Showing all newswire headlines

The ideal programming language for beginners should offer the minimum barrier between thought processes and their concrete implementation as programs on the machine. It should not be a ‘toy’ language - its structure should be rich enough to express complex computer science concepts without being awkward. The language should encourage good coding habits and students should be able to look at it as an extension of the three things which they have already mastered to varying levels of proficiency - reading, writing and mathematics. Do we have such languages? Yes - the programming language Scheme fits in admirably.

It's somewhat understandable that many countries would be nervous that the United States, in essence, controls the Internet. Like it or not, the Bush administration has chosen to act alone over and over again, in both war and peace. The decision to essentially go it alone in the Iraq War is but one sign of this attitude. Now the decision to retain what is essentially dominance of the DNS root servers is another. As long as that control remains, governments and citizens around the world can't be sure that US foreign or domestic policy won't affect the Internet.

Centralized management of user accounts solves a major problem in distributed computing environments. Without centralization in an environment with X users, Y computers, and Z services, we have (X*Y)+(X*Z) accounts to manage. With centralization, we have X+Y+Z accounts to manage. In this article, I will provide an overview of user account management with Kerberos and LDAP. I will describe the protocols and how they work as well as their implementation. Finally, I will discuss how to manage accounts using this new system.

[Ed.- this is a wonderfully detailed howto that clearly explains how all the pieces work, written by a Google System Administrator, so presumably he has had a lot of practice!]

[ED: This article and others from SYS-CON have come under the scrutiny of our editors. In fact, a message to me from one of our top people said that this article was pretty good but if he were Editor-in-Chief, he would nuke it because of the sound.

In fact, I feel the same way. We thought we would leave it up to you to decide. Should we nuke SYS-CON articles because of the streaming content? Or should we put up a warning? -tadelste]

The LinuxWorld SYS-CON newsdesk writes; "I've been suspicious of professional certification exams for a long time. Part of it is that I've heard a lot of flack about Microsoft certifications. Specifically, that the best thing they test is how well you study for Microsoft certification. For that reason, I've resisted taking any of the Linux certification exams. Although I have 15 years worth of experience in Unix-related operating systems, I've always suspected that I wouldn't do well on a certification exam because I wouldn't have studied the specific exam prep materials."

Read the rest of the story at LinuxWorld Magazine.

If you have time on your hand you can review yesterdays Town-Meeting at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Read more over at Groklaw or Sign the petition if you agree.

Although Slackware was THE distro in the mid-90s , at the present time it has conceded the corporate market (but of course Linux is not about market share, the Slackware zealots always remind me!) to Red Hat and SUSE, and the rest of the market to the many Debian derivatives, with the result that Slackware is now just a niche distro used by a very small minority of Linux users.

If you try to find a Linux compatible wireless card, you might find that a challenge. I shop around frequently and haven't seen any "Linux Compatible" stickers on wireless card boxes. Recently, I bought one on eBay and it had an entry in a Linux compatibility list. It didn't work. The manufacturer kept the model number but changed the chipset.

In attempting to make it work, I discovered that in Ubuntu's new release 5.10, they've added a utility that makes it easy to get off-the-shelf wireless cards to work. Now, that's the way Linux innovation can trump other OSes. Here's a short article demonstrating this ingenious tool.

Free 1GB online to store and edit your emails, office documents, calander, organizer, photos and files, chat to friends play games surf the web even faster and more from any computer on your own personal online desktop and access it from anywhere in the world. Here is a bit more info [ED-What a great way to demo KDE]

Linux Journal's"Señor Editor" recounts the latest Geek Cruise's visits to resorts later trashed by Hurricane Wilma.

Nick at Threadwatch is all giddy about a new Firefox extension for the SEO crowd put out by WebmasterBrain. The extension gives you the ranking of a site which a term is linked to and the amount of links indexed by Google, Yahoo or MSN pointing to that target site.

This article shows you how to Connect to and browse Apache Derby databases using Eclipse technology.

Linux kernel 2.6.14 is out, the fourth major kernel version of 2005, and chock full of improvements, including driver updates, new virtual filesystems and wireless connectivity improvements.

The 2.6.14 kernel comes just two months after the 2.6.13 kernel was released at the end of August. This release also marks the beginning of a new development process for kernel development.

"As per the new merge policies that were discussed during LKS {Linux Kernel Summitt} in Ottawa earlier during the summer," Linus Torvalds wrote in a mailing list posting. "I'm going to accept new stuff for 2.6.14 only during the first two weeks after 2.6.13 was released."

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Justsystems Corporation (JASDAQ: 4686), a leading enterprise software provider in Japan, announced today that xfy Basic Edition 1.0 will be available starting October 31 for the U.S. market. xfy Basic Edition 1.0, an integrated XML application development and runtime environment, along with the xfy Developer's Toolkit 1.0, which enables the generation of XVCDs (XML data processing sequence programs), can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.xfytec.com. xfy Basic Edition 1.0, serves as a tool for creating and editing XML documents.

It may not have quite the same thrilling finish, but you need wait no longer for a new Triple Crown winner--we've just published the third jewel in our Linux Triple Crown: What Is a Linux Distribution, which follows the publications of What Is Linux and What Is a Linux Desktop, respectively. Each article is intended to introduce your friends, family members, and co-workers to the world you know so well, and maybe enlighten you in some untold way as well.

Overwhelming demand for downloadable version of the LiveCD caused the site to crash.
Placeholder page with server links and instructions put instead.

This Month in SVN for October looks at KOffice development. "While much of the rest of KDE is in feature freeze preparing for the imminent release of KDE 3.5, KOffice developers are starting to work hard for their 1.5 release, scheduled for between KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.

The GoblinX LiveCD Linux distribution is celebrating its first birthday today. "One year of life, one year of devoted efforts to make it a great liveCD distro and also as good as possible," says Flavio de Oliveira of the GoblinX project. GoblinX is a bootable LiveCD based on Slackware Linux.

Overview: Considering a move to Linux? Before you do, find out how you can overcome the "Linux Deployment Speed Bump."

Many organizations are considering a move to Linux to help improve the stability, security, and total cost of ownership of their enterprise applications, but few realize that there are a number of deployment and maintenance challenges that impact the success of their Linux projects. And even fewer realize that an option exists that can eliminate these challenges and further reduce the TCO of their Linux projects.

A provider of configurable, licensable CPU/DSP core IP (intellectual property) for system-on-chip (SoC) processors is adding SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) instruction support. ARC's forthcoming Multimedia Subsystem will support 104 new 128-bit-wide SIMD instructions that can reduce power and improve performance in mobile applications by exploiting the parallelism inherent in multimedia applications, the company says.