Monthly Archive:: July 2008

We'd like to formally welcome Quentin Hartman, Tony Steidler-Dennison, and Amjith Ramanujam to the OSNews team. We had a huge response to our recent call for contributors, and if you were one of the people who contacted us, we're not done with you yet. Whether you're interested in contributing daily news or writing articles, we'll be contacting you soon, and these new editors are specifically tasked with helping to marshall the efforts of the other contributors. These new editors join Thom Holwerda, who's taking a sabbatical while trying to recover from RSI, David Adams, our Publisher and business manager, Adam Scheinberg, our webmaster and back-end guru, and Eugenia Loli-Queru, who is still occasionally lured out of retirement until the trolls and platform zealots earnest advocates remind her why she found it less stressful to take up videography. Welcome, n00bs!

Decrying stasis in the laptop industry, InfoWorld's Tom Yager and crew have designed their ideal laptop for 2009 given the components are available currently. The project was subjected to the same limitations manufacturers face when whiteboarding a new notebook and introduced only those components that would increase end-user productivity manyfold. The resulting AMD Puma-based WorldBook Ether and WorldBook Meteor include an 'Embedded Smartphone' system-in-system ARM microcontroller, flash-memory overlay for fast boot, and ATI/AMD Hybrid Graphics for power-saving switched mode.

I find a large number of people around me who have used vim a few times while writing programs. Very few of them have grown into becoming effective vim users. The majority drop out because of its initially daunting interface. A good number of the interested users switch to emacs, because they think the 'power' just isn't there with vim. I am not saying emacs is bad, but I just cannot stand decisions made on lack of information.

The company plans to charge corporate customers a monthly subscription of $15 per user for a suite of "hosted" software, which includes e-mail, Web meeting, collaboration and messaging applications running on Microsoft's computers.

Even though the White House "strongly support" the FISA bill, and contends it is necessary to provide "our intelligence professionals the tools they need to keep our Nation safe," and urges the Senate "to act as soon as it returns from its recess," the Bush Administration is willing to veto the legislation and forgo these tools unless the telecom immunity is given effect immediately.

In 2006, Microsoft released Windows Powershell, a new command line shell that, via cmdlets, scripts, and executables, allow core system administration tasks to be scripted. While this functionality has been available on Unix-type systems for decades, Microsoft's version will almost certainly, within a few years, be available on several hundred million PCs. So how does the Powershell stack up against Linux favorite bash? MSDN links to this Bash vs Powershell article.

Gary Richmond at Freesoftware Magazine looks at Acer's Aspire One, the latest ultra portable laptop computer to feature GNU/Linux. It runs Linpus Linux Lite, a hacked version of Fedora 8. At last we have a version of Linux not tainted with the kernel source code issues and GPL violations that characterised Xandros on the Asus EeePC.

The way the Internet is set up now, an I.P. address, by itself, doesn't identify an individual user. But an I.P. address can be traced to a specific Internet service provider, and with a subpoena, the Internet provider can be forced to identify which of their customers was assigned a particular I.P. address at a particular time. That is how the recording industry has been identifying and suing people who use file sharing programs.

The GNOME Foundation has decided to hire a new executive director to continue its spread. In an announcement Monday at its user conference in Istanbul, Turkey, the foundation named Stormy Peters, who co-founded the foundation and formerly managed the open source program at Hewlett-Packard, to be the group's new executive director.

Cisco is not taking enough action to stamp out the sale of counterfeit products on Internet auction sites, according to networking-product resellers. Mike Sheldon, chief executive of reseller Network Hardware Resale, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that Cisco was not willing to co-operate with resellers to investigate potentially counterfeit Cisco products being sold on auction sites such as eBay.

InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes an in-depth look at nine Ruby on Rails IDEs and editors with Rails bundles, breaking down where each tool fits into a development strategy and how to mix and match tools for a complete set of functionality. Under review are Ruby in Steel, RadRails, Komodo, 3rdRail, NetBeans, TextMate, IntelliJ IDEA, E Text Editor, and Intype.

A recent study released by Net Applications indicates that the market share of Windows among Internet-connected devices could drop below 90% as soon as the fourth quarter of this year. This seems to be the same report referred to earlier that showed Linux approaching a 1% use share.

While I was trawling through Net Applications' operating system share trend data for the past 24 months, something struck me. June 08 marked a big month for Linux. The OS saw the largest increase in market share for the whole 2 year period - a growth of 0.12%.

Imagine creating Web-page graphics dynamically using just code. Creating and manipulating images is yours for the doing with the power of PHP. This tutorial steps through using the GD library, showing you how to create and alter images on Web pages. It starts with the GD construct, and then builds on it to showcase graphics techniques.