Showing all newswire headlines

3D has taken over video gaming. When will it take over mundane computing areas such as file managers, word processors, and desktop environments? Maybe soon, if Hideya Kawahara and the Project Looking Glass team have their way. John Littler explores the ideas, implementations, and possibilities of 3D interfaces in this interview.

This week advisories were released for gdk-pixbuf, horde2, helix-player, Inkscape, horde2, Perl, Webmin, eagle-usb, spamassassin, mailman, xpdf, libc-client, and imap. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva, and Red Hat.

Credit Union Experiences Improved Network Reliability, Enterprise-level Network
SecurityBURLINGTON, Mass. – December 8, 2005 – Astaro Corporation today announced that Families And Schools Together Federal Credit Union (FAST FCU) has selected Astaro Security Gateway appliances to improve the reliability of their remote offices and to enjoy enterprise network security capabilities as a small and growing business.

The Melbourne member office of international accountancy and business advice provider HLB International is mid-way through the process of replacing its Microsoft Office-based desktop suite with the OpenOffice.org open source alternative.

Microsoft and Google have engaged in a bit of role reversal when it comes to making it possible to search print books online. This time around, Microsoft and an open technology community are fighting against Google, a rival seen as aggressive, arrogant, and set on doing its own thing for the sake of its cause.

Shared-Memory Computer with 1,280 Processors, Advanced Visualization and One Petabyte of Storage to be Used for Next-Generation Fluid Integration Research

Sebastian Kügler has written a new PyQt tutorial. Python is the perfect language to start learning programming with and this tutorial takes you through making a basic Qt based program.

Features enhanced by the developer community include workflow management, campaign management, and the ability to convert E-mails into leads.

Index Venture Partners, backer of blowout-success Skype, added an open-source company to its stable Thursday with a $5-million investment in business-intelligence software maker Pentaho.

This isn’t the first open-source startup in the European venture firm’s portfolio. It is a backer of MySQL, a Red Herring 100 Europe company. The database startup has gained significant traction internationally, with some $20 million in sales in 2004 (see RH-100 Europe: The Ikea of Databases).

Based on a smidgen of new detail on how Microsoft will proceed into the business services market, it appears that Redmond will be happy to add services that augment its core Windows, messaging, and Office applications — and thus stab in the back those ISVs that have created the third-party safety net for Microsoft users. But when it comes to building out services that may in any way replace the functions of its core code products — the equivalent of "Business Live," if you will — Microsoft appears to want no part of it.

This year will almost certainly go down in Web history as the Year of the Firefox. The open-source browser ended up the greatest beneficiary of the barrage of bad press aimed at Microsoft Internet Explorer and its various security vulnerabilities. With the ever-present threat of spyware, it's little surprise that so many users have made the switch to what is now widely considered to be the "safe" Web browser, at least compared with IE.

[ED: For a PC Mag. quite balanced - flaw that entered via Firefox that lands only in IE (open or closed) is not seen by the author as a Firefox flaw, blames Active X and Java plus users going to the wrong sites-HC]

Software vendors, enterprise IT managers, and investors face challenges as the market evolves, including quality of software and confusion about license models.

The latest version of OpenLogic Inc.'s BlueGlue Open Source Infrastructure Management Suite, unveiled yesterday, adds enterprise-centric features designed to make it easier for corporate users to select and deploy a custom-tailored stack of compatible, preconfigured, precertified open-source applications.

According to reports published in the Thursday edition of the "International Herald Tribune," Microsoft is prepared to draw on an internal slush fund to sell its products at deep discounts, or at last resort, give them away, when it runs up against Linux in contests for big government and institutional contracts.

In internal memos written last summer and obtained by the paper, then top Gregg Leizer wrote: Microsoft sales executive Orlando Ayala -- who has recently gone on to oversee sales to small- and mid-sized businesses, and to expand the company's Business Solutions partnering channel -- outlined the strategy to keep Microsoft in its leading position as the purveyor of desktop system software.

"Under NO circumstances lose against Linux," Ayala said in the July memo.

[Ed: Evidently it did not work with South Korea -tadelste]

A FOSS supporter recently spoke to a group of Italian economic researchers about the future--and costs--of information exchange and archiving and the possibilities offered by open formats.

There was a time when people talked about Latin American "Banana Republics" that would do what the US told them to do. Does Microsoft have a Banana Standards body now?

The effort to put a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution into the enterprise consciousness may have picked up some steam this week. The DCC Alliance of Debian based GNU/Linux distributions released their DCC 3.0 core as part of an effort to further adoption and standardization and potentially offer an alternative to Red Hat and Novell/SUSE.

The DCC, which originally stood for Debian Common Core, now just stands for DCC Common Core due to trademark issues with the use of the term "Debian."

Test builds of Mozilla Thunderbird with an updated patch for tabbed message browsing are available.

With all the hoopla surrounding Yahoo RSS Mail, you can be forgiven if you were under the impression that a great technical barricade has been breached. By mating webail with an RSS news reader, Yahoo made a webmail client that also presents RSS news feeds. That's a long, long way from an RSS messaging system.

[ED: This is one perspective on the Yahoo RSS announcement. I think the most important part is that I had not heard about the Yahoo announcement. I think the Yahoo RSS addition to their email system will be useful for lots of people. - ralph}

What is a Black Dog? It's a complete USB-powered Linux server which fits easily in the palm of your hand. Powered by a 400-MHz PowerPC processor, 64 MB of RAM, and either 256 MB or 512 MB of flash, this pint-sized pet packs quite a bite (or is that "byte"?). Russell Pavlicek finds out in this product review.