Showing all newswire headlines

Microsoft will on Tuesday announce it is opening up access to its Office file formats to competitors, as part of a move to ensure the software giant does not lose lucrative government markets for its Office software.

[ED-I bet the binary component of the format will be intact so this is mostly a feint, Note the 18 month leadtime before it will be made available. bstadil]

I’ve spent years in Washington and elsewhere and have concluded that lack of common sense is by far the greatest threat facing this country. The examples are seemingly endless.

The procurement process can be so complex that new purchases may be several years behind the technology curve. Windows and Microsoft Office are the government standard, but free open-source alternatives are available that would save taxpayers millions every year. Do either of those things make sense?

Diggable

Digg.com may be one of the fastest growing web sites on the global Internet. I know why: They listened to Tim.

Linux has moved closer to maturity as a robust datacentre platform, with the release of a major refresh of the kernel software.
The latest version of the Linux kernel - kernel 2.6.14 - which is at the core of many enterprise Linux products, is designed to make it a stronger alternative to the Windows operating system.

CEO Stuart Cohen talks about OSDL's efforts to head off patent claims against the community-developed operating system.

The latest version of the Asterisk open source IP-PBX, version 1.2, is now available.

Diggable.com

ALMOST 80 per cent of Australian TAFEs and universities plan to use customised, third-party or open source applications, along with commercial platforms to develop e-learning, a study shows.

In this interview Mark Sobell, author ofA Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, contrasts the original Bourne Shell with GNU's Bourne Again Shell and talks about the usefulness of the gawk and tr utilities.

Last week the USA held onto control of Internet domain addresses. Tectonic asked Internet Service Providers Association co-chair Greg Massel for his take on the affair.

Over the years, I've observed that for every favorable review written about the GIMP or other free graphics applications, there is another review denouncing it as useless because "it doesn't support Pantone." Although I've accepted this is how the universe works, it's worth noting that the unfavorable articles are generally accompanied by some misconceptions about what Pantone is and isn't used for, and the legality of supporting it.

Vienna's 'soft' migration to open source on the desktop is proving more popular with users than expected, according to Erwin Gillich, the head of IT at Vienna's municipal authority.

LXer Day Desk: 11-21-2005

A report in ComputerWorld about Banks choosing Windows over Linux is a copy editor's dream. Too bad, it may never have seen a copy editor. Or if it did, perhaps it was a copy editor in the advertising department.

Diggable

This article introduces the sample code provided with the Cell Broadband Engine SDK, taking a look at what kinds of programs are provided, how to build them, and what you can learn from them.

The 2005.1-r1 release is simply a media refresh over the 2005.1 release. What this means is that it used the same base snapshot, and has very few changes. It is essentially nothing more than a bug-fix release. Though offered to all architecture teams, only a few had bugs that were large enough to warrant an interim release before 2006.0's release next year. This media refresh is only of stages and the InstallCD images. The PackageCD images from 2005.1 are still valid and have not been rebuilt.

Mozilla is preparing to use an "open source marketing" drive online to promote the next generation of Firefox, its free web browser.

Through a series of online viral videos, made by volunteers who enter a competition, Mozilla is hoping to repeat the success of the last year’s campaign to promote the launch of Firefox 1.0.

Linux Format has a brief interview with Andrew Morton, the maintainer of the Linux kernel 2.6 tree. Andrew discusses the debates behind revision control systems (the BitKeeper and CVS), new kernel features and his own -mm tree.

Shared-Memory Architecture Enables Researchers to Address Complex Computing Problems

Two days ago, in a post called ODF Update: What Will Happen Next on Beacon Hill and When I reported that it looked like the Massachusetts legislature would adjourn without adopting a bill that would enable the enemies of ODF to block its implementation in Massachusetts.

The good news is that I was right. The bad news is that everything else decided on Beacon Hill today is bad news. Even the good news may not amount to much, on which more below.

The city of Paris is accelerating its move to free and open-source software as part of a strategy to reduce its dependence on suppliers. It plans to replace more of its software, both on servers and desktops, with open-source.

With some activists claiming that the whole concept of patent pledges is misguided, ZDNet UK spoke with OSDL chief executive Stuart Cohen to find out the wider aims of the project.