Showing all newswire headlines

The good folks at Ars Technica benchmarked and compared JavaScript performance between Android 2.2 and iOS 4. The results were overwhelmingly in Android's favor as it performed almost twice as well in the SunSpider benchmark and nearly five times better at the V8 benchmark.

Find out how those two leaders of the mobile world stack up against each other. They are both amazing, but which one is better? Here's a side-by-side comparison.

Greenplum, which uses the open source PostgreSQL database as a base for its data warehousing and business intelligence software, has been acquired by storage company EMC. The move will allow EMC to compete directly with Oracle and its Exadata software. No details were given on the value of the transaction, but the companies expect the deal to be completed by the end of the third quarter 2010.

We've kept a fairly low profile and have not commented much on the Oracle / NetApp lawsuit. Today, however, Coraid announced that they have received a letter from NetApp threatening them; Coraid has decided therefore to stop reselling their ZFS based storage appliance. As the leading vendor of ZFS based storage appliances and a long time supporter of AoE and a technical partner of Coraid, we're inevitably mentioned in discussions about this lawsuit. Rather than rehash the entire case I'll just make a few points that have been missing from the commentary I have seen today so far:... If you are one of the 78% percent of enterprises that support OpenSource (see my related blog on a recent Accenture survey), now is the time to stop buying solutions from legacy vendors that resort to lawsuits.

The Mozilla Foundation has released an early beta of the upcoming version 4 of Firefox, its flagship cross-platform browser for Windows, OS X, and Linux. HTML 5 and CSS 3, the standards that are slated to power next-generation Websites, are clearly at the forefront of Mozilla's development efforts. Firefox 4 includes extended support for many of the new features that those two technologies introduce, including the Websocket API, which enables Web-based applications to access servers using arbitrary protocols like, for example, the one used by e-mail clients. Most interestingly, Mozilla has chosen to support HTML 5 video playback by implementing Google's WebM video codec, which, like Firefox, is open-source and (at least in theory) unencumbered by patents.

One of the great things about Linux is how easy it is to customize. Now unfortunately if you don't know what you're doing and sometimes even if you do know what you're doing, you can get into trouble. I found this method to be very useful in times of stress. As you all may know everything in Linux is a file, all of the settings are files. Inside your Home folder is where all of the settings and user specific files are located. Remove these folders to reset Ubuntu/Gnome back to its default.

Robotics and artificial intelligence enthusiast Francisco Paz has launched a new open source robot called Qbo. Armless fun or Henry with attitude? Regardless, it's probably the most impressive open source project we've ever seen…

Sabayon Linux is a very fun distribution based on Gentoo Linux. That tidbit of information may be one of the reasons Sabayon isn't more popular, although it shouldn't be. The mention of Gentoo usually invokes visions of difficulty and hours of compiling to Linux users. While that general assessment of Gentoo may be correct overall, it certainly isn't true of Sabayon. In fact, if it wasn't a known fact that Sabayon was based on Gentoo, many users might never realize it.

This tutorial will show you how to add a secure-delete option to the contextual menu in Ubuntu and Fedora Linux. We all know that when you simply delete a file, it’s possible to recover it later. Sometimes this is useful, if you accidentally delete something important; but usually this is a problem, and you really want that file gone forever. Additionally, this tutorial can be adapted to add any command to the Nautilus context menu.

Google's Android mobile operating system got some significant performance improvements in version 2.2, codenamed Froyo. A high-performance JIT was introduced in Android's Dalvik runtime environment and the browser got some very deep optimizations. These enhancements make Android's performance more competitive than ever.

It is no secret that Linux is not a popular gaming platform. Despite that stigma, however, the open nature of Linux makes it easy, even for relatively inexperienced developers, to produce quality games. Therefore, while the number of high-rated Linux game titles may be small in comparison to Windows or gaming consoles, there are a number of quality free and commercial games out there. Most of the Linux sites that list games tend to highlight the same bunch; however, there are a few hidden gems that you may have missed but are still worth playing. In no particular order, here are four you might want to try.

GUADEC pre-conference: July 26 With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, software development interests will focus increasingly on improved user experience, accessibility and application use. While the GUADEC 2010 conference aims to prmote all of these ideals through the work of the GNOME Foundation, the GNOME Open Desktop Day will place important attention on the desktop in education and government. The GNOME Open Desktop Day is a preconference to GUADEC 2010. It is organized in association with Programme Office NOiV — 'the Netherlands in Open Connection' — and Open DWR. In line with the NOiV's action plan, the preconference will focus on the 'New Forerunners' (action line 9, page 19 of the action plan) and other organisations in the public/private sectors interested in open desktop development.

As I noted in my post “Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?", one of the reasons there are no large pure-play open source companies is that their business model is based on giving back to customers most of the costs the latter have traditionally paid to software houses.

Minimizing is not always seen as the same thing; Plus, an exploration of just how bad it can get with a small laptop screen.

Online banking is becoming a very popular way to satisfy our banking needs and this even includes people with no or very little technical background. There are numerous advantages when doing banking transactions online, such as 24/7 bank opening hours, ability to make transactions from anywhere in the world and convenience. The only problem is that we do not take our secured home PC everywhere with us. Consequently, the use of other computer and operating system rather than our own for online banking may involve a great security risk. However, what we can and usually carry on us everywhere we go is some sort of the USB key storage device. This article describes a way of building our own customized Online banking USB live Desktop.

After a long time waiting the most interesting update of the Intel drivers for Linux is now a fact. We can now have this great hardware acceleration for playing h.264 video. Or in other words we now have hardware acceleration for HD content with our Intel video cards. As an owner of U400-138 with Intel 4500 MHD I have been waiting for this over a year but now I can play 720p without an issue. And so here is how to install this.

Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.

Microsofts ISA proxy server is popular in many corporations. Unfortunately support for NTLM authentication is spotty in Linux at best. This article will show you how to connect to the internet via an ISA proxy when NTLM is not supported.

Last week, I wrote about the somewhat-vague definition of the open core business model, and how it compared to the dual-license business model. Open core, like dual licenses, are all part of the whole "ways-to-make-money-faster-with-open-source-software" genre of business, but they are not the same thing.

While there are a good number of gnome applets to choose from by default, there are piles of other applets you can find online to install. The following are a list of four of my favorites I use on my various Linux systems around my house.