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119 items tagged "Software"

Slashdot: IT

Options For Good (Not Expensive) Office Backbone For a Small Startup

Posted: May 23rd, 2012, 4:33pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "I recently joined a startup, we have about 10 people altogether in various roles / responsibilities, and I handle most of the system / IT responsibilities (when I'm not in my primary role, which is software development). When trying to price licenses, I'm finding Microsoft offerings require quite a bit of upfront cost, so I'm trying the alternative solutions. LibreOffice and Google Docs work fine for the most part (we also have some MS Office users); however I'm having trouble getting a good / cheap / free solution to email, contacts, calendaring and user management in general. We have some Mac users, Windows users, need desktop clients for most of these uses as well — and there doesn't seem to be a solution that satisfies these myriad combinations." (Read more, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mercedes Can Now Update Car Software Remotely

Posted: April 9th, 2012, 11:03am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

MatthewVD writes "Our cars run millions of lines of code that need constant and, often, critical updates. Jim Motavalli writes that Mercedes-Benz's new mbrace2 'cloud infotainment system' has a secret capability: it can update software automatically and wirelessly. In a process called 'reflashing,' the Mercedes system turns on the car operating system (CU), downloads the new application, then cuts itself off. With companies like Fisker paying dearly for constant recalls for software problems, automakers will likely rush to embrace this technology. No more USBs in the dashboard!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: It's World Backup Day; How Do You Back Up?

Posted: March 31st, 2012, 5:29pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

MrSeb writes "Today is World Backup Day! The premise is that you back up your computers on March 31, so that you're not an April Fool if your hard drive crashes tomorrow. How do Slashdot users back up? RAID? Multiple RAIDs? If you're in LA, on a fault line, do you keep a redundant copy of your data in another geographic region?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
XBMC V11 Eden Has Been Released

Posted: March 25th, 2012, 5:06am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

New submitter themib writes "After only two release candidates XBMC v11.0 Eden has been released. The latest version contains many updates and new features, including: Addon Rollbacks, Confluence improvements, Dirty region rendering, a new JPEG decoder, movie scraping, better network support, a new upgraded Weather service. This announcement also heralds the new XBMCbuntu Final."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Beta 1 Released

Posted: March 1st, 2012, 10:25pm CET by Unknown Lamer

Tags: Software

donadony writes with news about what will become the next LTS release of Ubuntu. From the article: "It's time to take another look at what is happening with the development of Ubuntu 12.04. As it stands, the first Beta of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin has been released. I just updated my own system. What changed since Alpha? Not much, really. In fact, there's really nothing groundbreaking or any new features added. Unity has been updated to version 5.4.0 which also sees the introduction of the new HUD feature. HUD still apparently has many outstanding bugs, but developers maintain that all bugs will be ironed out before Ubuntu 12.04 goes gold. Also added were recommendations to Ubuntu software center, and a new tool called 'privacy' and other small new features."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Ask Slashdot: How Do You Install Ubuntu On 30 Laptops and Keep Them In Sync?

Posted: February 26th, 2012, 6:32pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

New submitter spadadot writes "I am setting up a new event in France (Open du Web), where between 15 and 30 laptops running Ubuntu Linux will be available. They came with Windows preinstalled and it must stay for other purposes. I'd like to take care of only one of them (resize the hard drive, install Ubuntu, add additional software and apply custom settings) and effortlessly replicate everything to the others including hard drive resizing (unattended installation). After replicating, what should I do if I need to install new software or change some settings without manually repeating the same task on each one of them? Should I look into FAI, iPXE, Clonezilla, OCS Inventory NG? Other configuration management software? I would also like to reset the laptops to the original environment after the event."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ask Slashdot: How Do You Install Ubuntu On 30 Laptops and Keep Them In Sync?

Posted: February 26th, 2012, 6:32pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

New submitter spadadot writes "I am setting up a new event in France (Open du Web), where between 15 and 30 laptops running Ubuntu Linux will be available. They came with Windows preinstalled and it must stay for other purposes. I'd like to take care of only one of them (resize the hard drive, install Ubuntu, add additional software and apply custom settings) and effortlessly replicate everything to the others including hard drive resizing (unattended installation). After replicating, what should I do if I need to install new software or change some settings without manually repeating the same task on each one of them? Should I look into FAI, iPXE, Clonezilla, OCS Inventory NG? Other configuration management software? I would also like to reset the laptops to the original environment after the event."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Secure Syslog Replacement Proposed

Posted: November 23rd, 2011, 9:43pm CET by Unknown Lamer

Tags: Software

LinuxScribe writes with this bit from IT World: "In an effort to foil crackers' attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, and improve the syslog process as a whole, developers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers are proposing a new tool called The Journal. Using key/value pairs in a binary format, The Journal is already stirring up a lot of objections." Log entries are "cryptographically hashed along with the hash of the previous entry in the file" resulting in a verifiable chain of entries. This is being done as an extension to systemd (git branch). The design doesn't just make logging more secure, but introduces a number of overdue improvements to the logging process. It's even compatible with the standard syslog interface allowing it to either coexist with or replace the usual syslog daemon with minimal disruption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

How Ford Will Upgrade Owners' Display Screens

Posted: November 19th, 2011, 2:28pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

gManZboy writes "'Sometime early next year, Ford will mail USB sticks to about 250,000 owners of vehicles with its advanced touchscreen control panel. The stick will contain a major upgrade to the software for that screen. With it, Ford breaks the model in which the technology in a car essentially stayed unchanged from assembly line to junk yard' — and Ford becomes a software company. This shift created a hot new tech job at Ford: human-machine interface engineers — people who come from a range of backgrounds, from software development to mechanical engineers, and who can live in the worlds of art and science at once."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Linus' Lessons On Software Dev Management

Posted: September 26th, 2011, 9:14pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

Esther Schindler writes "In this interview with Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Linus Torvalds shares hard-won wisdom about managing software development projects, including encouraging community involvement, the importance of programming tools, and ensuring the project stays on track. For instance, regarding getting people to contribute to your project, he says, 'If you start off with some "kumba-ya feeling" where you think people from all the world are going to come together to make a better world by working together on your project, you probably won't be going very far.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Wikimedia Foundation Releases Their Server Config

Posted: September 21st, 2011, 9:26am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has released their Puppet configuration in a public git repository. They describe this as the first step in a project called Wikimedia Test/Dev Labs, letting users participate in the operations of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

A Linux Kernel More Stable Than -stable

Posted: August 17th, 2011, 12:04am CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: Software

jfruhlinger writes '-stable' is the term for the current Linux release most suitable for general use; but as Linux moves into more and more niches, there's a need for a kernel more stable than -stable, which is updated fairly regularly. Both enterprise and embedded systems in particular need a longer horizon of kernel stability, which prompted Greg Kroah-Hartman, then at SuSE, to establish a -longterm kernel, which will remain stable for up to two years. Now there are moves to get this schedule formalized — moves that are a good sign of Linux's long-term health."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Linux Kernel More Stable Than -stable

Posted: August 17th, 2011, 12:04am CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: Software

jfruhlinger writes '-stable' is the term for the current Linux release most suitable for general use; but as Linux moves into more and more niches, there's a need for a kernel more stable than -stable, which is updated fairly regularly. Both enterprise and embedded systems in particular need a longer horizon of kernel stability, which prompted Greg Kroah-Hartman, then at SuSE, to establish a -longterm kernel, which will remain stable for up to two years. Now there are moves to get this schedule formalized — moves that are a good sign of Linux's long-term health."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Qt For the Console

Posted: July 19th, 2011, 7:35pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "Girish Ramakrishnan has written a Lighthouse plugin that lets one run Qt applications on the console. Old timers would recall the April Fool's story. Except it's for real this time." It's more of a neat hack than anything since it doesn't support things like mouse events yet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Qt For the Console

Posted: July 19th, 2011, 7:35pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "Girish Ramakrishnan has written a Lighthouse plugin that lets one run Qt applications on the console. Old timers would recall the April Fool's story. Except it's for real this time." It's more of a neat hack than anything since it doesn't support things like mouse events yet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Ask Slashdot: Best Small-Footprint Modern Browser?

Posted: April 30th, 2011, 8:29pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Annirak writes "I've recently started a paid internship at a company which is expanding faster than their IT department can supply new hardware. As a consequence, I've been issued a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB of RAM. Currently, I am using Firefox 4, but I find that it eats up far too much of my limited RAM. I'd rather not give up some of the more modern UI features that are offered by the current versions of Firefox and Chrome, but I need a smaller footprint. What other browsers are out there which could help me conserve resources?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feds Pay Millions For Bogus Spy Software

Posted: February 20th, 2011, 2:14pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: Software

gosuperninja writes "The US Government paid tens of millions of dollars to Dennis Montgomery because he said he had created software that could decode secret Al-Qaeda messages embedded in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. Even though the CIA figured out that his software was fraud in 2003, other defense agencies continued to believe in it. To date, the government has not prosecuted Montgomery, most likely to save itself the embarrassment."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36

Posted: January 17th, 2011, 2:51am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Opera Goes To 11, With Extensions and Tab Stacks

Posted: December 19th, 2010, 2:11am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

surveyork writes "Opera Software released Opera browser 11 for desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). The main features are support for extensions similar to Chrome and Tab Stacks, Opera's version of tab management. The extension catalog is still small, with roughly 200 extensions, but steadily growing. The browser is very fast — Chrome-fast — and lightweight, with a new installer which is 30% smaller than the one in the previous version. Other enhancements include visual mouse gestures and better address field. There's no hardware acceleration yet, but it could be coming in a further dot release and benefit XP users as well as Mac, Linux and Windows 7/Vista users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AVG 2011 Update Causes Widespread Problems For 64-Bit Windows

Posted: December 2nd, 2010, 10:00pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

phx_zs writes "Last night's mandatory update of AVG 2011 Free edition has caused most 64-bit Windows 7 PCs to fail while loading Windows. On their website they have an FAQ with instructions on how to repair the problem using a boot CD or USB device."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Aussie Government Gives PDF the Thumbs Down

Posted: December 1st, 2010, 7:41am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

littlekorea writes "The central IT office of the Australian Government has advised its agencies to offer alternatives to Adobe's Portable Document Format to ensure folks with impaired vision are able to consume information on the Web. A Government-funded study found that PDFs can present themselves as image-only files to screen readers, rendering the information contained within them unreadable for the vision impaired."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Opera 11 Beta Released, With Extensions Support

Posted: November 24th, 2010, 8:40am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "Opera 11 Beta has just been released and now includes support for extensions. Also new in this release Tab Stacking, Visual Mouse Gestures, performance improvements, new installer, and much more. Even with its many new features, Opera 11 is 30% smaller than Opera 10.60. That means that Opera downloads more quickly and installs in fewer steps. There are over 130 extensions and climbing including NoScript and AdBlock! Extensions can be found here."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

CDE — Making Linux Portability Easy

Posted: November 13th, 2010, 1:36am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

ihaque writes "A Stanford researcher, Philip Guo, has developed a tool called CDE to automatically package up a Linux program and all its dependencies (including system-level libraries, fonts, etc!) so that it can be run out of the box on another Linux machine without a lot of complicated work setting up libraries and program versions or dealing with dependency version hell. He's got binaries, source code, and a screencast up. Looks to be really useful for large cluster/cloud deployments as well as program sharing. Says Guo, 'CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

10 Oddly Useful Specialty Web Browsers

Posted: October 23rd, 2010, 6:43pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE to uncover 10 alternative browsers that offer specialized advantages for 3-D searching, social networking, easy scriptability, powerful page manipulation, and the like. Each provides a targeted browsing environment, enabling users to browse Web tables into spreadsheets, browse leaner, browser in text, browse socially, browse musically, or browse smarter on the Mac. 'A purist might object that these hybrids are not much different from a standard browser with extra plug-ins. There's some truth to this, but not always — some of the unique capabilities can only be done deep inside the software. In any case, the job of parsing the terms and creating an exact definition of the Web browser isn't as much fun as embracing the idea that there are dozens of alternatives.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Opera Embraces Extensions For v.11

Posted: October 14th, 2010, 9:11pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

dkd903 writes "Opera is one of the most solid browsers around. It is very fast, extremely customizable, and has a lot of functionality that others do not have. Opera is also a very strong supporter of Web standards; it was one of the first browsers to pass the ACID 3 test. However, Opera has always been confined to a relatively small user-base because of one critical thing — lack of extensions. Well, that is about to change — at least the extensions part. Today, it has been announced that Opera 11 will support extensions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DHS CyberSecurity Misses 1085 Holes On Own Network

Posted: September 9th, 2010, 3:24pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: Software

Tootech writes "In a case of 'physician, heal thyself,' the agency — which forms the operational arm of DHS's National Cyber Security Division, or NCSD — failed to keep its own systems up to date with the latest software patches. Auditors working for the DHS inspector general ran a sweep of US-CERT using the vulnerability scanner Nessus and turned up 1,085 instances of 202 high-risk security holes. 'The majority of the high-risk vulnerabilities involved application and operating system and security software patches that had not been deployed on computer systems located in Virginia,' reads the report from assistant inspector general Frank Deffer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Schedules Chrome 6, 7, and 8 For This Year

Posted: July 24th, 2010, 12:10am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "Google said that it will be releasing a new stable version of Chrome every six weeks, which is about twice as fast as the release pace today. The goal is to make new features available when they are done and to make Chrome releases more predictable. Has anyone complained that there were too few new Chrome releases? Mozilla has been releasing a major new browser update twice a year and Microsoft is on an 18-24 month pace. Firefox's 4.0 Beta 2 is scheduled for release soon, and it appears that Mozilla is somewhat paranoid about the Black Hat Conference. 3.6.6 was planned to be the original 'Black Hat release'; now we are at version 3.6.7 and Mozilla has already a build candidate of 3.6.8 that will be released depending on news coming out of Black Hat."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Opera 10.60 Released, With Faster JS, WebM Video Support

Posted: July 4th, 2010, 10:46pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

teh31337one writes "Four short months after Opera 10.50, the latest version of Opera's lightweight web browser has been released. It not only claims to be the fastest browser, but also the first final browser with WebM video support. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux." Update: 07/04 21:53 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is Opera 10.60, rather than 10.6. Thanks to the readers who spotted this goof.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Opera 10.60 Released, With Faster JS, WebM Video Support

Posted: July 4th, 2010, 10:46pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

teh31337one writes "Four short months after Opera 10.50, the latest version of Opera's lightweight web browser has been released. It not only claims to be the fastest browser, but also the first final browser with WebM video support. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux." Update: 07/04 21:53 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is Opera 10.60, rather than 10.6. Thanks to the readers who spotted this goof.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

WordPress 3.0 Released

Posted: June 17th, 2010, 9:21pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download and comes with 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements. Major new features in this release include a new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them easily to implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 3:37am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

climenole writes "Finally! The much discussed F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Benchmarked and Reviewed

Posted: May 26th, 2010, 9:19pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware just posted an interesting review of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It includes an expanded set of OS benchmarks that they also performed on the previous LTS release (8.04), to see just how much the mainstream Linux distro has progressed in two years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Benchmarked and Reviewed

Posted: May 26th, 2010, 9:19pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware just posted an interesting review of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It includes an expanded set of OS benchmarks that they also performed on the previous LTS release (8.04), to see just how much the mainstream Linux distro has progressed in two years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

IT Infrastructure As a House of Cards

Posted: May 25th, 2010, 12:20am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia takes up a topic many IT pros face: 'When you've attached enough Band-Aids to the corpus that it's more bandage than not, isn't it time to start over?' The constant need to apply temporary fixes that end up becoming permanent are fast pushing many IT infrastructures beyond repair. Much of the blame falls on the products IT has to deal with. 'As processors have become faster and RAM cheaper, the software vendors have opted to dress up new versions in eye candy and limited-use features rather than concentrate on the foundation of the application. To their credit, code that was written to run on a Pentium-II 300MHz CPU will fly on modern hardware, but that code was also written to interact with a completely different set of OS dependencies, problems, and libraries. Yes, it might function on modern hardware, but not without more than a few Band-Aids to attach it to modern operating systems,' Venezia writes. And yet breaking this 'vicious cycle of bad ideas and worse implementations' by wiping the slate clean is no easy task. Especially when the need for kludges isn't apparent until the software is in the process of being implemented. 'Generally it's too late to change course at that point.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Tom's Hardware On the Current Stable of Office Apps for Linux

Posted: April 29th, 2010, 10:23pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware is continuing its coverage of easy-to-install Linux applications for new users coming from Windows with the latest installment, Office Apps. This segment covers office suites, word processors, spreadsheet apps, presentation software, simple database titles, desktop publishing, project management, financial software, and more. All of these applications are available in the Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE repos or as .deb or .rpm packages. All of the links to download these applications are provided — even Windows .exe and Mac OS X .dmg files when available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tom's Hardware On the Current Stable of Office Apps For Linux

Posted: April 29th, 2010, 10:23pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware is continuing its coverage of easy-to-install Linux applications for new users coming from Windows with the latest installment, Office Apps. This segment covers office suites, word processors, spreadsheet apps, presentation software, simple database titles, desktop publishing, project management, financial software, and more. All of these applications are available in the Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE repos or as .deb or .rpm packages. All of the links to download these applications are provided — even Windows .exe and Mac OS X .dmg files when available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Review of Adobe Creative Suite 5

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 3:40pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: Software

Barence writes "Adobe today updated its Creative Suite software to version 5, and PC Pro has an absolutely massive collection of reviews. Along with an overview of the entire suite, from Design to Web to Production bundles, every individual component gets the full in-depth treatment. It includes video demonstrations of Photoshop CS5's fabulous Content-Aware fill trick and new Puppet Warp function; a long-awaited step up to 64-bit for Premiere Pro CS5; and big updates to Dreamweaver CS5, After Effects CS5, and the rest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Naming and Shaming Toxic Web Apps

Posted: April 5th, 2010, 8:55pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

itwbennett writes "Stanford Law School has released a wiki called WhatApp?, where users can rate all manner of web apps, browsers, mobile platforms, mobile apps, and social network apps on their security, privacy, and openness. Currently, the wiki 'lists some 200+ apps, but most of them have not been reviewed yet. So they need a lot of help,' writes blogger Dan Tynan. 'To review an app you select it from the list, then fill out a 9-question form rating its privacy, security, and openness, ranging from 5 (very private, secure, and open) to 1 (a steaming pile of vulnerabilities and violations).'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Opens Apps Marketplace

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 11:27pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

snydeq writes "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap, and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard, and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Are All Bugs Shallow? Questioning Linus's Law

Posted: February 16th, 2010, 5:34am CET by kdawson

Tags: Software

root777 writes to point out a provocative blog piece by a Microsoft program manager, questioning one of the almost unquestioned tenets of open source development: that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Are they? Shawn Hernan looks at DARPA's Sardonix experiment and the Coverity static-analysis bug discovery program in open source projects to conclude that perhaps not enough eyeballs are in evidence. Is he wrong? Why? "Most members of the periphery [those outside the core developer group] do not have the necessary debugging skills ... the vast numbers of 'eyeballs' apparently do not exist. ... [C]ode review is hardly all that makes software more secure. Getting software right is very, very difficult. ... Code review alone is not sufficient. Testing is not sufficient. Tools are not sufficient. Features are not sufficient. None of the things we do in isolation are sufficient. To get software truly correct, especially to get it secure, you have to address all phases of the software development lifecycle, and integrate security into the day-to-day activities."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenOffice 3.2 Released

Posted: February 11th, 2010, 8:20pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

harmonise writes "Version 3.2 of the OpenOffice.org office suite is now available. This marks the tenth anniversary year of the office suite, with over three hundred million downloads recorded in total. The new features include faster start up times; improved compatibility with open standard (ODF) and proprietary file formats; improvements to all components, particularly the Calc spreadsheet, with over a dozen new or enhanced features; and the Chart module (usable throughout OpenOffice.org) has had a usability makeover as well as offering new chart types."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 10:30pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

OpenShot Video Editor Reaches Version 1.0

Posted: January 10th, 2010, 1:21am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "After only one year of development Jonathan Thomas has released version 1.0 of his impressive NLE for Linux. Based on the MLT Framework, OpenShot Video Editor has taken less time to reach this stage of development than any other Linux NLE. Dan Dennedy of Kino fame has also lent a helping hand ensuring that OpenShot has the stability and proven back-end that is needed in such a project."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Recession Turning Software Auditors Into Greedy Traffic Cops

Posted: January 9th, 2010, 3:46am CET by Soulskill

Tags: Software

judgecorp writes "As the recession bites, software auditors are cracking down, and some are simply exploiting loopholes and technicalities to meet their targets, according to analyst Forrester. They may be within their rights, but they aren't endearing themselves to users; Steve Ballmer faced weary customers in London last year, and admitted Windows licenses have deliberate 'gotchas.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
VMware Workstation vs. VirtualBox vs. Parallels

Posted: December 16th, 2009, 9:43pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy takes an in-depth look at VMware Workstation 7, VirtualBox 3.1, and Parallels Desktop 4, three technologies at the heart of 'the biggest shake-up for desktop virtualization in years.' The shake-up, which sees Microsoft's once promising Virtual PC off in the Windows 7 XP Mode weeds, has put VirtualBox — among the best free open source software available for Windows — out front as a general-purpose VM, filling the void left by VMware's move to make Workstation more appealing to developers and admins. Meanwhile, Parallels finally offers a Desktop for Windows on par with its Mac product, as well as Workstation 4 Extreme, which delivers near native performance for graphics, disk, and network I/O. 'There's some genuine innovation going on, especially in the areas of hardware support and application compatibility,' Kennedy writes. 'All support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux hosts and guests, and all have added compelling new VM management capabilities, ranging from automated snapshots to live VM migration.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Inkscape 0.47 Released

Posted: November 25th, 2009, 8:10am CET by kdawson

Tags: Software

derrida writes "After over a year of intensive development and refactoring, Inkscape 0.47 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, including: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more. Additionally, it would be wrong to not mention the hundreds of bug fixes. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X." We've been following the progress of Inkscape for years (2006, 2005, 2004).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft COFEE Leaked

Posted: November 8th, 2009, 3:05pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: Software

54mc writes "Crunchgear reports that Microsoft's long-searched-for forensics tool, COFEE, has been leaked. The tool started on a small, private tracker, but has since worked its way to The Pirate Bay. Not all those who have gotten hold of it are enthused, and reviews have ranged from 'disappointing' to 'useless.' From the article: 'You have absolutely no use for the program. It's not something like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, an expensive application that you download for the hell of it on the off-chance you need to put Dave Meltzer's face on Brett Hart's body as part of a message board thread. No, COFEE is 100 percent useless to you.'"
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Slashdot: Linux

Ryan Gordon Ends FatELF Universal Binary Effort

Posted: November 5th, 2009, 7:30pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: Software

recoiledsnake writes "A few years after the Con Kolivas fiasco, the FatELF project to implement the 'universal binaries' feature for Linux that allows a single binary file to run on multiple hardware platforms has been grounded. Ryan C. Gordon, who has ported a number of popular games and game servers to Linux, has this to say: 'It looks like the Linux kernel maintainers are frowning on the FatELF patches. Some got the idea and disagreed, some didn't seem to hear what I was saying, and some showed up just to be rude.' The launch of the project was recently discussed here. The FatELF project page and FAQ are still up."
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Slashdot: IT

Fixing Bugs, But Bypassing the Source Code

Posted: October 30th, 2009, 12:03am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

shreshtha contributes this snippet from MIT's Technology Review: "Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: 'delivering an immortal, invulnerable program.' In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, his group has developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes." Interestingly, this software doesn't need access to the source code of the target program.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ryan Gordon Wants To Bring Universal Binaries To Linux

Posted: October 25th, 2009, 1:12pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

wisesifu writes "One of the interesting features of Mac OS X is its 'universal binaries' feature that allows a single binary file to run natively on both PowerPC and Intel x86 platforms. While this comes at a cost of a larger binary file, it's convenient on the end-user and on software vendors for distributing their applications. While Linux has lacked such support for fat binaries, Ryan Gordon has decided this should be changed."
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Red Hat Spins Off JBoss 2.x As HornetQ

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 11:31am CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Several sources are reporting that Red Hat has spun off the 2.x release of the JBoss messaging protocol as HornetQ. The 1.x version of JBoss is still being supported in maintenance mode and will continue to be known by its original name. "HornetQ is an open source project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system. HornetQ is an example of Message Oriented Middleware. [...] HornetQ is designed with flexibility in mind: It's elegant POJO based design has minimal third party dependencies: Run HornetQ as a stand-alone messaging broker, run it in integrated in your favorite JEE application server, or run it embedded inside your own application. It's up to you."
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Slashdot: IT

Getting Through the FOSS License Minefield

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 4:03pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

dotancohen writes "Here's an exercise: Write a GPLed server for solving Freecell that the graphical game would communicate with using TCP/IP or a different IPC mechanism. Easy, right? Except for that pesky licensing bit. Our own Shlomi Fish gives an overview of the various options in picking up a licence for one's FOSS project, and tries to give some guidelines choosing one."
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Best Free Open Source Software For Windows

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 12:12am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

snydeq writes "InfoWorld surveys the FOSS-on-Windows landscape, detailing the 10 free open source solutions most likely to unseat proprietary offerings. 'Some, like TrueCrypt and VirtualBox, are real diamonds in the rough: enterprise-grade solutions that deliver many of the same bells and whistles of their commercial brethren, but for free. Others, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are already legendary, and their strong followings ensure their continued development and support at levels that rival the best proprietary solutions.'" Rather than click through 10 different pages, the slideshow presentation at least lets you hover over each page's link to preview the author's top picks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Emacs Hits Version 23

Posted: July 30th, 2009, 9:29pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."
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Emulated PC Enables Linux Desktop In Your Browser

Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 3:50pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Ianopolous writes "Classic DOOM and DSL Linux Desktop inside your Java-enabled browser! The latest JPC, the fast 100% Java x86 PC emulator, is now available with online demos and downloads. JPC is open source and is the most secure way of running x86 software ever — 2 layers (applet sandbox, JPC sandbox) of independently validated security make it the world's most secure means of isolating x86 software. Visit the website to try out some classic games and play around with Linux all within your web browser. Refresh = reboot!"
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Slashdot: Linux

Emulated PC Enables Linux Desktop In Your Browser

Posted: July 3rd, 2009, 3:50pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Ianopolous writes "Classic DOOM and DSL Linux Desktop inside your Java-enabled browser! The latest JPC, the fast 100% Java x86 PC emulator, is now available with online demos and downloads. JPC is open source and is the most secure way of running x86 software ever — 2 layers (applet sandbox, JPC sandbox) of independently validated security make it the world's most secure means of isolating x86 software. Visit the website to try out some classic games and play around with Linux all within your web browser. Refresh = reboot!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FSFE President Urges Community To Strengthen Open Source As a Brand

Posted: June 5th, 2009, 7:31pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Georg Greve, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has an insightful look at FOSS from a brand perspective with urgings that the community come together and strengthen open source as a unified brand. "There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and framing issues, more specifically in the area of 'Free Software' vs 'Open Source.' Name-calling and quarreling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message. The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focusing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should rein in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FSFE President Urges Community To Strengthen Open Source As a Brand

Posted: June 5th, 2009, 7:31pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Georg Greve, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has an insightful look at FOSS from a brand perspective with urgings that the community come together and strengthen open source as a unified brand. "There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and framing issues, more specifically in the area of 'Free Software' vs 'Open Source.' Name-calling and quarreling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message. The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focusing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should rein in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

PLplot Notes Its 10,000th Commit

Posted: June 5th, 2009, 4:55am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

iliketrash writes "From the PLplot development team is the announcement of their 10,000th commit: 'PLplot is a cross-platform software package for creating scientific plots that has been in continuous development since its inception 17 years ago. On May 23, 2009 the PLplot developers quietly celebrated our ten thousandth commit since our initial software repository was populated back in May 1992. This longevity puts PLplot in some select company amongst open-source software projects. We may even be unique within this group because all PLplot development has been done by volunteers in their spare time. The enthusiasm for PLplot development continues; we have averaged more than 100 commits per month over the last year which is double our 17-year average, and we are looking forward to the celebration of our next ten thousand commits!'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenOffice UI Design Proposals Published

Posted: May 11th, 2009, 7:05pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "Various members of the OpenOffice.org community have been submitting their first revisions of proposals to the OpenOffice.org Call for Design Proposals to redesign the user interface of Open Office. As part of Project Renaissance, attention is being drawn to the OpenOffice user interface, and it's 'user-friendliness.' Among the designs, is FLUX UI, which won an award at the Sun Microsystems Community Innovation Awards Program. Anyone can, and is encouraged, to check out the proposals (scroll to bottom of page) and leave your comments so that the designers can improve their designs for the final deadline for proposal submissions to the community."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org

Posted: April 28th, 2009, 8:28pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

ericatcw writes "Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle's purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun's (and soon to be Oracle's) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun's tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle's take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org

Posted: April 28th, 2009, 8:28pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

ericatcw writes "Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle's purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun's (and soon to be Oracle's) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun's tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle's take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Best Easter Eggs and Other Software Surprises

Posted: April 10th, 2009, 7:13pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

the_insult_dog writes "Computerworld has an article up (with videos) about some of the coolest Easter eggs and other software surprises, ranging from full-featured games to strange messages from robots. What other eggs are out there? What's the coolest egg ever?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ubuntu Vs. Windows In OpenOffice.org Benchmark

Posted: March 31st, 2009, 4:59pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ubuntu Vs. Windows In OpenOffice.org Benchmark

Posted: March 31st, 2009, 4:59pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Microsoft Office 2007 In Linux With WINE

Posted: March 18th, 2009, 12:00am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

Kenneth Reitz writes "Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment ... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Microsoft Office 2007 In Linux With WINE

Posted: March 18th, 2009, 12:00am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

Kenneth Reitz writes "Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment ... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Office 2007 In Linux With WINE

Posted: March 18th, 2009, 12:00am CET by timothy

Tags: Software

Kenneth Reitz writes "Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment ... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

DB Query Becomes Browseable In Virtual World

Posted: March 16th, 2009, 10:33pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Jani Pirkola writes to tell us that Green Phosphor's new project "Glasshouse" allows users to take database queries or spreadsheets and create 3D representations in a virtual world. Man what I wouldn't give to mash my level 80 death knight up with some of the ugly joins I have run across in the past. "Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively - all from within a virtual world. Glasshouse produces graphs which are avatars of the data itself. We've tailored the system for the use of biotech companies, specifically for drug discovery and development. Dr. David Resuehr, a molecular biologist, recently joined Green Phosphor as our Chief Scientist."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Symantec Support Gone Rogue?

Posted: March 7th, 2009, 4:12am CET by Soulskill

Tags: Software

DigitalDame2 writes "PCMag Security Analyst Neil Rubenking has always praised Symantec's tech support. Lately, though, a number of readers have reported problems with chat support, so he investigated. Rubenking was trying to install Norton 360 version 3.0 on a malware-infested system when the computer crashed with a blue screen error. He connected with Symantec tech support and was told that they could fix the problem, but for a fee of $100! (Here is the transcript and screen-captures of the chat.) Even more, Symantec support suggested that he use a malware-removal tool that wasn't even made by Symantec."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Citrix XenServer Virtualization Platform Now Free

Posted: February 23rd, 2009, 9:01pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Pedro writes "Citrix announced today that they are giving away their Xen OSS based virtualization platform XenServer with all the goodies included for free. The big highlights are XenMotion, which lets you move VMs from box to box without downtime, and multi server management. The same stuff in VMware land is $5k. They plan to sell new products for XenServer and also the same stuff on Microsoft's virtualization technology called Hyper-V. It will be interesting to see what VMware does. The announcement comes the day before VMware's big user event VMworld."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Bruce Perens On Combining GPL and Proprietary Software

Posted: February 9th, 2009, 10:19pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

jammag writes "Combining GPL and proprietary software is ever more common, especially in the world of embedded devices like cell phones. But the question is: how to combine them legally. As sticky as the issue is, there is an answer, as self titled "open source strategic consultant" Bruce Perens explains. The proper procedure entails fully understanding what type of open source software you're using, and knowing why you need to combine these disparate licenses. The problem, he notes, is that many companies don't know or care about doing this legally. 'They're used to just "clicking yes" with no regard to what they're committing themselves and their company to.' Hopefully Perens' guide can be read by more company execs — resulting in fewer lawsuits going forward (but we're not holding our breath)." update 21:31 GMT by SM: Bruce wrote in to make sure we knew he was not a lawyer, even though he is weighing in on a legal issue; updated to reflect.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bruce Perens On Combining GPL and Proprietary Software

Posted: February 9th, 2009, 10:19pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

jammag writes "Combining GPL and proprietary software is ever more common, especially in the world of embedded devices like cell phones. But the question is: how to combine them legally. As sticky as the issue is, there is an answer, as self titled "open source strategic consultant" Bruce Perens explains. The proper procedure entails fully understanding what type of open source software you're using, and knowing why you need to combine these disparate licenses. The problem, he notes, is that many companies don't know or care about doing this legally. 'They're used to just "clicking yes" with no regard to what they're committing themselves and their company to.' Hopefully Perens' guide can be read by more company execs — resulting in fewer lawsuits going forward (but we're not holding our breath)." update 21:31 GMT by SM: Bruce wrote in to make sure we knew he was not a lawyer, even though he is weighing in on a legal issue; updated to reflect.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet

Posted: January 13th, 2009, 3:01pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester

Posted: January 12th, 2009, 2:08pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "A Forrester Research report has found that companies use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity and are beginning to consider other alternatives as the Web has changed the way people create and share documents. The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option." Microsoft surely knows that some other options are creeping slowly into the view of even the most Word-centric users, though. User I dream about smoking writes "Microsoft is testing new capabilities for Office Live Workspace, its online adjunct to Microsoft Office, that will make it a closer rival to online application suites such as Google Docs. Microsoft will start beta testing an updated version of Live Workspace later this year that allows users to create and edit new documents online."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008

Posted: December 31st, 2008, 9:11pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008." Along roughly similar lines, davidmwilliams points out the year in review of the iTWire's "Linux Distillery" column.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008

Posted: December 31st, 2008, 9:11pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader writes "Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008." Along roughly similar lines, davidmwilliams points out the year in review of the iTWire's "Linux Distillery" column.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

BitTorrent For Enterprise File Distribution?

Posted: December 14th, 2008, 6:01pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: Software

HotTuna writes "I'm responsible for a closed, private network of retail stores connected to our corporate office (and to each other) with IPsec over DSL, and no access to the public internet. We have about 4GB of disaster recovery files that need to be replicated at each site, and updated monthly. The challenge is that all the enterprise file replication tools out there seem to be client/server and not peer-to-peer. This crushes our bandwidth at the corporate office and leaves hundreds of 7Mb DSL connections (at the stores) virtually idle. I am dreaming of a tool which can 'seed' different parts of a file to different peers, and then have those peers exchange those parts, rapidly replicating the file across the entire network. Sounds like BitTorrent you say? Sure, except I would need to 'push' the files out, and not rely on users to click a torrent file at each site. I could imagine a homebrew tracker, with uTorrent and an RSS feed at each site, but that sounds a little too patchwork to fly by the CIO. What do you think? Is BitTorrent an appropriate protocol for file distribution in the business sector? If not, why not? If so, how would you implement it?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

OLPC's "Give 1 Get 1" Comes To Europe

Posted: November 11th, 2008, 9:46pm CET by kdawson

Tags: Software

Christoph Derndorfer writes "Last year OLPC's XO-laptop was among the hottest Christmas gadgets thanks to the organization's G1G1 program, where you could donate $399 to give one XO-laptop to a child in the developing world and receive one yourself in return. However in 2007 the program was only available for US and Canadian citizens. This year's program, which takes off November 17, is also available to citizens in the EU member states, Switzerland, Russia, and Turkey. This is certainly awesome news for all the OLPC / Linux / gadget enthusiasts here in Europe! P.S. Before anyone asks, these XOs will come equipped with the child-friendly Sugar platform, which is based on Fedora 9, and not Windows XP."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

OpenOffice.org V3.0 Sets Download Record, 80% Windows

Posted: October 26th, 2008, 8:31pm CET by timothy

Tags: Software

thefickler writes "The newest version of OpenOffice, version 3.0, has set a download record in its first week of availability. Most surprising is the fact that over 80% of downloads were from Windows users. As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Generic VMs Key To Future of Coding

Posted: October 18th, 2008, 2:16pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister calls for generic VMs divorced from the syntactic details of specific languages in order to provide developers with some much-needed flexibility in the years ahead: 'Imagine being able to program in the language of your choice and then choose from any of several different underlying engines to execute your code, depending upon the needs of your application.' This 'next major stage in the evolution of programming' is already under way, he writes, citing Jim Hugunin's work with Python on the CLR, Microsoft's forthcoming Dynamic Language Runtime, Jython, Sun's Da Vinci Machine, and the long-delayed Perl/Python Parrot. And with modern JITs capable of outputting machine code almost as efficient as hand-coded C, the idea of running code through a truly generic VM may be yet another key factor that will shape the future of scripting."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Linux 2.6.27 Out

Posted: October 10th, 2008, 5:58am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux 2.6.27 Out

Posted: October 10th, 2008, 5:58am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mono 2.0 and .NET On Linux

Posted: October 7th, 2008, 8:59am CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

Several readers noted the release of Mono 2.0, which is compatible with Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0. According to Miguel de Icaza, "... users can move over server applications built for .NET and client applications built with Windows Forms." InternetNews points out that only about half of the .NET apps out there will work on Mono 2.0, for a variety of reasons including (but not limited to) legacy Windows-only libraries and Microsoft's progress on .NET 3.0 and 3.5 APIs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mono 2.0 and .NET On Linux

Posted: October 7th, 2008, 8:59am CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

Several readers noted the release of Mono 2.0, which is compatible with Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0. According to Miguel de Icaza, "... users can move over server applications built for .NET and client applications built with Windows Forms." InternetNews points out that only about half of the .NET apps out there will work on Mono 2.0, for a variety of reasons including (but not limited to) legacy Windows-only libraries and Microsoft's progress on .NET 3.0 and 3.5 APIs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Enterprise Software Sales Dried Up In September

Posted: October 7th, 2008, 1:25am CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

CurtMonash writes "As I predicted a week ago, it looks as if the third quarter was ugly for software vendors, due to the economic crisis. SAP said 'The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses. These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter.' My old acquaintance John Treadway, who used to work in Sybase's financial services vertical unit, reports that things are even worse than that in the financial services industry, Wall Street and retail banks alike. So now what? Well, IT is a huge part of capital spending, and at enterprises that have to cut back capital spending, IT is going to get hurt. On the other hand, high-growth companies — Web businesses, analytic services providers, etc. — may try to power through the downturn. And the more directly an IT project affects near-term profits, the more likely it is to survive."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Norwegian Standards Body Members Resign Over OOXML

Posted: October 4th, 2008, 6:04am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

tsa writes "Ars Technica reports that 13 of the 23 members from the technical committee of the Norwegian standards body, the organization that manages technical standards for the country, have resigned because of the way the OOXML standardization was handled. We've previously discussed Norway's protest and ISO's rejection of other appeals. From the article: 'The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technical committee.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Drop-In Replacement For Exchange Now Open Source

Posted: September 19th, 2008, 11:43pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Fjan11 writes "Over 150 man-years of work were added to the Open Source community today when Zarafa decided to put their successful Exchange server replacement under GPLv3. This is not just the typical mail-server-that-works-with-Outlook, it is the whole package — including 100% MAPI, web access, tasks, iCal and Activesync. (The native syncing works great with my iPhone!) Binaries and source are available for all major Linux distros."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Drop-In Replacement For Exchange Now Open Source

Posted: September 19th, 2008, 11:43pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Fjan11 writes "Over 150 man-years of work were added to the Open Source community today when Zarafa decided to put their successful Exchange server replacement under GPLv3. This is not just the typical mail-server-that-works-with-Outlook, it is the whole package — including 100% MAPI, web access, tasks, iCal and Activesync. (The native syncing works great with my iPhone!) Binaries and source are available for all major Linux distros."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SGI Releases OpenGL As Free Software

Posted: September 19th, 2008, 6:01pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

StoneLion writes "Since its release, the OpenGL code that is responsible for 3-D acceleration on GNU/Linux has been running on licenses that were accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative. Today, however, the FSF has announced that the licenses in question have been rewritten, the problems resolved, and the code freed. Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, says, 'This represents a huge gift to the free software community.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
SGI Releases OpenGL As Free Software

Posted: September 19th, 2008, 6:01pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

StoneLion writes "Since its release, the OpenGL code that is responsible for 3-D acceleration on GNU/Linux has been running on licenses that were accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative. Today, however, the FSF has announced that the licenses in question have been rewritten, the problems resolved, and the code freed. Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, says, 'This represents a huge gift to the free software community.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

OS/2 Community Tries Bounty System

Posted: September 7th, 2008, 8:34pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Grayskull writes "The OS/2 and eComStation community are trying to get open source software ported to that platform by opening bounties and allowing people to chip in with prize money. Currently the most important open bounties are Java 6 port, Icon routines in OS/2, VirtualBox port, Extend multimedia and OpenWengo ports."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Behind the Doors of the Free Software Foundation

Posted: August 29th, 2008, 7:15pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Linux.com has an interesting look at the inner workings of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). "The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology. As a 501(c)3 charity in the United States, the FSF is run by a board of directors. The current board includes FSF founder and president Richard M. Stallman and long-term member Henry Poole, but, in the last few years, new faces have appeared on the board."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Behind the Doors of the Free Software Foundation

Posted: August 29th, 2008, 7:15pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Linux.com has an interesting look at the inner workings of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). "The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology. As a 501(c)3 charity in the United States, the FSF is run by a board of directors. The current board includes FSF founder and president Richard M. Stallman and long-term member Henry Poole, but, in the last few years, new faces have appeared on the board."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Behind the Doors of the Free Software Foundation

Posted: August 29th, 2008, 7:15pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Linux.com has an interesting look at the inner workings of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). "The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology. As a 501(c)3 charity in the United States, the FSF is run by a board of directors. The current board includes FSF founder and president Richard M. Stallman and long-term member Henry Poole, but, in the last few years, new faces have appeared on the board."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Gaining RAM For Free, Through Software

Posted: August 27th, 2008, 3:25pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

wakaramon writes with a piece from IEEE Spectrum about an experimental approach to squeezing more usable storage out of a device's existing RAM; the researchers were using a Linux-based PDA as their testbed, and claim that their software "effectively gives an embedded system more than twice the memory it had originally — essentially for free." "Although the price of RAM has plummeted fast, the need for memory has expanded faster still. But if you could use data-compression software to control the way embedded systems store information in RAM, and do it in a way that didn't sap performance appreciably, the payoff would be enormous."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Gaining RAM For Free, Through Software

Posted: August 27th, 2008, 3:25pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

wakaramon writes with a piece from IEEE Spectrum about an experimental approach to squeezing more usable storage out of a device's existing RAM; the researchers were using a Linux-based PDA as their testbed, and claim that their software "effectively gives an embedded system more than twice the memory it had originally — essentially for free." "Although the price of RAM has plummeted fast, the need for memory has expanded faster still. But if you could use data-compression software to control the way embedded systems store information in RAM, and do it in a way that didn't sap performance appreciably, the payoff would be enormous."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gaining RAM For Free, Through Software

Posted: August 27th, 2008, 3:25pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

wakaramon writes with a piece from IEEE Spectrum about an experimental approach to squeezing more usable storage out of a device's existing RAM; the researchers were using a Linux-based PDA as their testbed, and claim that their software "effectively gives an embedded system more than twice the memory it had originally — essentially for free." "Although the price of RAM has plummeted fast, the need for memory has expanded faster still. But if you could use data-compression software to control the way embedded systems store information in RAM, and do it in a way that didn't sap performance appreciably, the payoff would be enormous."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gaining RAM For Free, Through Software

Posted: August 27th, 2008, 3:25pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

wakaramon writes with a piece from IEEE Spectrum about an experimental approach to squeezing more usable storage out of a device's existing RAM; the researchers were using a Linux-based PDA as their testbed, and claim that their software "effectively gives an embedded system more than twice the memory it had originally — essentially for free." "Although the price of RAM has plummeted fast, the need for memory has expanded faster still. But if you could use data-compression software to control the way embedded systems store information in RAM, and do it in a way that didn't sap performance appreciably, the payoff would be enormous."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux Foundation Promises LSB4

Posted: August 1st, 2008, 7:55pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

gbjbaanb writes "Ever thought it was difficult to write software for Linux? For multiple distros? InternetNews reports that the LSB is making a push for their next release (due out later this year) that should help make all that much easier. Although the LSB has not lived up to expectations, this time around Linux has a higher profile and ISVs are more interested. This is to help persuade them to develop applications that will run on any LSB-compliant Linux distribution. If it gets adopted, LSB 4 could bring a new wave of multidistribution Linux application development. 'It is critically important for Linux to have an easy way for software developers to write to distro "N," whether it's Red Hat, Ubuntu or Novell,' [said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.] 'The reason you need that is because we don't want what happened to Unix to happen to Linux in terms of fragmentation.' The LSB defines a core set of APIs and libraries, so ISVs can develop and port applications that will work on LSB-certified Linux distributions."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
BOINC Now Available For GPU/CUDA

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 6:49pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

GDI Lord writes "BOINC, open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing, has posted news that GPU computing has arrived! The GPUGRID.net project from the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park uses CUDA-capable NVIDIA chips to create an infrastructure for biomolecular simulations. (Currently available for Linux64; other platforms to follow soon. To participate, follow the instructions on the web site.) I think this is great news, as GPUs have shown amazing potential for parallel computing."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Interactive Linux Kernel Map

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 1:05am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Constantine writes "The Linux kernel is one of most complex open source projects. Even though there are a lot of books on the Linux kernel, it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The interactive Linux kernel map gives you a top-down view of the kernel. You can see the most important layers, functionalities, modules, functions, and calls. Each function on the map is a link to its source code. The map is interactive. You can zoom in and drag around to see details."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Software Update Shuts Down Nuclear Power Plant

Posted: June 7th, 2008, 1:58am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

Garabito writes "Hatch Nuclear Power Plant near Baxley, Georgia was forced into a 48-hour emergency shutdown when a computer on the plant's business network was rebooted after an engineer installed a software update. The Washington Post reports, 'The computer in question was used to monitor chemical and diagnostic data from one of the facility's primary control systems, and the software update was designed to synchronize data on both systems. According to a report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when the updated computer rebooted, it reset the data on the control system, causing safety systems to errantly interpret the lack of data as a drop in water reservoirs that cool the plant's radioactive nuclear fuel rods. As a result, automated safety systems at the plant triggered a shutdown.' Personally, I don't think letting devices on a critical control system accept data values from the business network is a good idea."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Phoronix Releases Linux Benchmarking Platform

Posted: June 5th, 2008, 9:34pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

KernelPie writes "The Linux hardware site Phoronix.com has announced the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0, a Linux-based testing platform designed for benchmarking software and hardware. This suite ships with 57 tests and 23 test suites, which contain everything from open-source games to file encryption to encoding software. In addition, they have a global database where users can submit benchmark results and more — with over 1,000 submissions already. This testing software is licensed under the GPLv3 and is available for download."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
gNewSense Distro Frees Ubuntu

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 11:07pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Linux.com (who shares corporate overlords with Slashdot) is reporting that gNewSense has gone 2.0. For the uninitiated gNewSense is a stripped down version of Ubuntu's Hardy Heron for the free software purist. Removing over 100 pieces of proprietary code and firmware, gNewSense offers a user the ability to run an OS where everything is able to be studied, changed, and redistributed. "gNewSense is a great alternative to Gobuntu, the Canonical-sponsored free derivative of Ubuntu. According to its wiki page, the 8.04 version of Gobuntu hasn't been released due to a less-than-optimal reaction from the community. Gobuntu used the same repositories as Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu live CD can achieve the same installation as Gobuntu by merely selecting the free-software-only option in the installer (press F6 twice at the boot menu). Also, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has indicated that he would rather focus on gNewSense because the work on that distribution can help the Ubuntu community as a whole. "
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

The Most Annoying Software Out There

Posted: May 20th, 2008, 5:39pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

superglaze writes "ZDNet UK has a very entertaining round-up of the most annoying software out there, and everything from RealPlayer and Adobe Reader to Java and Norton Antivirus gets a kicking. 'The internet has brought us many joys. It's rewritten the rules of business and pleasure. And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time ('let's use it to make sure our customers have the latest software', for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery — usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Mono's WinForms 2.0 Implementation Completed

Posted: May 14th, 2008, 5:21am CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

adrian.henke writes "After four years of development, 115K lines of source code, and 6,434 commits, Jonathan Pobst announces that Mono's WinForms 2.0 implementation is now complete. This announcement has been long awaited by any .NET WinForms developer who has ever tried to get an applications to work on Linux using Mono."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Released

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 7:11pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Sean0michael writes "OpenOffice.org has announced their 3.0 Beta is ready for testing. The new version includes some great enhancements, including MS Office 2007 import filters, an improved notes feature, a built-in Solver component, and an Aqua interface for Macs. The site has a complete list of Beta features. Download your beta release from their site."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Use BitTorrent To Verify, Clean Up Files

Posted: May 5th, 2008, 1:28am CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

jweatherley writes "I found a new (for me at least) use for BitTorrent. I had been trying to download beta 4 of the iPhone SDK for the last few days. First I downloaded the 1.5GB file from Apple's site. The download completed, but the disk image would not verify. I tried to install it anyway, but it fell over on the gcc4.2 package. Many things are cheap in India, but bandwidth is not one of them. I can't just download files > 1GB without worrying about reaching my monthly cap, and there are Doctor Who episodes to be watched. Fortunately we have uncapped hours in the night, so I downloaded it again. md5sum confirmed that the disk image differed from the previous one, but it still wouldn't verify, and fell over on gcc4.2 once more. Damn." That's not the end of the story, though — read on for a quick description of how BitTorrent saved the day in jweatherley's case.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Usability Testing Hardy Heron With a Girlfriend

Posted: April 28th, 2008, 2:07pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

toomin writes "Reviews of the latest Ubuntu version, 8.04 Hardy Heron, are everywhere, but most of them are undertaken by geeks familiar with Linux. This guy sits his girlfriend down at a brand-new Ubuntu installation and asks her to perform some basic tasks. Some of them are surprisingly easy, others frustrate and annoy. There are lots of little usability tweaks he stumbles upon just by seeing the desktop experience from the point of view of the mainstream user."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
VIA Announces Open Source Driver Initiative

Posted: April 8th, 2008, 11:37pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: Software

Aron Schatz writes "VIA has announced that they will start a new site (http://linux.via.com.tw — doesn't exist yet) specifically for the development of open source drivers. From their press release: 'Over the following months, VIA will work with the community to enable 2D, 3D and video playback acceleration to ensure the best possible Open Source experience on VIA Processor Platforms. 'To further improve cooperation with the community, VIA will also adhere to a regular quarterly release schedule that is aligned with kernel changes and release of major Linux distributions. In addition, beta releases will be issued on the site as needed, and a bug report and tracking feature will also be integrated.' Nvidia should be next."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Analyst Admits Open Source Will Quietly Take Over

Posted: April 5th, 2008, 5:31am CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

ZDOne writes "In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to analyst Gartner — which has up to now been fairly cautious, or downright negative, in its previous predictions about community developed software. '"By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms,' predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a 'stealth' impact for the technology in embedded form: "Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Novell Rises to Second Highest Linux Contributor

Posted: April 2nd, 2008, 8:20pm CEST by Zonk

Tags: Software

eldavojohn writes "Which companies contribute the most to the Linux kernel? Well, The Linux Foundation released their results and Novell's contributions have gone up 250% (from 3.6% of all contributions to 14.4% of all contributions) to put them at #2 behind Red Hat. This chart also illustrates just how widely Linux is modified by the community and not just a handful of developers/companies. You can find more coverage on blogs and the original report."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Virgin America Uses Linux to Entertain Inflight

Posted: March 29th, 2008, 10:42am CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

anomalous cohort writes "CrunchGear has an interesting interview with the Director of Inflight Entertainment for the airline Virgin America, who discusses their adoption of Linux for the passenger's seat back computers. 'The ability to compose a music-video playlist is pretty cool and on the horizon. The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Is There Room For a Secure Web Browser?

Posted: March 28th, 2008, 1:29am CET by Soulskill

Tags: Software

An anonymous reader points out an eWeek story about researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are designing a new web browser based on security. The new software, code-named OP for Opus Palladianum, will separate various components of the browser into subsystems which are monitored and managed by the browser kernel. Quoting: "'We believe Web browsers are the most important network-facing application, but the current browsers are fundamentally flawed from security perspective,' King said in an interview with eWEEK. 'If you look at how the Web was originally designed, it was an application with static Web pages as data. Now, it has become a platform for hosting all kinds of important data and businesses, but unfortunately, [existing] browsers haven't evolved to deal with this change and that's why we have a big malware problem.' The idea behind the OP security browser is to partition the browser into smaller subsystems and make all communication between subsystems simple and explicit."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

OpenOffice.org 2.4 Released

Posted: March 27th, 2008, 7:03pm CET by Zonk

Tags: Software

ahziem writes "The multiplatform, multilingual office suite OpenOffice.org has announced the release of version 2.4. New features include 5 PDF export enhancements, text to columns in Calc, rectangular selection in Writer, bug fixes, performance improvements, improvements supporting the growing library of extensions such as 3D OpenGL transitions in Impress, and much more. Downloads are available either direct or P2P. In September, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will add PDF import, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, and ODF 1.2."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Salasaga Fills Flash Creation Hole for Linux

Posted: March 24th, 2008, 10:47pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: Software

Linux.com's Bruce Byfield is reporting that Salasaga, the renamed Flame Project, is attempting to fill the functionality gap of Flash creation for Linux in addition to being a cross-platform tool. While it still lacks the spit-shine of more mature apps, it is going a long way to filling yet another hole in Linux software. "Opening Salasaga, you could easily think you are in a slide show program. Individual slides display on the left, and the current slide appears on the bottom right. On the top right is information about the layers on the current side. Menus are logically laid out across the top of the editing window. From the editing menu, you can set the defaults for new projects, including the default display size of finished projects, the preview width, and the default background color. After adjusting these settings, you proceed logically from the right as you develop a project, progressing from Screenshots for importation through Slide and Layer to Export. This progression is so logical that few viewers should have trouble teaching themselves the basics of the software and producing a test project in less than 20 minutes -- and saving it in native .flame format or exporting it to Flash or SVG formats."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: IT

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Released

Posted: March 21st, 2008, 3:14pm CET by kdawson

Tags: Software

markybob writes "Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 beta has been released. It features GNOME 2.22 and uses Linux kernel 2.6.24. Furthermore, it uses Firefox 3 beta 4, and PulseAudio is enabled by default. To ease the transition of Windows users, it includes Wubi, which allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: Linux

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Released

Posted: March 21st, 2008, 3:14pm CET by kdawson

Tags: Software

markybob writes "Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 beta has been released. It features GNOME 2.22 and uses Linux kernel 2.6.24. Furthermore, it uses Firefox 3 beta 4, and PulseAudio is enabled by default. To ease the transition of Windows users, it includes Wubi, which allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Open Source News » Tags » Software

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119 items tagged "Software"

Posted: May 23rd, 2012, 4:33pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Posted: April 9th, 2012, 11:03am CEST by timothy

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Posted: March 31st, 2012, 5:29pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: March 25th, 2012, 5:06am CEST by timothy

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Posted: March 1st, 2012, 10:25pm CET by Unknown Lamer

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Posted: February 26th, 2012, 6:32pm CET by timothy

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Posted: February 26th, 2012, 6:32pm CET by timothy

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Posted: November 23rd, 2011, 9:43pm CET by Unknown Lamer

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Posted: November 19th, 2011, 2:28pm CET by timothy

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Posted: September 26th, 2011, 9:14pm CEST by Soulskill

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Posted: September 21st, 2011, 9:26am CEST by Soulskill

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Posted: August 17th, 2011, 12:04am CEST by Unknown Lamer

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Posted: August 17th, 2011, 12:04am CEST by Unknown Lamer

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Posted: July 19th, 2011, 7:35pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

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Posted: July 19th, 2011, 7:35pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

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Posted: April 30th, 2011, 8:29pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: February 20th, 2011, 2:14pm CET by Soulskill

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Posted: January 17th, 2011, 2:51am CET by timothy

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Posted: December 19th, 2010, 2:11am CET by timothy

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Posted: December 2nd, 2010, 10:00pm CET by timothy

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Posted: December 1st, 2010, 7:41am CET by timothy

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Posted: November 24th, 2010, 8:40am CET by timothy

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Posted: November 13th, 2010, 1:36am CET by timothy

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Posted: October 23rd, 2010, 6:43pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: October 14th, 2010, 9:11pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: September 9th, 2010, 3:24pm CEST by CmdrTaco

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Posted: July 24th, 2010, 12:10am CEST by Soulskill

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Posted: July 4th, 2010, 10:46pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: July 4th, 2010, 10:46pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: June 17th, 2010, 9:21pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: June 14th, 2010, 3:37am CEST by timothy

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Posted: May 26th, 2010, 9:19pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: May 26th, 2010, 9:19pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: May 25th, 2010, 12:20am CEST by Soulskill

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Posted: April 29th, 2010, 10:23pm CEST by timothy

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Posted: April 29th, 2010, 10:23pm CEST by timothy

Tags: Software

Posted: April 12th, 2010, 3:40pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: Software

Posted: April 5th, 2010, 8:55pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: Software

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 11:27pm CET by timothy