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LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2010

The sad thing is that Apple has basically delivered a Netbook but by chopping off the keyboard (and all of the I/O ports), giving it a touch screen, and crippling it significantly in several ways, they have everyone convinced that it is a new form factor. This is aided by the fact that it is reminiscent of devices from the Star Trek universe. In writing this article, I hope to expose the iPad for what it really is and stay out of Steve Job's reality distortion field.

While there can be some overlap between web designers and web developers, they tend to define their own specific worlds. However, what if a programmer would also like to be better at design? Where does he or she go? Turns out Brian Hogan and the folks at Pragmatic thought in that direction as well and came up with Web Design for Developers. I guess the title gives it away. But is this book just for programmers who want to learn design?

Starting with version 1.1, VideoLan Media Player (VLC) will get extensions support, and anyone will be able to write their own - like it is with Firefox extensions:

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with OpenSUSE 11.2 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running OpenSUSE 11.2). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

No, really. As trollish and dumb as they may seem, you still get such reactions. And the problem is that they may damage Free Software more now than ten years ago, when almost nobody knew what Free Software is anyway, so here are a few recent facts. http://stop.zona-m.net/node/87

Do you have problems with viruses and malware? Do you like to test different Linux distribution on your PC? Do you like to have tools and utilities available to check your PC, to partition your hard disk or to rescue data? This is perhaps the best tool you have ever seen and the best stuff for your USB Stick. Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility (Sardu) is software that can produce an ISO or an IMA anti-virus bootable CD, comprehensive collections of utilities, the most popular distributions of Linux Lite, and the best known Windows PE. In this article we’ll describe how to install more the 20 Live Systems on your USB Stick in 4 steps.

During much of the time I was running Ubuntu, I told myself that I'd be running Debian instead, if only I could get everything working. I have tried the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 build, and I still appreciate so many things working out of the box on my 2002-03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop. Even the USB Headphone Set sound module I've been using was able to play system sounds and Flash audio in Ubuntu. However, I recently was able to get that sound module to work in Debian Lenny. All I had to do was plug it into a different USB port on the Toshiba, and now it's working fine.

Gábor Horváth has been developing the raw photo converter RawTherapee single-handedly, on Linux and Windows, since 2006. The application has been freeware the entire time, with Horváth accepting Paypal donations through the project's web site. Consequently, although there are significant changes in the 3.0 alpha release announced on January 4th, it was arguably bigger news that the project was switching to the GPLv3.

Well, it was bad enough when X@FOSDEM became a one day event (where for the past several years it has been a highly-populated two-day conference) at the upcoming Free Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) taking place in Brussels next weekend, but now it's not even a one day event. X@FOSDEM has just been sliced down to now just be a half-day conference... Well, five hours.

One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.

Chris Green, a Microsoft employee who appears to use his MSDN blog here-and-there, posted a rather telling product support lifecycle update on December 2, 2009. In it, he details not only the public information found on Microsoft’s product support lifecycle site, but he boldly goes where no one has gone before by mentioning not only Windows 8, but Windows Server “2012? (Windows 8 Server) and Office “2012? (Office 15)… with dates.

The book aims to be a book for PHP application developers who want to improve their user interfaces through jQuery's capabilities and responsiveness. I really think the author has done a great job at achieving this goal. The code examples are very practical which can be used inside loads of websites. You don't especially need to be familiar with jQuery, since the book will provide you with numerous practical examples on how to improve your application. Through the code, you'll learn some great jQuery too!

Being a SysAdmin (as most of you who read this blog regularly know), I love to look at logs to solve problems. If there is an issue, the first thing I always do is look at the logs to see what went wrong. Even when I am writing programs, I build debugging in from the beginning to make sure I know what’s going on at all times (especially when something goes wrong).

I’d like to talk about the Nokia N900 Linux-based phone I’ve been testing for the past 6 weeks. It’s the first Maemo powered device to feature phone functions. Does this move signal a new direction for Nokia? Nobody seems quite sure just yet, but the hardware and software are causing a lot of interest in the Linux community. Here’s my thoughts on the experience so far. A Linux fan's view.

A top European official has announced plans to begin a major overhaul of European Union privacy laws, saying that the existing framework has failed to keep pace with technological innovation.

A user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client-server distributed computing system. The term most notably refers to applications that access the World Wide Web, but other systems, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), use the term user agent to refer to both end points of a communications session.

New work on the Sandia National Laboratories Red Storm supercomputer — the 17th fastest in the world — is helping to make supercomputers more accessible. Sandia researchers, working hand in hand with researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, socialized 4,096 of Red Storm's total 12,960 computer nodes into accepting a virtual external operating system — a leap of at least two orders of magnitude over previous such efforts.

Hardware failures, power failures, and most of all, storage media failures. Ever notice how fragile digital storage media are? Are we ever going to get digital storage media that can match plain old paper, and other analog media, for reliability and longevity?

Once again the Defective by Design have sprung into action to denounce another product from Apple, and once again nobody really cares. Defective by Design is a marketing campaign sponsored by the Free Software Foundation. While the FSF does plenty of good work, DBD is increasingly out of touch with the majority of users. Contrast the tone of the Defective by Design campaign with Stan Schroeder over at Mashable, who nails Apple's goals with the iPad: