Showing all newswire headlines

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced that it has created an Open Document Format plugin for Microsoft Office 97 and up. Distribution plans are still up in the air, but It may be released publicly as part of Google Pack. (Linux-Watch)

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes: "The driver, in theory, will be able to support any flavor of 802.11 -- a, b, g, and come the day it's finally approved, n. The driver doesn't concern itself with those issues. It's up to the chipsets' hardware radios to deal with speed concerns. The driver is designed to control the radio hardware on the target device, not replace it."

Sun said Thursday that it would alter its licensing terms in order to make Java easier to bundle with open source operating systems. The announcement is expected to come at the JavaOne conference later this month.

When technology serves its owners, it is liberating. When it is designed to serve others, over the owner's objection, it is oppressive. There's a battle raging on your computer right now -- one that pits you against worms and viruses, Trojans, spyware, automatic update features and digital rights management technologies. It's the battle to determine who owns your computer.

DistroWatch reports - The release candidate of dyne:II is out. In this 2.0 version there is a lot more than 1.0, it will take a while for me to write complete documentation about all the features, but let's go on and see what happens. In particular this release solves all problems with nesting, Unionfs for writable /usr, PCMCIA automatic recognition and... runs on Apple's new Intel based machines (docking and booting from CD with bootcamp). OSDir has some nice shots of dyne:bolic in the dyne:bolic 2.0 RC Screenshot Tour.

Current and former OpenEmbedded users are invited to complete a 23-question online survey conducted by the project. The first OpenEmbedded user survey aims to help the project understand its user-base and their needs, in order to improve the tool. The OpenEmbedded project maintains open-source embedded development tools primarily targeting Linux.

One of the basic premises of evolution is that traits that are advantageous to the species are perpetuated and adverse ones winnowed. Extending the metaphor to software design project management, one would expect that modern "best practices" would be the ones that had resulted in the most benefit to companies. James Turner analyzes why this is not usually the case, and what can be done to correct the problem.

Spam email is the plague of the 21st century; SpamBayes is its cure. This client-side application analyzes all incoming email messages and automatically sorts out those that are unwanted.

Tentative designs call for a machine that uses one-tenth of the power of conventional laptops, a 7-inch screen and the Linux operating system. The project's partners include Google and AMD.

Covalent announced a strategic partnership with Chariot Solutions on Apache Geronimo support

Red Hat, the global provider of open source to the enterprise, announced that they have welcomed four new resellers as Red Hat Ready Business Partners to cater to markets in northern India.

Think of the children

WCIT The US has fallen way behind other nations with regard to its embrace of open source technology, and the situation may only get worse. Open source coders face their grandest test to date as organizations place more and more scrutiny on the origins and value of FOSS (free and open source software) products.

Chevron has two U.S. data centers - one in Houston, Texas, and the other 1600 miles away in San Ramon, California. These data centers are the centralized service hubs for the business units located in their respective areas.

Pay-per-click fraud. First, Google was on the hook. Now it's Yahoo's turn. The plaintiffs charge Yahoo enabled all manner of it. Anybody can file a lawsuit. But to assess Yahoo's chances of getting off, you need to see who they're up against. After taking a look at each of these battle-hardened class-action litigators, you'll probably conclude that Yahoo's going to be writing a real big check.

The 'new' XiTi-report about Firefox-usage worldwide is in, and it shows us Finland has lost is lead in Firefox-usage to Slovenia. Three countries have have more than 30% usage of Firefox now: Slovenia, Finland and Croatia, while the European average is 19,4%.
Usage in the continent of Northern America is 15,6% now.

[ The report is a few weeks old, but I thought our readers might like it anyway. The survey was based on 268M visits to the websites audited by XiTi during a full week.
Note to our American readers: Please read a point where this report states a comma. - hkwint ]

OpenWater Solutions has announced its partnership with Zabbix. OpenWater Solutions and Zabbix have partnered to deliver Zabbix's open-source multi-platform monitoring system which effectively monitors application, servers and network devices of enterprise IT infrastructure irrespective of its complexity and types of hardware platforms and operating systems, to North America.

Atmel has announced that it has chosen TimeSys, the embedded Linux specialist, as the source of the primary Linux distribution mechanism for their latest ARM-based processors.

The problem has been a topic of discussion of newsgroups on Microsoft's support site. The issue--broken Web links in messages--affects at least Outlook 2000 and 2003, and similar problems were also reported on Outlook Express.

[Just when I was looking to start a humor column... - dcparris]

In 2006, Canadians can fill out their census forms online for the first time -- but not if they use GNU/Linux, or are free software advocates who prefer not to install a proprietary version of Java. The situation raises questions of open access to government that are familiar to most of the free and open source software (FOSS) communities, all the more so because other government services are implementing systems with the same limitations.

' I have just heard from the OpenDocument Foundation's Gary Edwards, with news about a plugin the Foundation is offering the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in response to the Commonwealth's request for information on any plugin that could "allow Microsoft Office to easily open, render, and save to ODF files, and also allow translation of documents between Microsoft's binary (.doc, .xls, .ppt) or XML formats and ODF."'

[May 3 - Massachusetts requests plugin. May 4 - Plugin offered. Earlier story linked from this one.]