Showing all newswire headlines

One of the realities that every standards professional must deal with is the sad fact that everyone else in the world thinks that standards are…

[Start over; no one else thinks about standards much at all. - Andy]

The future smartphone market will be driven by operating systems and user demand for functionality and "experiences" the phone can provide, according to industry analyst In-Stat. In a report released Tuesday, the research firm projected that there will be some 412 million smartphones worldwide by 2014, where over 250 million units will be equipped with accelerometers.

AMD has released a new driver for ATI Radeon-chipsets, version 9.10. This driver is suitable for 32bit, or 64bit Linux versions.

"Is it here to stay?" has to be one of the most common questions enterprise users ask when considering Open Source options for their business needs. It's a legitimate concern with any product, Open Source or not — who wants to deploy a mission-critical service one day and be told it's no longer in development the next? In a time when the corporate side of Open Source is a bit up and down, spreading strategic support around is itself mission critical.

You can have Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft's trust-no-one innovation, or you can have the advance KDE desktop, all full of polish and useful functionality. Bruce Byfield compares the two.

Miro previously called Democracy player is a cross platform internet television application developed by Participatory Culture Foundation. The latest release is Miro 2.5.3 and it comes packed with a lot of goodies. It's alternatives include Boxee and also XBMC which do really perform as good as Miro.

Microsoft proved that one thing Windows 7 won't install is a sense of humour yesterday, by hastily pulling out of its sponsorship of a Family Guy/American Dad variety special. The vendor announced two weeks ago that it would blow some of its Windows 7 marketing budget on "an upcoming television event devoted to the comedy of Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show".

Some have suggested that Googe's Android OS is a strategic move by Google to block Win Mobile marketplace success, but it seems that Microsoft is doing enough to harm its reputation without Google's interference.

The folks at open source collaboration platform MindTouch conducted a poll recently to get a sense of who open source executives think are the most influential people in the industry. More than 50 execs were polled from Europe and North America and no one was allowed to vote for anyone in their own company. The results were ranked according to the effect each nominee has on the open source industry, and some of the winners may surprise you.

FTP communication is not secure, all communication is plain text and can be easily captured. Despite this serious weakness, few do anything to secure it. There are simple ways to correct this with VSFTPD.

After a three month development period following the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0, the first beta release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 "Bardu" is now available for all of your testing needs on Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD platforms. Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Beta 1 carries more than 200 changes since the release of 2.0 Sandtorg with many new prominent features being introduced, new test profiles added, and greater usability enhancements. In this article, we will go over some of the key improvements to be found in Phoronix Test Suite 2.2.

Red Hat is set to invest in EnterpriseDB, according to InternetNews.com. If true, the move accelerates EnterpriseDB’s momentum with big-name partners and also gives Red Hat a hedge against the pending Oracle-Sun-MySQL business combination that awaits regulatory approval. Here’s some more analysis.

Thought you were bleeding edge with your quad-core PC? Think again. A company called Tilera today announced that it's working on a chip containing 100 processor cores, which it says could be seen by 2011. It's part of its new TILE-Gx line of 64-bit multi-core processors, the first of which--a 36-core chip--will be sampling by the end of 2010, the company said today in a statement. With its top-end TILE-Gx100, Tilera claims to outstrip Intel's next-generation Westmere processor in performance-per-watt by a factor of 10. Other models will contain 16 and 64 cores, and will sample in early 2011.

With all the hubbub about Snow Leopard and Windows 7, there's another operating system out there you may not have noticed that's getting a significant update: Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu backer Canonical plans to release its "Karmic Koala" version on Thursday, and both the desktop and server versions of the open-source operating system take significant steps toward cloud computing. The concept of moving work away from the computer in front of you and into the network does have some merit, but cloud computing is today's fashionable buzzword, and Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth is sensitive to its overuse.

Psystar and Apple continue to battle it out, and things are coming to a head next month. They are fighting on two major fronts, and both will be the subject of oral argument on November 12. It looks like we will see an end, one way or another, of much of the first Apple-Psystar litigation. Psystar, I gather, would like this to be the end of this litigation, period, and then it will be on to Florida, I assume, for the second, the one over Snow Leopard, which Psystar has already been infringing, from Apple's point of view. Psystar has said it will accept an injunction of just Leopard, since it claims it isn't selling it any more anyway, and a nominal fine. All the rest of Apple's claims, it argues, are then moot.

Much of the realtime scheduling work in Linux has been based around getting the best behavior out of the POSIX realtime scheduling classes. Techniques like priority inheritance, for example, exist to ensure that the highest-priority task really can run within a bounded period of time. In much of the rest of the world, though, priorities and POSIX realtime are no longer seen as the best way to solve the problem. Instead, the realtime community likes to talk about "deadlines" and deadline-oriented scheduling. In this article, we'll look at a deadline scheduler has recently been posted for review and related discussion at the recent Real Time Linux Workshop in Dresden.

Not only has virtualization advanced the state of the art in maximizing server efficiency, it has also opened the door to new technologies that were not possible before. One of these technologies is the virtual appliance, which fundamentally changes the way software is delivered, configured, and managed. But the power behind virtual appliances lies in the ability to freely share them among different hypervisors. Learn the ideas and benefits behind virtual appliances, and discover a standard solution for virtual appliance interoperability called the Open Virtualization Format.

Fedora 12 provides "out of the box" support for kernel mode-setting with ATI R600/700 series graphics hardware, but it does not provide 3D acceleration by default. However, Red Hat's X developers have made it very easy to enable this 3D support for the ATI Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series hardware by just installing a special Mesa package from yum. In this article we are taking a quick look at where the R600/700 3D support is at in Fedora 12.

What's new in the open source world? We've put together a list of software that was first released (or first made open source) in the last couple of years. While many of these apps are still early in the development process, they're all usable, and in fact, have all acquired fairly substantial user bases in a short time. What do they have in common? While the apps on our list cover a gamut of categories, we did uncover a few trends. First, a number of the most successful new open source projects relate to mobility.

Many Linux users pride themselves on being highly technical geeks. And, while that's great for finding people to contribute code patches to projects, it means that a lot of first-time Linux users get branded a "newbie" and are made to feel stupid when they ask fundamental questions about things we take for granted. To be blunt, that situation sucks. If people have honest questions about Linux, we need to be helping them find answers, and we need to do so without sarcastic comments, without "RTFM" and without telling people "just use Google."