OpenSource
gregladen | March 13, 2008
Firefox 3 is in testing, with the latest build, beta 4, released Monday. Mozilla is aiming for a final release of its flagship product before the end of the first quarter of 2008. Let's take a look at the changes coming down the pike.
You can grab a copy of the latest Firefox 3 beta from mozilla.com. Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Universal Binaries are provided in more than 40 languages. The Linux version is a bzip2-compressed tar archive. You can unpack into any location on your system.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | March 12, 2008The Acid Test is a webs standards test to which browsers can be subjected to see which is best. Here are some of the current results for browsers that are released (the one you are likely to use if your software is reasonably well updated):
Konqueror on Ubuntu 7.10: 62%
Epiphany on Ubuntu 8.04: 59%
Camino on a Mac and Firefox on Mac, Windows XP, or Windows Vista: 52%
The list that I'm looking at then has fourteen combinations of different browsers, versions, and operating systems ranging from 39% to 52%
Then, way down the list, we get:
INternet Exporer 5.50 on Windows XP at 14%
Then a bunch…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Microsoft is encouraging its business partners to promote its Office Open XML specification (OOXML) to the Indian Bureau of Standards (BIS) and Ministry of IT. This move has incensed supporters of the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) who fear that the "soft" Indian state may not be able to stand up to Microsoft pressure tactics.
Open Source Initiative (OSI) board member Raj Mathur claims to have a copy of the Microsoft letter to NGOs. "Microsoft has 'persuaded' several non-profit organizations," Mathur writes, "to bombard the Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the…
gregladen | March 3, 2008The developers of Firefox ran into an interesting situation with Firefox 3.0 (in production). There are reasons for it to have run faster than Firefox 2.0 on a Mac, but in some ways it ran more slowly.
After a great deal of research, they figured out why. Essentially, there is a thing that happens to software running on a Mac that does not use certain native Apple system software ... causing it to run much more slowly. But a very simple change (which is somewhere between undocumented and very very poorly documented) in the software can fix it easily.
When this article was picked up on…
gregladen | March 3, 2008
The Asus Eee Laptops being sold by Best Buy come featured with an Intel Celeron M Processor, 512 MB of DDR2 memory, 7" widescreen display, 4GB solid state drive, built-in webcam, and the Linux operating system. Weighing in at only 2lbs, the laptop is great for day-to-day traveling. The hardware might not seem much, if you're used to the high demands of a Windows-based PC, but for Linux, 512 MB of memory and a 4GB hard drive is plenty. You won't be using the laptop for much server-based work or playing any 3D accelerated games, but that's not what the laptop is about. It's about having e-mail…
gregladen | March 2, 2008What is your favorite scripting language?
(I don't think I can do polls on this site ... but if you click on this picture of a poll, you can go to that site and take the poll)
gregladen | February 25, 2008Microsoft has paid the Library of Congress a huge bribe so that they will adopt some of their software, and use hardware running Vista in public areas. This is, of course, a travesty. As Boing Boing says, "Library of Congress sells itself out to Microsoft for a mere $3 mil" ... You know this is George Bush's fault.
For Microsoft's part, this is a move on Google (because it will involve a major search facility) and on The Gutenberg Project and all other open access publication projects (because this is a bald faced effort to control access to key, old, not copyrighted documents such as the…
gregladen | February 24, 2008That's the sound of a statistician or scientist laughing because s/he has some really cool software and didn't pay a dime for it, because it is open source.
Since we are talking about R, I thought I'd point you to a couple of screen shots. Here it is running on a Mac, and here it is running on a Linux box.
These images are about 200 K or so in size, and they come to us courtesy of The R Project for Statistical Computing
gregladen | February 21, 2008And they are paying for it.
Google is funding work to ensure the Windows version of Adobe Systems' Photoshop and other Creative Suite software can run on Linux computers.
For the project, Google is funding programmers at CodeWeavers, a company whose open-source Wine software lets Windows software run on Linux. Wine is a compatibility layer that intercepts a program's Windows commands and converts them to instructions for the Linux kernel and its graphics subsystem.
Story here.
gregladen | February 14, 2008Beta. So, don't download this unless you want to play. Details here.
Here's the skinny:
Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager.
Improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
Richer…
gregladen | February 11, 2008Who doesn't? Well, for one, all the people who have sipped the Kool-Ade of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office is adware.
Or at least, this is the arugment made by OpenOffice.orgNinja, and by the way, something I've been saying for years.
Is Microsoft Office adware? Wikipedia defines adware as "any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertising material to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used."
Ninja then goes on to demonstrate that this is true.
It goes beyond that, to the level of malware, in that malware…
gregladen | February 8, 2008The Ugly American Company, Microsoft, will now have a third investigation run by the EU regarding their smarmy "lobbying" (read, "bribery and coercion" tactics during the OOXML file format fight last year.
"The investigation will be especially welcome in standards circles, due to the wide range of reports from the field that Microsoft has engaged in 'stacking' of the national committees that were voting on OOXML as well as other overreaching activities intended to influence the result" of standards voting, said Andrew Updegrove, a standards expert who has opposed the Microsoft effort in the…
gregladen | February 4, 2008But probably too late for this year's election ...
The controversial decision to implement various types of electronic voting machines in place of paper ballots is garnering little public attention, while many states hastily implement flawed electronic voting machines and related election procedures, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
...
Criticism of the current crop of voting machines focuses mainly on the lack of clear requirements for a paper record of electronic votes. Part of this ongoing dispute is the disagreement between legislators and voting machine vendors on any…
gregladen | February 2, 2008The Google Summer of Code is a project run by Google which matches up ideas, programmers (focusing on students) and OpenSource development project to advance the technology.
Speaking at open source conference Linux.conf.au yesterday (Thursday), Google's head of open source programs, Leslie Hawthorn, hinted that the IT giant is evaluating a southern hemisphere version of the Summer of Code during the Australian summer months.
Stopping short of confirming the program, Hawthorn said Google is looking into finding the human resources - as opposed to the financial resources - to make it happen.…
gregladen | January 29, 2008And neither does a lot of proprietary technology. But the possibility that ads will show up on either type of technology is obviously very different.
Now, we are about to see add supported P2P services.
At the Midem conference in Cannes, France, Qtrax and its parent company Brilliant Technologies Corp. announced deals on Sunday with all four major labels that would make it the first free and legal ad-supported P2P service with major label music.
By allowing users to share DRM-protected files with label approval, Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz said he expected the service to offer over 25…
gregladen | January 16, 2008Slashdot has a number of interesting technology tidbits you may want to know about:
Later this year, at ShopRite supermarkets in the eastern US, Microsoft will be rolling out computerized shopping carts. These carts will allow people with a ShopRite card to enter their shopping list on the ShopRite site from home, and then pull up the list on their grocery cart when they swipe their card. The new carts will also display advertisements depending on where in the supermarket the cart is, using RFID technology to help locate it."
[source]
"IBM is molding its Jazz technology, which helps…
gregladen | January 14, 2008This is big. Sim City, the really cool computer game simulation program, is open source as of now.
This past holiday (I've been bugging him since November about it) my good friend Don Hopkins got a lot of work done on the finishing touches on releasing the original SimCity source code under the GNU General Public Library (GPL). The code won't have reference to any SimCity name as that has all be renamed to Micropolis. Micropolis was the original working title of the game and since EA requires that the GPL open source version not use the same name as SimCity (to protect their trademark) a…
gregladen | January 9, 2008Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. The motto of his group, Architecture for Humanity, is "Design like you give a damn." Using a litany of striking examples, he shows how AFH has helped find creative solutions to humanitarian crises all over the globe. Sinclair then outlines his TED Prize wish: to create a global open-source network that will let architects and communities share and build designs to house the world.
gregladen | January 8, 2008Jimmy Wales assembled "a ragtag band of volunteers," gave them tools for collaborating, and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished encyclopedia of the future. Here, he explains how the collaborative approach works, and why it succeeds. Along the way, he debunks some controversies, explains the "neutral point-of-view policy" and why it is non-debatable; and details the Wikipedia governance model: a democracy with a bit of aristocracy and some monarchy thrown in.
gregladen | January 7, 2008The com units are broken, the transporter can't penetrate the ion clouds, and the Klingon have you surrounded. You turn to Scotty and say, "Scotty, if you were any kind of engineer, you'd whip us up a Klingon Repellent device using this tricorder and these useless communicators."
"I cannae mind what I was thinkin', Captain! I can give it a try. Geese a dod of that Tricorder, Mr. Spock and I'll sort you up a real sloater of a Klingon Killer .. oh wait, no, sorry. It says here: 'No user serviceable parts'."
Then the Klingons kill them all.
But that wouldn't happen in real science…