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‘free open source software’ Archives
We should all be using free software
An issue that garners far less press coverage than the ongoing net neutrality story is that of free software. The software powering the devices we use is just as vital for the internet as is the management of the "pipes" that carry our data. Most of us, though, don't even think about the software we choose to use (or worse, are coerced to [...]
Real world results: FBI cannot crack Truecrypt
The FBI failed to break the encryption code of hard drives seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha. The operation began in July 2008. According to a report published on Friday (6.25.2010) by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, after a year of unsuccessful attempts, the U.S. [...]
Samba with Active Directory: getting closer!
In the video, Tridge demonstrates provisioning an Active Directory domain on a Samba server, running a development version of Samba from shortly before Samba 4 alpha 11. Once the Samba server is running, he then starts a copy of Microsoft Windows Server 2008R2 Standard as a guest under VirtualBox, and runs the Windows "dcpromo" command to have it [...]
Benchmarking Debian’s GNU/kFreeBSD
There has been an effort underway within the Debian development community to pull the FreeBSD kernel within this distribution to provide an alternative to using the Linux kernel. In essence with this Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project you have the standard Debian package set providing a GNU user-land with a GNU C library, but the FreeBSD kernel is [...]
Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX
Often, when we meet other game developers and say that we use OpenGL for our game Overgrowth, we're met with stares of disbelief -- why would anyone use OpenGL? DirectX is the future. When we tell graphics card representatives that we use OpenGL, the temperature of the room drops by ten degrees. This baffles us. It's common geek wisdom that [...]
GIMP 2.7 has a single window mode
For those living under a rock, GIMP is an awesome open source image editor but one of the things that people found really annoying about GIMP in the past was that it doesn’t come in a single window. It has 2 or 3 separate windows which makes it hard for people to move it around and in my opinion it doesn’t look very professional and [...]
Dear Google: You keep using that word…
Google's Jonathan Rosenberg wrote a paean to 'open,' in which his company's commitment to 'open' is pitched at great length. The most remarkable paragraph, however, is the one dealing with things that Google keeps closed: While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to [...]
(1) Open a Linux terminal, (2) Enter “cal 9 1752″, (3) wtf?
Wikipedia can explain it. Britain and the British Empire (including the eastern part of what is now the United States) adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 by which time it was necessary to correct by 11 days. Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752 to account for 29 February 1700 (Julian). Claims that rioters [...]
Microsoft and a “patent checkmate” of my dreams
Microsoft tried to auction off some patents that they claim relate to Linux. Patent trolls could have bought them. Instead Open Invention Network (OIN) got them. Why would Microsoft wish to get rid of 22 patents that it presumably could sue Linux over? Let's try to imagine what might have happened. Let's pretend you are Microsoft, and you want [...]
The File Menu
The File menu has been around since the dawn of user interfaces. But do you know what? It has overstayed its welcome. The File menu has been abused in far too many applications. A File menu should deal with files. That’s it. Open a file, save a file, print a file, quit editing the file. Some, no.. most applications have been using the File [...]
I didn’t realize this was such a commonly used size in GIMP
The question is, do any modern printers support that format? Seriously. I think that it would be cool to print some novelty toilet paper.
Pidgin 2.6.0 is out with “more other new features than I care to count”
Make very sure you update to a recent version, there is an extremely dangerous security issue in <2.5.9. First off, some statistics for this release: 99 bullet points in the ChangeLog. 221 tickets closed for the release (that is, 221 tickets that we believe are fixed or are patches that we accepted). 2 major new features More other [...]
MIT drops open-source software for Microsoft Exchange
Beginning this summer, Information Systems and Technology has begun transitioning portions of the MIT e-mail system to Microsoft Exchange, as well as changing the way spam is handled. Changes to mail access & storage Microsoft Exchange replaces the portion of the mail system that stores messages waiting to be read, which is currently [...]
Google announces Chrome Operating System. An open-source Windows competitor
Nine months after having launched the Chrome web browser, Google just now announced the Google Chrome Operating System, "an attempt to re-think what operating systems should be." Google plans to offer the OS for use on a wide array of devices in about a year. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be [...]
New Linux patch could circumvent Microsoft FAT patents
Microsoft's recent lawsuit against TomTom, alleging infringement of file system patents, has left many questions unanswered about the legal implications of distributing open source implementations of Microsoft's FAT file system. A new Linux kernel patch that was published last week offers a workaround that might make it possible to continue [...]
FireFox 3.5 Download Link
The day Firefox 3.0 was to be released I went to the Mozilla website and changed the version numbers in the URL and was able to download the official release version of 3.0 well before it was officially released. As most of you know FF 3.5 is releasing today (apparently) and I did the same thing to the URL. Windows Mac Linux I installed it [...]
GAP for GIMP 2.6 released
GAP is a collection of GIMP plugins that make it possible to create animations as sequences of single frames. The result can be saved as animated. GIF, AVI or MPEG file (external libraries are used for this). Now GAP 2.6.0 has been released. The new version is optimized for GIMP 2.6 and offers some new functionality. To download the [...]
Watch video… without Flash
Dailymotion is working converting their video library to open video formats: Ogg Theora. Currently they are working with Firefox to get it working correctly on Firefox 3.5 Beta(they include a link with some demos) and soon on other browsers that support HTML 5. This is one of the biggest video sites to begin to offer their video in open video [...]
Priceless Linux T-shirt
"There are some games you need windows to run. For everything else, there's linux."
