Apparently, if you consider only that other OS you can make a proposal look good. Against MacOS and GNU/Linux the costs are staggering. TDSB has 60K PCs and 256 support people, 240 machines per support person. RedHat and others can set up systems where one support person can deal with thousands of machines. Could it be that the IT people did not believe CMS’ advice and lay themselves off upon migrating to Vista? Chuckle… The truth is only M$ and its partners benefit when a school board migrates to a product from M$. On top of that students are harmed by the exposure, instilling dependency on that other OS.
We use Linux.
Now, Diane is well aware of the problems that Windows Users face. She's been one of them for as long as she's been using a computer but once she sat in proximity to a Linux computer and someone who knew how to use it, that all changed.
Diane is retired from the Airline Industry. She spent years in the Accounting and Purchasing Divisions of several airlines and companies so she's no stranger to spreadsheets and databases. In the last part of her career she also used many on line applications to do her work.
Linux provides the basis for much virtualization technology -- Xen, VMware, KVM and OpenVZ, for example. Cloud vendors that use Linux exclusively, such as Amazon.com, attest to the fact that Linux provides the perfect virtualization backdrop for their services.
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Linux is no longer viewed as just an anomaly among "real" data center OSes. Its developers and converts have made it a respectable and competitive choice for businesses that seek to lower their IT overhead and regain some profit. Converting to Linux isn't difficult, even for those who find themselves drowning in a sea of proprietary software and hardware. It's a real choice for developers, cloud vendors, database vendors, virtualization companies, hosting companies and you, the business owner. Linux is here to stay. Linux is a real commercial offering. Linux has proven itself as a real data center OS. And, the developers keep it real for everyone.
In a matter of weeks, Google's very first operating system aimed squarely at computers will be upon us: Chrome OS. As Dana Blankenhorn notes, Google has a FUD engine going surrounding the operating system that rivals the very best FUD campaigns from Microsoft's past. Google is spoon feeding us 100 Chrome experiments, and appears to be wooing powerful hardware makers such as Dell. Like the iPad, the pent-up love for all things Google will probably make Chrome OS a short-term success, but where does it really fit in?
Now a Linux version is available. TeamViewer offers a bit more than just remote desktop sharing. It comes bundled with a host of other features such as the ability to manage share lists, record sessions and have voice conversations using VoIP.
rekonq has a clean minimalistic interface – the type of interface most web browsers prefer nowadays. It has a Chrome type wrench icon from where you get the various browser options. There is also the bookmark next to it. Like Google Chrome, it has an integrated URL bar from where you can search the web, your history or simply enter the URL. It also serves as an indicator when a page is being loaded.
Free Linux music packages Ardour, Hydrogen and Jack will help you fall in love with a whole new world of creative possibilities
A few things I’d like to see implemented include some of the more helpful items that were in Amarok 1.4 such as being able to add a “play count” column in the queue display list, and some of the playlist builder functions (“random 50ââ¬Â³ and “random 100ââ¬Â³ were two that I used a lot in Amarok 1.4).
That said, I’m extremely happy with what it can do as it currently stands, and those wants are pretty minor compared to what they’ve already done with it. I’m really kind of amazed that there isn’t much buzz surrounding this great application. So here’s to hoping that this quiet little project gets the attention it deserves!
When I was still using Windows, I remembered playing or should I say scratching with the popular audio/video mixing software made by Atomix Productions called VirtualDJ. Though I didn't really enjoyed DJing that much, I missed those days when I finally get to somehow experience what it's like to be a DJ. So I started looking for DJ software program that I could install on my Linux box. Unfortunately, I only found a few and most of them are really old or are poor in quality if compared to VirtualDJ. But there is one Linux-compatible, free and open source DJ software program that is quiet promising, and its name is Mixxx.
As we continue on with our travels down the Xfce path, I thought it would be smart to highlight the Xfce calendaring application Orage. This tool is not an “all in one” tool like Evolution, nor does it have all of the bells and whistles of the Mozilla Sunbird calendar. But what it does, it does well and does so without taking up tons of your resources or your desktop real estate.
Puppy will run upon pretty much anything out there.
It gives you a blisteringly fast machine with a sensible selection of pre-installed applications.
The open source KVM virtualization technology is being promoted by many different vendors, often as a mechanism to help enable cloud deployments. Among the biggest backers of KVM are Linux vendors Red Hat and Ubuntu, though in at least one use case the solutions they're marketing aren't necessarily the solutions that cloud deployments are using.
Hosting provider The Planet recently launched a new cloud service offering built on KVM technology without the benefit of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) or Red Hat's Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Instead The Planet has chosen to take its own path, leveraging the freely available Ubuntu Lucid LTS release and without engaging in a commercial contract with Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu.
Stemming from Canonical's relatively modest customer base, especially outside of cloud deployments, the vendor behind Ubuntu doesn't have to worry about existing customers doing a similar price comparison between the pay-per-usage cloud approach and traditional support subscriptions. This is definitely an advantage for Canonical over Red Hat.
Lucid, 10.04, was released nearly 3 months ago and still to this date the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo Team has not received our shipment. Not only has our shipment not been received but nobody seems to be answering my emails. Getting a bit tired of telling everyone, nope you can’t have any CDs because I don’t have any CDs, and not being able to have a decent gathering to promote Ubuntu because we have zero materials. Maybe this blog post will make its way to someone’s desk that can help or who possibly cares.
Ubuntu 10.10 (codename Maverick Meerkat) is well into the development cycle, with the planned celebrity release date of 10 October 2010 (10/10/10). The development time frame of Ubuntu is quite condensed, and this is managed with a number of stages. These stages tend to symbolise milestones of the schedule, and usually refer to a restriction on what activity can happen during this time.
We have long passed the Alpha 1 CD image stage and I anticipate the release of Alpha 2 by the time you read this. You will no doubt be eager to test Alpha 3, which is currently scheduled for 5 August. Alpha 3 will be the last CD image created before the development of Maverick starts entering the second half of the ‘freeze’ stages.
The fragmentation of Linux has become a hot topic in recent weeks as industry leaders debate how the community can collaborate to compete against single, vertical operating systems without creating an ecosystem that pulls the community in too many directions at once to be truly effective. As FOSS developers work at a fever pitch to create Linux-based OSes, handheld devices, enterprise-level servers, and mobile phones, the point at which they join forces can make the difference between getting a leg up on other operating systems and lagging behind.
Tests run by independent benching site Carrypad confirmed that Google's open source OS took a licking. The benchmark was the Sunspider Javascript test. This is a processer intensive test that measures how quickly applications get displayed in a web browser.
As I begin a series of tests on the Aava prototype phone today, the first thing I wanted to get out of the way was a Sunspider javascript test. It’s CPU-intensive and forms an important part of the chain of events that take place to get a web application displayed on your browser. Yes, it’s one of many variables but it’s a good indicator of CPU performance.
iOS game developer OpenFeint has announced that the company will be bringing its open-source gaming platform to Google's Android OS.
Apple ranked number two with 24.4 percent share and Microsoft third with 13.2 percent, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent.
Android’s growth should come as no surprise to mobile enthusiasts. More than 20 Android phones are available in the U.S. currently. Handset makers such as LG and Samsung that have been slower than rivals Motorola and HTC in adopting Android are now planning to launch new Android devices.
Earlier this week, LG said it will have two Android smartphones and an Android-based tablet available by the end of the year. Samsung has already announced that its first 4G Android phone on Sprint will be available this summer.
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE HOUSE Google has updated its Android software development kit (SDK) to match the latest version of Android 2.2.
MindTree is using open source software to build the applications. This was the choice of the authorities in charge of the project. But Lahiri says open source such as Linux is scalable and mature enough for a project like this. Mindshare will use some vendor applications.
One of the better blogs you might like to read up on in follow up to this event comes from Scott Wilson who talked about open innovation, development and collaboration. Wilson said that his focus was on barriers to community as he discussed areas such as, "Governance, diversity and personal barriers to engaging in an Open Source development community and how as a member of such a community you can make a contribution."
Five years on, Simon Brock catches up with those original open source projects he covered in this very column
It’s now five years since this column changed its title to Open Source, before which it had been restricted to Unix server software. We changed it because so much of the open-source Unix software we covered was also available for Windows and the Mac, and a broader remit seemed more sensible.
“Does this mean that [moving forward] all newsrooms will publish using Scribus or will tone all photos using Gimp? No, but if an operation — part Journal Register or an outside company — wanted to, they could,” the press release read. “The tools we discovered, trained on and used as part of the Ben Franklin Project could allow a news organization to throw away their old methods and start anew.”
The person making these comments is a professional writer who I follow, with several books published. So the opinion about the software not being feature rich is a valid issue and being too complicated is something that I too find with writing software in general. But that the author feels it is less feature rich because it is Open Source, or more correctly, because it is free is something that bothers me.
Product Development Kit (PDK) 3.0, released today by the Symbian Foundation, is targeted at device developers. The kit includes all the source and binary files required to generate the new S^3 operating system and run it in the supplied emulator.
Both Opera and Google are obsessed with the speed of their browser. With each release, each claim to be the fastest browser. Google has even gone on to make a game to demonstrate the speed of its browser Chrome. With today’s release of Opera 10.60, Opera is now claiming that it is the fastest browser on earth. So, we decided to see if it is indeed the fastest browser or if it is Google Chrome. We also decided to throw in the latest dev build of Chromium and Firefox 4.0 beta to the test.
Mozilla is perhaps best known today for its Firefox web browser. Underlying that browser however is the open source license that enables its development community to thrive. The Mozilla Public License (MPL) has remained nearly untouched since 1999 and now at long last is undergoing a process of evolution.
If you're slightly bewildered by all the buzz over this new technology with the funny-sounding moniker, you’re not alone. The official story is that Hadoop was the name of the inventor's kid's stuffed elephant. However, for most IT professionals, it could easily be an acronym for "Heck, Another Darn Obscure Open-source Project." The fact that Hadoop, managed by Apache, includes subprojects with similarly opaque names--such as Pig, Hive, Chukwa, and ZooKeeper—contributes to the queasy feeling that this is an untamed menagerie of squealing beasties.
Open source technology is going to seriously impact the cloud computing world, and there are two main reasons why: Open source software is essentially free, and it is not generally encumbered by the software license models of proprietary software. Many proprietary software vendors, such as Microsoft and Oracle, are trying to maintain old and expensive license models, even though they impede the flexibility gained by virtualization and cloud computing.
Since Ingres was re-created in 2006 we have tripled our revenues and established ourselves as the second-largest open source company after Red Hat.
While Consona has aquired a number of software companies based on this model, that doesn’t seem to be the strategy behind the Compiere deal. Compiere brings only 130 customers to Consona and I doubt Compiere’s open-source business model was generating big profits. Instead of buying customers and profits, Consona seems to be thinking ahead about how they can lead the market in the next generation of technology. The acquisition is more about growing organically – selling more Compiere systems – than it is about harvesting customer support contracts.
The PC-BSD project brings a user-friendly pre-configured KDE desktop to the FreeBSD community. Which is all well and good, but what if you're more of a GNOME person? Well, it turns out there is a project in the works for you too. The GhostBSD project is in its early stages, but it's paving the way for users who enjoy running GNOME on a FreeBSD base without any configuring or installing extra software. I had a chance to exchange emails with Eric Turgeon, the project's founder and lead developer.
Have you ever heard someone saying “Intellectual Property is a dumb term, please do not use it” in the parliament? Well it happened in the German Bundestag: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoeren said it during the internet enquote this week. Afterwards one of the other experts, Prof. Rainer Kuhlen supported him and added that collecting societies abuse this term “so they can get goods with licensing agreements and circumvent copyright law”. (I already wrote about that in German blog entry.)
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A bit later in 2004, Richard Stallman also wrote about that topic, in his article “Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It’s a Seductive Mirage”:It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.
John Ferlito, president of Linux Australia, has revealed that he and several associates are developing a way for open-source users to interface with the government's Standard Business Reporting (SBR) system.
National Linux advocacy body Linux Australia has added its support for the federal government’s Standard Business Reporting initiative by planning an open source SBR integration project, meanwhile work begins at the ATO on AUSkey for Linux.
It wouldn't be anything really new, either, for the U.K. government to look toward open source. In 2003, the government signed a five-year agreement with Sun to look at using some of its open source systems in government.
Sara Coffin likes to think of Schreibstuck as the dance equivalent of open-source software that allows members of the public to modify and redistribute the original code to suit their own needs.
AOL’s MapQuest has announced an interesting partnership open-source online mapping outfit OpenStreetMap. Through the partnership, MapQuest will begin using data provided by OpenStreetMap to power a version of its product. This new product, available for now in the UK at open.mapquest.co.uk, will reside separately from the main site and will not use any commercial mapping data.
OSCON this year will be a delight for anybody interested in working with hardware. A full open source hardware track offers a range of talks to get you started with hardware hacking, and gives a great insight into the current options for prototyping.
The open source Python language is at a crossroads with two major versions available to developers. The end of the road for the Python 2.x branch is now a little closer, with the release of Python 2.7 this week.
Python 2.7 is intended to be the last major Python 2.x release as the open source project aims to help developers migrate to the newer Python 3.x release codebase. Python 3.x first hit general availability in December of 2008. Though the Python 2.x branch is now at the end of the line in terms of new releases, Python 2.x still has a lot of life left in it.
There are already a number of Flash alternatives available to users, including the promising open source Lightspark and Gnash players.
The most interesting alternative, however, is not a replacement Flash player but a separate technology that converts existing Flash content into HTML5 and Javascript, on the fly.
Stuart sends over a column from a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Terry Savage, that I could have sworn was satire until someone convinced me that it's not. Savage is apparently a "financial" columnist, who apparently is a bit confused about her basic economics. Over the long weekend, she decided to celebrate the American way by berating and lecturing some children who set up a lemonade stand because they wanted to give away the lemonade for free. According to Savage, these kids represent all that is wrong with America. I'm not joking.
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Wait, what? You know what the Declaration of Independence also didn't include? Anything about how much "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" costs. You know why? Because it has nothing to do with whether or not something costs money or is free. So that's not "something to think about" because it makes no sense.
Given the massive backlash against Best Buy for this move, it appears the company is backtracking quickly. Best Buy's CEO did a blog post saying the company had "completed its investigation" and Brian was being offered his job back. The CEO also points out -- as people did in the comments, that some of the original concern wasn't so much about the famed iPhone/Evo video (which doesn't mention Best Buy), but other videos he had done that had mentioned the company (which have since been taken down).
Roger Thompson chief research officer at AVG revealed a Javascript injection attack that lures users by providing a link to a video, which it claims "99% of people can't watch". The link forwards users to another page that asks them to paste Javascript code into their browser's address bar.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is embarking on a secret domestic surveillance project dubbed "Perfect Citizen", intended to monitor and protect important national infrastructure such as power grids and transport systems.
The National Security Agency plans to launch a program aimed at assessing vulnerabilities and developing capabilities to help secure critical infrastructure like power plants, air traffic control systems and the electrical grid.
The results of a Cyber-Ark global survey show that 35 percent of respondents believe their company’s highly-sensitive information has been handed over to competitors. Thirty-seven percent of the IT professionals surveyed cited ex-employees as the most likely source of this abuse of trust.
At a minimum, once U.S. firms will be required to detail their payments to foreign governments, the citizens of these countries will know how much their governments are receiving and from whom, giving them a fighting chance to hold their government accountable for investing those funds in critical needs such as food, health and education.
The fate of the Wall Street reform bill is up in the air after the death of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. The bill is a single confirmed vote short of the 60 votes needed to get past a threatened filibuster by Senate Republicans. From day one, the Bankster team has supported the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and that is still one of the strongest pieces of the bill. It is a great time to send off the last emails to Senators telling them to put a new cop on the block in the form of a CFPB.
In addition to recommending a professional PR campaign to try and coax tourists back to Arizona in the wake of the state's tough new immigration law, the task force appointed by Governor Jan Brewer suggested that Arizona try to "change the tone of the dialogue" by talking about the effects that tourism boycotts have on vulnerable employees within the state.
It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure."
For the first time, thanks to an ongoing "open records" investigation by the Food Rights Network, the public and the press have easy online access to dozens of internal SFPUC files, documenting the strange tale of Chez Sludge, or how the sewage industry bedded Alice Waters.
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San Francisco's SFPUC is in the forefront of the latest maneuver in this toxic scam, "composting" its toxic sludge and marketing it as "organic Biosolids compost," thus co-opting a venerable terms used in Organic agriculture. This greenwashing scam slipped rather unnoticed by the public from 2007 until the fall of 2009. That is when the San Francisco Chronicle reported on an effort by two public interest groups who petitioned the [SFPUC to halt the program. In December 2009, the The Atlantic reported that the city had rejected the petition and that the SFPUC was preparing to increase its toxic sludge to gardens giveaway ten-fold in 2010.
The wireless industry urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) not to mandate that cell phone companies make their billing practices clearer, a possibility the agency is considering in its effort to mitigate "bill shock."
The commission started a proceeding in May seeking comment on whether it should make regulations to prevent consumers from receiving higher-than-expected cell phone bills.
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An FCC survey released in May picked up national attention for reporting that nearly one in five American consumers have been subject to sudden and unexpected rises in their monthly cellular phone bills.
This interesting abuse or misuse of copyright law again shows an old fox obeying the law but getting what he wanted, including great publicity in a campaign where it is not all that easy to get news coverage.
Sharron Angle has resorted to an unusual maneuver to counter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's attacks on her past quotes and positions, the Reid campaign has announced: A cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Reid no longer republish Angle's previous campaign website.
CMR International, a firm that tracks that performance of the pharmaceuticals sector, released a rather depressing report on research and development productivity last week. The report will set you back $10,000, but highlights have been made public:
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- Pharma is having a tough time selling its new drugs: New drugs launched within the last five years accounted for less than 7 percent of industry sales in 2009, down from 8 percent in 2008, highlighting the big problems that companies are having in trying to reinvigorate their portfolios.
There are so many reasons to love Woot, including their recent awesome letter and video about their acquisition. But, even better may be that in today's Woot offering, they mock the Associated Press for its coverage of the Woot acquisition, because the AP just happens to have also copied text from the awesome Woot letter. Now, that's all well and good for most publications, but this is the AP that we're talking about. The same AP that threatens bloggers for copying headlines and snippets. The same AP that insists it needs "hot news" to protect others from "free riding" on its work. And, most importantly, the same AP that has a famously ridiculous pricelist for quoting five words or more from an AP article.
It's no secret that the Associated Press is hot for the "hot news" doctrine (even as they seem blind to how it will come back to bite them). However, most of the lawsuits involving "hot news" to date have strayed away from really testing the legal limits of, say, blogs writing about newspaper stories and quoting parts of the story in the process. That may be changing. Dean Singleton is the chair of the Associated Press, as well as the CEO of MediaNews, one of the big newspaper chains out there. Apparently he's decided to test the waters on threatening bloggers over "hot news."
THE composers of the legendary 1980s international pop smash hit Down Under have been ordered to pay five per cent of earnings from the song after it was found to have breached copyright law.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of academics and public policy groups are urging a federal judge to dismiss a criminal indictment that could give websites extraordinary power to dictate what behavior becomes a computer crime.
Neil Hull had bought a Performing Rights Society (PRS) licence... however, the relatively unknown Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) took him to court because, unbeknown to Neil, he needed a licence from IT, too
Late last year, Summit sued to shut down an unofficial Twilight fan magazine, in part for using stock publicity photos that Summit had distributed to the news media. The production company had licensed the use of the photos for "journalistic purposes," and it argued that Beckett Media, the magazine's publisher, violated the license because its use of the pictures wasn't journalistic enough.
The MPAA is at it again, going after movie pirates. This time, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is helping out the movie industry, and they've seized nine different domains: Movies-links.TV, nowmovies.com, thepiratecity.org, filespump.com, planetmoviez.com, zml.org, tvshack.net, ninjavideo.net and thisninja.net. These were mostly ad-supported movie streaming sites that showed pirated versions of current theatrical releases.
According to the Wall Street Journal, federal authorities seized 9 domain names of sites that were offering pirated movies.
The nine domain names were registered using U.S.-based registrars, allowing authorities to take control of their site addresses.
The Federal Court of Appeal issued is decision today [not online yet] on whether Internet providers can be considered broadcasters within the context of the Broadcasting Act. The case is the result of last year's CRTC New Media decision in which many cultural groups called on the Commission to establish an ISP levy to fund Canadian content. The ISPs argued that such a levy was illegal since they fell under the Telecommunications Act, not the Broadcasting Act. The cultural groups argued that ISPs should be considered broadcasters in the case of the transmission of video programs. The CRTC punted the issue to the Federal Court of Appeal.
News that TalkTalk and BT are challenging the Digital Economy Act in court is extremely welcome. It is a vindication of our view that the legislation should not have been rammed through parliament in the dying days of the last government.