Showing all newswire headlines

A Chinese mobile phone software vendor has licensed a suite of A/V (audio-visual) codecs for its Linux smartphone software stack. China MobileSoft (CMS) says A/V technology from InterVideo will enable users of phones based on its Linux smartphone stack to record and play "high-quality, jitter-free video clips."

Sony's settlement over the rootkit fiasco represents a blueprint for legislative action, argues law professor Michael Geist. The settlement seeks to both compensate US consumers for the harm they suffered from the Sony CDs and to place limits on Sony's future use of TPMs.

[Ed: If you're interested in copy restriction measures, you'll want to read this. - dcparris]

First Multi-Terabyte Product Aimed at Home Media Market Stores Up to 5000 Hours of Video or 640,000 Tunes

Hackers have cracked the Xbox 360 puzzle game Hexic HD in order to discover more about the inner workings of Microsoft's new console. Files from the puzzle game have been extracted, burned to disc, and booted from a standard Xbox 360 console. The game can also be run on PC.

Discover the latest step in the evolution of Java application development using DB2 Universal Database for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. Get an insider view of the JDBC Universal Driver, the clear advantages to using a pure Java type 4 driver, and examine common debugging techniques that will help you get to the heart of any problem.

One of Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) lead intellectual property law firms has asked the United States Patent & Trademark Office to open a new reexamination of the Eolas patent. The Eolas patent covers "a system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object."

Vincenzo Ciaglia has authored an article that describes his Linux Netwosix release, and answers many questions being posed by developers. He reiterates much of the information that he conveyed in a recent interview with LinuxWorld, but also added some new information. One brief outtake from the article (which is posted in full at LinuxWorld): 'The installation is simple and with the new release, Linux Netwosix 2.0-rc1, there's a new setup tool based on the Crux one that really help every user because it is simple and user-friendly for a security/network oriented GNU/Linux distribution. The Setup script will show a simple list of available 'base' packages you can choose to install on your system.'

What do you get when you combine reckless security with a tottering Internet Explorer feature set? An army of very unhappy opinion leaders: Geeks and network managers.

Motorola announces a Linux-Java smartphone under the moniker A910. It has Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, with a 1.3 megapixel camera. It has a TransFlash (micro-SD) slot, with voice recognition software. The A910 is expected to be available in 1st Quarter of 2006. Whether its available in our shores, that's an unknown.

Until today, the only two statements from Massachusetts spokespersons regarding Peter Quinn's open format policy stated that the "rules would not change." Now we know that the administration remains committed not only to open formats in general, but also to ODF in particular.

Newest Music-Optimized Mobile Delivers More Tunes Much Faster

In a few weeks, IBM will be delivering an update to OS/400, which has been i5/OS for the past year. Everyone knows its reputation for handling heavy-duty workloads by virtue of its impressive architecture and long list of applications. As an iSeries customer, you firmly believe that you get what you pay for. For instance, you get the capability to run multiple operating systems. In the past, OS/400 may have been enough. But as you look ahead, and certainly as IBM looks ahead, Linux could begin pulling more and more weight.

The saga of Internet Explorer, the piece of software that once brought the Department of Justice to the brink of breaking up Microsoft, continues to eat away at the company. Several Microsoft employees have been reporting on their blogs that they feel the browser is not receiving adequate attention from upper management, and that it reflects badly on Microsoft as a result.

Rory Blythe, after posting a rant complaining about how many people seem excited about switching Firefox simply to "beat the man," admitted in a comment that the lack of new features in Internet Explorer was embarrassing:

In this tutorial (login required) Ian Shields introduces you to Linux devices, filesystems, and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Learn in depth how to: Create partitions and filesystems, Maintain the integrity of filesystems, Mount and unmount filesystems, Manage disk quota, Use file permissions to control access to files, Manage file ownership, Create and change hard and symbolic links, Find system files and place files in the correct location.

[Ed: While this requires registering, some readers may want to access these course modules. -tadelste]

MINNEAPOLIS, Jan. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Telsasoft today announced that West Central Wireless of San Angelo, Texas has purchased a set of GSM CDR (Call Detail Record) reports to complement their next generation integrated OSS network management solution also purchased from Telsasoft for their GSM network infrastructure.

Open source software is off to a good start, but it won't revolutionize IT until the community gets serious about defining business frameworks and processes, says Charles E. Bess P.E. and EDS Fellow.

It's prediction time for Bess, and he opines on the future of Linux and open source in this interview. He also lists the hot new technologies that will shake up the IT world in 2006. As head futurist for EDS Corp., a global technology services company based in Plano, Tex., Bess studies the future implications of changes within the software industry.

While some security researchers advise Windows users to rush to install an unofficial patch to fix a vulnerability in the way the OS renders graphics files, Microsoft wants customers to wait another week for its official security update, it announced today.

The problem involves the way various versions of Windows handle graphics in the WMF (Windows Metafile) format. When a vulnerable computer opens a maliciously crafted WMF file, it can be forced to execute arbitrary code. Microsoft published a first security advisory on 28 December, saying it had received notification of the problem on 27 December and was investigating whether a patch was necessary.

Hey, it's fifteen years today since I bought the machine that got Linux started. January 2nd is a good date.

Happy New Year to all of you. New Year in the western world is the typical point in time to take a look backward and forward to see what happened and what one expects to happen next year. Also, we're almost in the middle between release of sarge and release of etch, another good reason to look both ways. :)

Stephan Binner has released a VMware player image of KDE 3.5 with KOffice running on OpenSuSE 10.