Archive for June, 2009

Moblin V2.0 Beta For Netbooks and Nettops

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

superbubba writes "The Moblin steering committee is happy to release the Moblin v2.0 beta for netbooks and nettops for developer testing. With this release, developers can begin to experience and work with the source code of the visually rich, interactive user interface designed for Intel Atom based netbooks."

EXT4, Btrfs, NILFS2 Performance Compared

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has published Linux filesystem benchmarks comparing XFS, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs and NILFS2 filesystems. This is the first time that the new EXT4 and Btrfs and NILFS2 filesystems have been directly compared when it comes to their disk performance though the results may surprise. For the ...

Ranchers Have Beef With USDA Program To ID Cattle

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System say that computer records ...

SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines would-be Microsoft Office competitors SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org and finds the results surprising. OpenOffice.org — frequently cited as the most viable Office competitor — has pushed for Office interoperability in version 3.1, adding import support for files in Office 2007's native Open XML format. ...

In Canada, No Expectation of Privacy On the Net

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

The_AV8R writes "In a recent interview, Peter Van Loan, the new Canadian Public Safety minister, says ISPs should be able to provide private user information without a warrant. (The only example he gave was cases of child pornography; the interviewer pointed out that in these cases ISPs are already at ...

The Hidden Cost of Using Microsoft Software

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Glyn Moody writes "Detractors of free software like to point out it's not really 'free,' and claim that its Total Cost of Ownership is often comparable with closed-source solutions if you take everything into account. And yet, despite their enthusiasm for including all the costs, they never include a very ...

Office-compatibility torture test

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

In InfoWorld's tests using complex Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability, severely mangling our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files. By stark contrast, SoftMaker Office showed excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats, making it a safe choice ...

The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

In the kingdom of business productivity, Microsoft Office reigns supreme. Its dominating position atop the word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations heap seems virtually unassailable. Its file formats define an industry, and its component applications are often synonymous with the underlying tasks they perform. That's not a presentation file you're displaying ...

Group pitches Linux for free netbooks from mobile carriers

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Mobile carriers may start giving away netbooks for free, and Linux-based application stores could help them profit by doing it, the head of a Linux advocacy group told Chinese companies on Monday.

The many faces of OpenOffice

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

A chameleon: That's what I think of when I ponder the myriad variations on the OpenOffice.org theme that have cropped up in recent years. Ever since Sun Microsystems decided to release the StarOffice source code into the public domain, ambitious open source developers have been actively tweaking, tuning, and spinning ...