Showing all newswire headlines

A little thing I wrote after reading some biology book, about how software development works, and how we can take advantage of it.

Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Bruce Byfield released a short introduction into apt-get on NewsForge. Again, developers were advised to close bugs automatically with a changelog entry only in connection with a proper description. Jason Boxman wrote a guideline for using Exim 4 and Courier IMAP on a Debian system.

To paraphrase this LA Times story: The RIAA and MPAA got their posteriors handed to them on a platter this year. HR 4077, the PIRATE Act, and INDUCE (among others) all got bogged down in Congress. If this news fills you with holiday cheer, you should donate to Public Knowledge, the D.C.-based nonprofit that made it happen. I've been working with this organization since their formation and can vouch for both their effectiveness in lobbying and that their hearts are in the right places. 'Tis the season for giving. 'Tis also the season for tax-deductible donations.

The New York Stock Exchange announced its new TradeWorks trading system today, though portions of the system have been in place for months. Described as an "Extreme Availability" system by IBM, it includes up to 3,000 -- 650 are already in use on the floor of the NYSE -- custom made wireless handheld devices used by floor brokers. The handhelds talk to Linux-based workstations, which in turn talk to HP servers, and they speak to IBM Z-series mainframes running a DB2 backend.

Got questions? LinuxQuestions.org has answers -- and a lot more. This popular and well-established site run by Jeremy Garcia has at last count 148,040 registered users. That's 4,473 more registered users than the Linux Counter itself.

"The Cybersource Linux vs. Windows TCO Comparison is back and better than ever. In April 2002, Cybersource undertook the first study contrasting the overall Total Cost of Ownership differences between Linux and open source platforms on the one hand, and Windows and Microsoft platforms on the other. We have now updated this report to accommodate the changes in both platforms. We have also extended the model to increase its relevance and accuracy.

Steven Noels, a Belgian consultant and member of the Apache Software Foundation claims running a business based on open source software is possible.

Application News MozSource, the independent company that operates the Mozilla Store and the Netscape Store, has announced the launch of its new high-quality, affordable technical support service for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla 1.7.

In this part I will show you how to speed up Debian by using hdparm, getting sound and video to work, and finally wrapping it up with printing.

Linux advocates have long insisted that open-source development results in better and more secure software. Now they have statistics to back up their claims.

A recent controversial IDC study said that some 62% of the TCO of Linux comes from support, versus only about 50% for Windows, for which support is slightly cheaper. Though you can argue about the validity of the survey's results, no one can deny that Linux would be a more attractive solution if it were cheaper and easier to support. OpenCountry, a small company with big aspirations, is today announcing new software that aims to make that happen.

An introduction to several Linux MIDI utilities, including JSynthLib, Midirgui and SynthEd.

Linux PDA software vendor Empower has joined Texas Instruments's (TI's) DSP (digital signal processor) third-party network, and will offer TI's DSP customers products and services related to Linux PDTs (portable data terminals), including industrial, portable medical, point-of-sale (POS), asset inventory, and enterprise applications.

Stanford Computer Science Researchers Analyze 5.7 Million Lines of Software, Identify 985 Software Bugs - Most Already Fixed by Open Source Community

Contrary to popular perception, many open source vendors are making money, even growing in size, revenue, installed base, and influence. Their secret? The dual license, a business model that allows software makers to provide commercial software licenses for a fee, while simultaneously providing free software to a broader community. Industry analyst and longtime Linux watcher Stacey Quandt explains how it works.

From caller ID to long distance, anything your phone can do, Asterisk can do better - and cheaper. Asterisk, an open source telephony project, greatly reduces the cost of traditional telecommunication technology and operation, and moves Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) into the mainstream. If you own a telephone, heed the call to Asterisk.

Six years ago, Oracle announced support for Linux, perhaps singlehandedly sparking the widespread adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Today, Oracle's Linux market share is growing by leaps and bounds, backed by the elegance, scalability, and low cost of Linux application clusters. In this hands-on guide, discover how easy it is to get Oracle up and running on virtually any Linux distro.

Every so often, something truly magical appears and changes the universe forever. Recent marvels like wireless and digital content are just two examples that come to mind. Each changed our expectations of what's possible.

Software patents -- more than copyright laws, commercial software companies, and uninformed legislators -- are the biggest threat to the future of free software. While software patents have only been issued regularly in the United States since about 1982 (after Diamond v. Diehr), and guidelines for granting software patents weren't established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) until 1996, software patents are now granted by the USPTO at the rate of nearly 30,000 per year, or over 15 percent of all patents issued.

Let me introduce you to my friend Steven Shaw, or "Fat Guy," as he likes to be called. Fat Guy lives in New York City, is a lawyer, and over the last three or four years, has cultivated a second career as a professional food writer -- and a damn good one, too. At 32, Fat Guy was one of the youngest men to win the James Beard Award for Food Journalism.