ambitious plan, is to take on Adobe and Microsoft in an attempt to create a new industry standard in the graphics and publishing tool market. Xara Xtreme is evolving from a relatively niche graphics product for Windows only, into a general purpose graphics and publishing tool for Mac and Linux. Xara has recently open-sourced their product as part of this plan to establish it as an industry standard on Linux. This is territory neither Microsoft nor Adobe dare to tread.

[A rarity: a fascinating press release, with historical context! -- grouch]

Savvy network managers have long known the best way to quickly address some pesky network problems is to scour Internet sites such as freshmeat.net and SourceForge.net for freeware applications.

[Freeware? -- grouch]

When someone mentions “open source” thoughts inevitably go to software like Linux. While products like Linux get the press thousands of hackers have quietly been building quite a respectable open source hardware presence. One such team of hackers are busily producing an ultra cheap, open source 3D prototyping machine.

[It's long, but interesting. -- grouch]

To tackle the privacy, business, societal, and technical issues surrounding personal health records - an integral part of the national debate on healthcare reform - 100 key leaders from industry, academia, medicine and government will team up October 10-11 for the first meeting on Personally Controlled Health Records Infrastructure (PCHRI 2006), hosted by the Harvard Medical School (HMS) Center for Biomedical Informatics.

Over the past few weeksSynSeer (the sponsoring company forMirrorMed) has been going back and forth with IBM regarding the newEclipse OHF project. This work started with the release theOHF bridge and has culminated in the integration of MirrorMed and Eclipse OHF.

Wind River says it supports Linux on a dual-core Freescale communications processor capable of SMP or AMP operation (symmetric or asymmetric multiprocessing). The company's Linux implementation for the MPC8641D is available with hardware and software tools, run-time environments, and middleware, including message-passing middleware based on TIPC (transparent interprocess communications), the company says.

With the launch of new Web-based services from two major online music subscription providers, Mac and Linux users can finally get in on the all-you-can-download action. But are these services any good?