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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.
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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?

Lennart Poettering, developer of Avahi, discusses Ubuntu's "No Open Ports!" policy in his blog syndicated on Planet GNOME. That policy is supposed to create a more secure workstation after a default installation, but at the same time makes its usability and comfort for users go down considerably. Lennart questions the validity of the reasons behind that decision as far is Zeroconf/Avahi is concerned. Another blog, this time on www.kdedevelopers.org takes up that policy in relation to the crippling of CUPS's convenience features on a default Ubuntu installation and puts it into the nutshell "you can't use your system for printing, but at least it is super-secure".

SugarCRM is touting the first fruits of a technology relationship with Microsoft in the next version of its open source customer relationship management suite.The bitterest pill for some, though, is likely to be Sugar's plan for a distribution issued under Microsoft's Community License, part of Microsoft's pseudo open source Shared Source Initiative. SugarCRM is currently licensed under a modified version of the Mozilla license, called SugarCRM Public License (SPL).

For several years, Nero has manufactured one of the most popular CD/DVD burning suites for Windows. Now at version 2.1.0.1, NeroLINUX is the GNU/Linux equivalent of Nero Burning ROM, one of the main programs in the Nero suite. Like its Windows counterpart, NeroLINUX combines an easy-to-use interface with a variety of options. However, unlike the Windows version, it offers little, if anything, that is not available in comparable free software.

Sun Microsystems, and Greenplum recently 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.

Motorola's new flagship platform, SCPL will support slider, flip, candy bar, swivel, touchscreen and QWERTY keyboards. The first SCPL phone is called the MOTOFONE. In addition, Motorola will be abandoning the familiar operating system used on its feature phones, such as the RAZR, for a Linux- and Java-based solution.

These days, when one talks about free software, the first word that comes to mind is Linux—be it the kernel or a distribution based on it (which would then be a GNU/Linux operating system, and its flavour marked by a brand name: Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware...) At one time, there was another project worthy of note: BeOS. It wasn’t POSIX-compatible, but it was neat. But now, only free *NIX prevail... really?

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) continued yesterday with more tutorials, the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, the Open Source Awards, and Larry Wall's State of the Onion report.

A recent patch posted to the lkml contained the following description, "this patch adds an efi e820 memory mapping", in response to which Andrew Morton asked, "why?". Linus Torvalds offered his views on EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface beginning by describing it as "this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)".

Last week in Part 1 we changed a bale of passwords. Today we'll take two more important steps to lock down our Asterisk@Home server: make sure that all Web administration traffic is encrypted, and lock down OpenSSH more tightly.

Any user that was browsing with Internet Explorer and had not installed the latest Microsoft patches was vulnerable to this attack. In January, Microsoft released a patch that prevents WMF (Windows Metafile) files, so users that had installed the patch were safe. Browsers using Firefox version 1.5 or later are also protected from WMF files.

Using Linux and the HDAPS kernel drivers, you can access the embedded accelerometers on Lenovo ThinkPads, then process the accelerometer data to read specific sequences of "knocking" events -- literally rapping on the laptop case with your knuckles -- and run commands based on those knocks. Double tap to lock the screen, and knock in your secret code to unlock. You can also download and use article Perl scripts to customize your own knocking input environment.

In this episode: voice mail update (or lack thereof) and Ogg Vorbis RSS feed link; listener feedback; this week’s Listener Tip about the alias command; the legal and philosophical issues concerning proprietary video and audio codecs; a review of Linux video players, such as MPlayer, xine and gxine, VLC, Totem, and Kaffeine, Linux video editors, including Kino, Cinelerra, Avidemux, LiVES, and Diva, Linux DVD ripping/encoding applications, such as dvd::rip, acidrip, xdvdshrink, and k9copy, and DVD authoring applications, including QDVDAuthor and DVDStyler.