Showing all newswire headlines

Many CIOs are now implementing Linux and open source software as policy within their organizations, a sign of how deeply those technologies have penetrated the enterprise, analysts say.

Microsoft Internet Explorer has substantially lost ground in recent months to Firefox within the APCMag.com user community. A whopping 37% of users are now browsing with Firefox. Another six per cent use Apple Safari.

As you may recall from my last entry, I exchanged my cable box from a Scientific Atlanta 8000HD to a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD. The latter, new box continues to output a signal from the cable connection even if I have it in HDTV mode. It probably also continues to output AVI and S-Video. This finally opened up a way for me to use my cable box with a MythTV box.Thanks to a serious (and mysterious) spinal injury (I say mysterious because I haven't figured out how I did the damage), I can only work on the project for a half hour at a time, at most. I have discovered some interesting things in those short segments.

Mozilla has long relied on its community to help it identify bugs within applications. Now it has another ally in the fight against bugs. Internetnews.com has learned that Mozilla will announce that it is using Coverity's source code analysis software, which extends beyond the confines of Coverity's Department of Homeland Security grant to improve open source software code quality.

One of the principal advantages of Emacs over competing editors is how flexible and customizable it is. In fact, in several other "Emacs tips" columns, you may find references to customizing your setup. It's a big topic, so this is a quick start guide to the fundamentals: the .emacs file and basic customization techniques.

Sensitive information that only certain people need to have web access to must be secured. If sensitive or proprietary information is located on your web site and you do not want public access to this information, you must password it. An obscure file name with no links to it anywhere on the site will not keep the information secure. Security through obscurity does not work.

Lenovo recently made headlines by adding Linux as a pre-installed OS option on its top-of-range T60p. Now, InterVideo has revealed that InstantON, its Linux-based quick-booting media-player environment, is shipping in a lightweight Lenovo notebook. InstantON offers immediate access to media functions, before Windows boots.

The association founded in May is responsible for establishing an Innovation Center for Young Companies developing Linux-based or open source-based software in the Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg. The Innovation Center located in Maxtorhof offers young companies an attractive welcome package. This includes the first three months rent-free, a very attractive rent and the use of a joint infrastructure equipped to a high technical standard.

What are some of the hottest trends in the Linux/open source market today? Avid activity among some resellers, abundant virtualization, and a growing tendency to mixed open source/proprietary deployments, according to a trio of top industry analysts, who helped to preview LinuxWorld San Francisco.

Aspiration and Blue Oxen Associates is hosting "FLOSS Usability Sprint II: Extreme Usability" on August 22-24, 2005 at 1366 Mission in San Francisco, California.

Julian Seward, father of the the famous Valgrind, an opensource tool for debugging and profiling your applications, won this years Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for "Best Toolmaker". This years ceremony was the second of the annual event. Congratulations, Julian! In other news, Valgrind 3.2 has been released. The two most notable changes are huge speed and memory gains in Memcheck (up to 30% faster) and the addition of the popular Cachegrind. Additionally, the valgrind-based profiler frontend KCacheGrind is available as a seperate package.

Software development for new architectures can be an intimidating prospect, but the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell BE) SDK 1.1 provides the debugging tools you need to tackle it for the Cell BE architecture. This article describes how to use new versions of the GNU Debugger (GDB) to diagnose problems in both PPU and SPU programs.

Medical Manager has been sold again! ApparentlySage hasagreed to purchase Emdeons"Practice Services" for $565 million in cash Practice Services includes both Medical Manager and Intergy. This is of course very good news for the mm2mm project and MirrorMed. Which have sucessfully positioned themselves as an Open Source Medical Manager alternative.

Using PHP with IBM's DB2 universal databaseTutorial As mentioned in the previous tutorial on PHP/DB2, PHP is widely used in web applications and most web applications have a database component. The PHP extension for DB2 database provides access to one particular widely-used database from a PHP script.

In July, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's head, started looking for a community manager for Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution. Shuttleworth recently found his man, Jono Bacon, a UK-based technology consultant and writer. The Ubuntu position isn't just a cheerleader for Ubuntu. Shuttleworth described the job as "'uniquely Ubuntu' in that it brings together professional management with community integration."

There are a range of ways that marketing can relate to engineering. At one end are companies where engineering is the core competency and marketing "leadership" is an absurdity. At the other end are companies where marketing tells engineers what to do.

Desktop Linux specialist Xandros announced Aug. 8 that it is joining the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), and will participate in OSDL's Desktop Linux working group. IDC, meanwhile, expects desktop Linux to will make substantial gains over the next several years, accounting for $10 billion in annual revenues by 2008, OSDL said.

With the recent release of the second draft of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), digital rights management (DRM) is back in the news. The new draft may raise concerns about the rewording of section 3 of the license, which deals with DRM. The Free Software Foundation dislikes the term "digital rights management" and instead choose to call it digital "restrictions" management. But many people don't understand the implications of DRM on free software like Linux.

Digium, the company that spawned open source PBX and telephony software, Asterisk, has received $13.8 million in Series A funding from Boston-based telecom specialist venture fund, Matrix Partners.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), (http://www.lpi.org), the world's premier Linux certification organization and the Free Standards Group (http://www.freestandards.com) will combine forces in Latin America to promote Open Standards and professional certification
. The two organizations will initiate this relationship through their key participation in a five city IT tour in Brazil beginning in August 2006 which includes such leading companies as IBM and Novell, local LPI training partners and other IT organizations.