Showing all newswire headlines

This morning I received an email from Andy Oram at 6:59 AM telling me about the Story of Peter Quinn coming under investigation for traveling to open source conferences. Andy is my editor at O'Reilly and the best person I know. He immediately wrote an article called Another desperate attempt to discredit Massachusetts OpenDocument adoption. I immediately submitted to Slashdot and Digg.com. I just saw the article on the front page of Digg.com and Slashdot .

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This article shows you a more practical approach to wireless compatibility. With some well-designed XHTML, a bit of CSS, and the media attribute, you can do wonders. Create more flexible, Mobile device ready, Web pages with XHTML and CSS.

Jeremy Jones is a script monkey who works for The Weather Channel as a software quality assurance engineer.

We spend so much time on the Web, it's only natural that small enhancements in the way we access it will lead to large gains in our yearly productivity. More than 100 million people have downloaded the Firefox browser to help them obtain that productivity. Developed by a small team of core engineers with the help of thousands of external developers, Firefox already has had an impact.

In this document I describe in short how to encrypt a device with one of the most contemporary methods, using dm-crypt and LUKS. Actually, devices cannot be encrypted. It’s the block devices which are volumes that can be. This means that you can encrypt a hard disk partition, a ZIP disk, a usb flash stick, or even a volume within a file.

Xbox-Linux Project has announced that they have startd a hacking project against Xbox360 – The Free60 Project, by porting Linux and Darwin onto this brand-new gaming console.

[ED: I dont know if this will be as easy as the old XBoxes were, but it will be interesting to watch. I am looking forward to seeing a lot of first gen XBoxes converted to doing something useful.]

The EII (enterprise information integration) market is going through interesting times. This article discusses a number of the things that have happened or that have been reported to me.

Large companies and analysts that work with open source are fond of talking about vendor "sensitivity" when they are explaining why some customers are reluctant to go public about migrations away from proprietary software.

Diggable

Who gave the Globe writers the tip on Peter Quinn's Trips? How did they know he didn't file internal reports? Is an inexpensive trip exempt? Will it ruin his career?

Perhaps it's time to step up the struggle against Microsoft.

Related story:
Slashdot Article Reference 1646243

While the authors of the study admit it uses a small sample set, the conclusions support contentions that the DMCA has been used to hobble expression on the Internet, even among security researchers, who have an explicit exemption in the law.

It was on the front page of the Boston Globe newspaper today, and the lead article on their web site--an investigation that normally would be buried in the City & Region section of the paper. So you can't miss it: IT manager Peter Quinn of the Massachusetts state government is criticized for not fully reporting trips he took during his promotion of the OpenDocument format.

Microsoft, after a late start (like most technology companies) has poured millions into lobbying over the past decade. Rumors even suggest that several government IT managers who dared to consider open-source alternatives to Microsoft heard promptly from both the company and their own bosses to pull back. So it would be highly gratifying to Microsoft and those trying to maintain the status quo if someone could turn the tables and try to smear the proponents of open source with similar influence.
[Ed: Made the Front Page of Digg and Accepted by Slashdot. Thanks Lxer! -tadelste]

The Romney administration has launched a review of several out-of-state trips that its top technology officer took to conferences sponsored in part by companies who stand to benefit from a change in computer software used by the state.

Diggable

If Microsoft is the big cat prowling the Serengeti of software with its Windows operating system, companies that promote Linux are playing the part of elk, banding together in protective herds. In a 30-day span, four groups backed by a number of companies pledging their allegiance to open source software launched with an emphasis on propagating Linux in a world where Windows reigns.

It's amazing to see the advancements of BSD on the desktop in 2005. This I believe is in a large part to a few very successful BSD products, namely PC-BSD, FreeSBIE and now DesktopBSD - all of which are based on FreeBSD. It's interesting to watch this play out.. Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris and Darwin all shooting for the desktop. Only Darwin has made it so far within Mac OSX.
Read more at Distro Reviews

From the list of attendees, it was obvious that open source in Europe is A Really Big Thing(TM) - several hundred delegates from the UK and continental Europe converged on Amsterdam's classiest hotel to receive the wisdom there imparted....In each standalone terminal, the server runs FreeBSD while the client runs Debian Linux with the KDE windows manager. All user software is free or open source, and KDE language modules have been added for isiZulu, isiXhosa, tshiVenda, Setswana, and Afrikaans.

DistroWatch reports - The development of Fedora Core 5 has finally begun: The Fedora Project announces the first release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux experts/enthusiasts or for technology evaluation, as many parts are likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid. Notable features of FC5 Test1: Modular X.Org; vastly improved Asian language input support with SCIM; kernel based on 2.6.15-rc1; GCC 4.0.2; GNOME 2.12; KDE 3.4.92; Xen 3.0 snapshot for i386; improved Open Source Java...

OSDir has some great shots of Fedora Core 5 Test 1.

New or Refurbished, Windows or Linux

Stores these days move directly from back-to-school sales to animated Santa displays, but the official kickoff of the holiday shopping season -- the day after Thanksgiving, dubbed Black Friday for retailers whose businesses get into the black with fourth-quarter sales -- is the time to find some tremendous savings on desktop PCs. Combine seasonal savings with ever-lower component costs, and the $1,000 price limit of HardwareCentral's regular Grand Openings reports looks much too lavish. In fact, you can find a good PC for well under $400.