Basic screenshot software is really handy to have on hand, even if you don’t use it often. If you rely on screengrab tools often, however, you know how important it is to have software with lots of tools and features. No matter what your screen capture software needs are, you’re sure to find something you like in this list of the top six open source options.

recordMyDesktop – Here’s a desktop session recorder written in C and with a choice of two front ends — pyGtk and pyQt4. Besides screen capture, this tool will also record just audio through ALSA, OSS, or the JACK audio server. If you need to produce files in multiple formats, then skip this app because your only options with recordMyDesktop are theora for video and vorbis for audio, using the ogg container.

ZScreen – This Windows-only screen capture app has tons of features. It grabs a shot of the active window, a selected window, or the entire screen. Once you’ve got the image, automatically open it in your image editor or upload it to Twitpic, YFrog, Flickr, or one of several other supported services. ZScreen caches all your images, even ones on the clipboard, so there’s always a history of your screenshots right at your fingertips.

Wink – This free tool isn’t open source but it does work reliably on Linux. You can capture screenshots or use pre-made images in one of several formats. Wink supports many different output formats as well, including Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript or HTML. Wink will also capture screenshots automatically based on mouse and keyboard gestures, which is a great feature to have if you take a lot of screengrabs.

Shutter – Use Shutter to take a timed or instant screenshot of your entire desktop, a single window, or a particular area of your screen. You can even dispatch it onto the Internet to take a snapshot of a Web site and bring you back the results.Once you have the shot you need, use the highlighting tool to call attention to certain areas of the image or the pencil to draw freehand. Spotlight any section of your screenshot with arrows, circles, boxes, ovals, or shading.

xvidcap – This tool captures movement on an X11 display, either a single frame at a time or in the form of an MPEG video. Unlike some screen capture apps, this one will capture the specific shape your mouse pointer if the Xfixes extension is installed. If not, xvidcap will simply record using the default mouse shape.

Greenshot – Here's an app that the developers say is "optimized for productivity." It will capture a shot of a single window, a region of the screen, or a full screenshot, then export it in one of several image formats. Once you've got your shot, use the built-in editing tools to apply text and shapes to it before saving.

Go to Source
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ostatic/~3/rBOWnVmOlbM/six-top-screen-capture-tools-for-linux

The latest and greatest from the folks over at the Fedora Project Fedora 12 has just hit the beta stage (download link at the bottom of the post).

I’ve decided to write a post for the occasion because quite simply, I’m darned impressed with what they hope to accomplish for the new release, which is due out November 17th (of 2009 of course).

This post is going to focus on some of the highlights of the new release that I really think are great, but you can find the full lengthy feature list over on their wiki.

I’ll preface this list by saying, I’m not sure I am 100% on board with everything below, and I’ll go into detail on next week’s Computer Action Show. But that said it’s a strong list with a ton of great stuff.


OK kids, buckle up… Here we go:

* Optimized performance – All software packages on 32-bit (x86_32)
architecture have been compiled for i686 systems with special
optimization for Intel Atom processors used in many netbooks but without
losing compatibility with the overwhelming majority of CPUs. There is a
list of the rare CPUs which will no longer be supported.


* Smaller and faster updates – In Fedora 11, the optional yum-presto
plugin, developed by Fedora contributor Jonathan Dieter, reduced update
size by transmitting only the changes in the updated packages. Now, the
plugin is installed by default. Also, RPMs now use XZ rather than gzip
for compression, providing smaller package sizes without the memory and
CPU penalties associated with bzip2. This lets us fit more software into
each Fedora image, and uses less space on mirrors, making their
administrators’ lives a little easier. Thanks to the Fedora
infrastructure team for their work in generating delta RPMs.


* NetworkManager broadband and other enhancements – NetworkManager,
originally developed by Red Hat’s Dan Williams, was introduced in Fedora
7 and has become the de facto network configuration solution for
distributions everywhere. Enhancements to NetworkManager make both
system-wide connections and mobile broadband connections easier than
ever. Signal strength and network selection are available for choosing
the best mobile broadband connection when you’re on the road. Bluetooth
PAN support offers a simple click through process to access the Internet
from your mobile phone. NetworkManager can now configure always-on and
static address connections directly from the desktop. PolicyKit
integration has been added so configuration management can be done via
central policy where needed. IPv6 support has also been improved.


* Next-generation (Ogg) Theora video – For several years, Theora, the
open and free format not encumbered by known patents has provided a way
for freedom-loving users to share video. Fedora 12 includes the new
Theora 1.1, which achieves near-H.264 quality, meeting the expectations
of demanding users with crisp, vibrant media in both streaming and
downloadable form. Thanks to the work of the Xiph.Org Foundation’s
Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, sponsored by Red Hat, other Xiph
developers, and the contribution of Mozilla.org, Firefox 3.5 can deliver
free media on the web out of the box, using the Theora video and Vorbis
audio formats even better than the previous release of Fedora.


* Graphics support improvements – Fedora 12 introduces experimental 3D
support for AMD Radeon HD 2400 and later graphics cards. To try it out,
install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package. On many cards, this
support should allow desktop effects to be used. Kernel mode setting
(KMS) support, which was introduced on AMD hardware in Fedora 10 and
extended to Intel hardware in Fedora 11, is now extended to NVIDIA
hardware as well, meaning the great majority of systems now benefit from
the smooth, fully-graphical startup sequence made possible by KMS. The
Fedora graphical startup sequence now works better on systems with
multiple monitors. Also on multiple monitor systems, the desktop will
now automatically be spread across all monitors by default, rather than
having all monitors display the same output, including on NVIDIA chips
(where multiple monitor spanning was not possible without manual
configuration changes in Fedora 11). Systems with NVIDIA graphics chips
also gain initial support for suspend and resume functionality via the
default Nouveau driver. Initial support for the new DisplayPort display
connector has been added for Intel graphics chips. Support for Nvidia
and ATI systems is already under rapid development and will be included
in the next release of Fedora. Thanks to the Red Hat Xorg team including
Adam Jackson (X server), Kristian Høgsberg (Intel driver), Dave Airlie
and Jerome Glisse (Radeon driver for AMD), and Ben Skeggs (Nouveau
driver for NVIDIA).


* Virtualization improvements – Not content with all the improvements in
Fedora 11, we’ve kicked virtualization based on KVM up another notch in
Fedora 12. There are extensive improvements in performance, management,
resource sharing, and still more security enhancements. A new library
(libguestfs) and an interactive tool (guestfish) are now available for
directly accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images.


* Automatic reporting of crashes and SELinux issues – Abrt, a tool to
help non-power users report crashes to Bugzilla with a few mouse clicks,
is now enabled by default. Abrt collects detailed information
automatically and helps developers identify and resolve issues faster,
improving the quality of individual upstream components and Fedora. The
SELinux alert monitoring tool has also added the ability to report
SELinux issues to Bugzilla quickly and easily with just a couple of
clicks.


* New Dracut initrd generation tool – Up until Fedora 11, the boot
system (initial ram disk or initrd) used to boot Fedora was monolithic,
very distribution specific and didn’t provide much flexibility. This has
been replaced with Dracut, an initial ram disk generation tool with an
event-based framework designed to be distribution-independent thanks to
the Dracut team including Harald Hoyer, Jeremy Katz, Dave Jones and many
others. It has been also adopted by OLPC which uses Fedora; OLPC modules
for Dracut are available in the Fedora repository.


* PackageKit plugins – PackageKit now has a plugin which can install an
appropriate package when a user tries to run a command from a missing
package. Another new plugin allows installation of software packages
from a web browser. Thanks to Red Hat’s Richard Hughes and the
PackageKit team.


* Bluetooth on-demand – Bluetooth services are automatically started
when needed and stopped 30 seconds after last device use, reducing
initial startup time and resource use when Bluetooth is not in active
use. Thanks to Red Hat’s Bastien Nocera.


* Moblin graphical interface for netbooks – The Moblin graphical
interface and applications are fully integrated thanks to Peter
Robinson, a Fedora Project volunteer, and others. To use it, just
install the Moblin Desktop Environment package group using yum or the
graphical software management tools, and choose Moblin from the login
manager. A F12 Moblin Fedora Remix (installable Live CD) will also be
available.


* PulseAudio enhancements – Red Hat’s Lennart Poettering and several
others have made significant improvements to the PulseAudio system.
Improved mixer logic makes volume control more fine-grained and
reliable. Integration with the Rygel UPnP media server means you can
stream audio directly from your system to any UPnP / DLNA client, such
as a Playstation 3. Hotplug support has been made more intelligent, so
if you configure a device as the default output for a stream, unplug
that device — causing the stream(s) to be moved to another output
device — and later replug it, the stream is moved back to the preferred
device. Finally, Bluetooth audio support means pairing with any
Bluetooth audio device makes it available for use through PulseAudio.


* Lower process privileges – In order to mitigate the impact of security
vulnerabilities, permissions have been hardened for many files and
system directories and process privileges have been lowered for a number
of core components that require super user privileges. Red Hat’s Steve
Grubb has developed a new library, libcap-ng, and integrated it into
many core system components to improve the security of Fedora.


* SELinux sandbox – It is now possible to confine applications’ access
to the system and run them in a secure sandbox that takes advantage of
the sophisticated capabilities of SELinux. Dan Walsh, SELinux developer
at Red Hat, explains the details at
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/31146.html


* Open Broadcom firmware – The openfwwf open source Broadcom firmware is
included by default. This means wireless networking will be available
out of the box on some Broadcom chipsets.


* Hybrid live images – The Live images provided in this release can be
directly imaged onto a USB stick using dd (or any equivalent tool) to
create bootable Live USB keys. The Fedora Live USB Creator for Windows
and the livecd-tools for Fedora are still recommended for data
persistence and non-destructive writes. Thanks to Jeremy Katz.


* Better webcam support – While Fedora 11 improved webcam support, in
Fedora 12 you can expect even better video quality, especially for less
expensive webcams. Red Hat’s Hans de Goede, developer of the libv4l
library, has more details on his continuous upstream webcam support
enhancements at http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/6989.html.


* GNOME 2.28 – The latest version of the GNOME desktop includes the
lighter Gnote replacement for Tomboy as the default note application,
and Empathy replaces Pidgin as the default instant messenger. The new
volume control application, first seen in Fedora 11, has been improved
to restore some of the popular functionality from earlier releases
without making the interface too complex.


* GNOME Shell preview – Fedora 12 includes an early version of GNOME
Shell, which will become the default interface for GNOME 3.0 and beyond.
To try it, install the gnome-shell package, and use the Desktop Effects
configuration tool to enable it. It will only work correctly from the
GNOME desktop environment, not others such as KDE or Xfce. This is a
preview technology, and some video cards may not be supported.


* KDE 4.3 – The new KDE features an updated “Air” theme and fully
configurable keyboard shortcuts in Plasma, improved performance and new
desktop effects in the window manager, a new bug reporting tool, and a
configuration tool for the LIRC infra-red remote control system.


* Cool new stuff for developers beginning with Eclipse Galileo, which
includes more plugins than ever before. Perl 6 is now included, along
with PHP 5.3. For Haskell developers, the Haskell Platform now provides
a standardized set of libraries and tools. But one of the biggest
changes for developers is that most of the nice new features of Fedora
12, from Bluetooth to WebCams is implemented through underlying
libraries, and many of the improvements will be included simply by
relinking your application. Also available in this release are SystemTap
1.0 for improved instrumenting and debugging of binaries, complete with
Eclipse integration, and the newest NetBeans IDE for Java development.


* Cool new stuff for sysadmins includes added functionality for
clustered Samba services (including active/active configurations) over
GFS2; and the ability to boot a cluster of Fedora systems from a single,
shared root file system.


* Multi-Pointer X – The update to X.Org server 1.7 introduces the X
Input Extension version 2.0 (XI2), with much work contributed by Red
Hat’s Peter Hutterer. This extension provides a new client API for
handling input devices and also Multi-Pointer X (MPX) functionality. MPX
functionality allows X to cope with many inputs of arbitrary types
simultaneously, a prerequisite for (among others) multitouch-based
desktops and multi-user interaction on a single screen. This is
low-level work that applications and desktop environments will
incrementally take advantage of in future releases. More details are
available in the Release Notes and in the XI2 tag of Peter Hutterer’s
blog at http://who-t.blogspot.com/search/label/xi2


Now it should go without saying, but this is a beta release and you should be cautious about loading it on a production system. If you do come across something you think needs attention before the final release, you should probably spend a few minutes letting the Fedora team know about it over at their bug tracker: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/


Now go forth and enjoy, you can grab the latest ISO in your preferred flavor here: http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

Over the weekend a controversy erupted over Netgear’s shipping some proprietary software with its GPL router, the Rangemax Wireless-N.

This is one of those stupid kerfluffles that give open source a bad name.

Harald Welte, one of the good guys, got things started with a blog post titled Netgear trying to fool their users with “Open Source Router,” (Picture from Wikimedia Commons.) The text doesn’t match the intensity of the headline.

Welte’s complaint is that Netgear did not “study the Open Source market that they’re trying to address.” The company ships proprietary software with the router, then lets users download open source replacements if they wish.

This doesn’t please open source advocates, but they’re not the whole market for this product. Addressing multiple markets with one router is called marketing.

Netgear’s Pat Choudhury explained the company’s position at its Myopenrouter web site.

What makes the router open source is that Netgear lets you flash open source onto it. In fact they give you tools for this, and software. They’re happy if you do, and happy if you then build applications on the open source software you flash.

But if you don’t care, if you just want a super-fast router you can use out of the box, then Netgear wants to have its own software there, software it supports, software it understands. Yes, that’s proprietary software. So what? If you don’t care where’s the harm?

Santa Claus, who does his online business under the name megacoder, immediately chimed in under Choudhury’s post with an attaboy, but I wonder how many times open source advocates need to cry “wolf” when there is no wolf before people stop listening when there is a wolf?

Harald Welte has more power than I do, power he has earned over many years with good works. It doesn’t matter much when I shoot from the lip. It matters when he does.

Go to Source
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zdnet/open-source/~3/ZQwFct2_GIs/

This Sunday October 10th at 12:30pm PDT / 3:30pm EST / 7:30pm UTC.



We’ll kick off with a coding with Bryan pre-show (so get your Skype ready to call in!) and then kick off The Computer Action Show!

You can catch the live stream over at our live page, or here on this post:

See that tiny dot in the middle of that ring? That’s Saturn. And the newly-discovered glowing ring is 13.4 million miles in diameter. The proverbial 800-pound gorilla has been discovered by the Spitzer Space Telescope, leaving every single astronomer speechless.

The ring hasn’t been discovered till now for because it’s so diffuse that it reflects very little sunlight. That makes it undetectable by optical telescopes. The particles in it, however, glow with heat radiation, which was captured by the Spitzer’s infrared instruments.

This image is an artist representation of what Spitzer’s discovered, showing us, once again, that we are still bloody clueless when it comes to almost everything around us. I can’t wait to see the actual image. [NASA]

Go to Source
http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/_yMK–TRAHk/new-gigantic-glowing-saturn-ring-discovered

Or: There Is No Replacement for Creator Codes in Snow Leopard

Ignore, for the moment, the specific technical details of how creator codes work (or, perhaps better put, worked). What matters is the behavior they enabled, which was the ability for documents of the same type to open in different applications by default. A very common case: HTML files. For things like readmes and other files downloaded from the web intended to be read as rendered HTML content, yes, I want them to open in my web browser by default. But for “.html” files I’ve created myself, I want them to open in my text editor by default. That used to work; now, in Snow Leopard it does not.

Launch Services is the subsystem on Mac OS X that determines which application will open a file by default. What I mean by “by default” is that you, the user, indicate that you want to open a file, without directly specifying which app you want it to open in. For example (and very commonly), a document is opened by its default handler when you double-click the file in the Finder.

Starting in Snow Leopard, these default file bindings are determined entirely by file name extensions; HFS+ creator codes, if present, are now ignored. The only way in Snow Leopard to set a document to open with an app other than the one that claims ownership of that document’s file name extension is to use the Finder’s Get Info window to make the assignment manually. Behind the scenes, this adds a “usro” resource to the document’s resource fork, the contents of which resource are not the app’s bundle identifier (e.g. “com.apple.TextEdit”) but rather a hard-coded string with the path to the app itself (e.g. “/Applications/TextEdit.app”).

That’s it — file name extensions and these “usro” resources are the only remaining ways to bind a file to an application. And, as Chris Suter documents in this piece on his weblog, the only way to add such a resource to a file is by way of a private Launch Services API. Users can do it manually using the Finder’s Get Info window, but there is no supported public API developers can use to do this in third-party software (cf. this thread on Apple’s Cocoa-Dev mailing list from two weeks ago).

Now, as for the actual technical details of type and creator codes, there’s no question that they’re dated. (Not as dated as file name extensions, though.) They date all the way back to the original Macintosh in 1984, a machine with 128 kilobytes of RAM and used 400 kilobyte floppy disks for storage. Every byte was precious, so type and creator codes (along with numerous other aspects of the original Mac OS) were implemented with concise but cryptic four-byte codes (“OSTypes”). As an aid to human readability, the four-byte codes were typically rendered as four-character MacRoman-encoded strings. Many of these strings are naturally mnemonic: The type code for a plain text file is “TEXT”, the type code for an application is “APPL”. I’ll bet you can guess the type code for JPEG files. Application creator codes were often cute: the Finder’s creator code is “MACS”; BBEdit, created by Rich Siegel, has the creator code “R*ch”.

But there’s only so much you can do with four bytes. There’s no good reason today to cram everything into four-byte codes (nor any good reason to use a single-byte text encoding for strings). Mac OS X 10.0 introduced a superior way to uniquely identify applications: bundle identifiers. Bundle identifiers like “com.apple.Safari” and “com.apple.iTunes” are more expressive, informative, and obvious than creator codes like “sfri” and “hook”.

So as John Siracusa pointed out in his “Metadata Madness” piece, there is no need for a “replacement” for creator codes. The replacement is the bundle identifier, and it has been here since 2001. Every Mac app already has a unique bundle identifier. What is missing, though, is any supported way to associate a bundle identifier with an individual file to indicate which app created the file.

In the old type/creator code system, files were assigned to applications on an individual basis. In Snow Leopard, Launch Services only considers the file’s type, the type comes from the file name extension, and default bindings can only be managed between types and apps, rather than individual files and apps.

Snow Leopard, effectively, gives us the file-to-application binding policy from Windows 3.0.

Interpolation Regarding Uniform Type Identifiers and Purported Claims That They ‘Fix’ Creator Codes

Each time I’ve linked to coverage elsewhere regarding Snow Leopard’s disavowal of creator codes, a few readers have kindly emailed me links to Daniel Eran Dilger’s piece on the topic, entitled “Inside Snow Leopard’s UTI: Apple fixes the Creator Code”, assuming that the article proves what it claims. It does not. I off-handedly referred to it as “blathering” last week, prompting several readers to ask why I’d say such a thing.

So, OK, I’ll bite.

The title of the piece claims “Apple fixes the Creator Code”. Then in the first paragraph:

Instead, Apple has invented a superior alternative for the old
Creator Code in order to support a variety of new features.
Here’s why, and what the new Uniform Type Identifiers offer.

That sounds interesting, especially since my understanding of UTIs was that they do not in any way replace the functionality of creator codes.

Then come 2,900 words, none of which explain what was promised in the headline and first paragraph.

Then comes the penultimate paragraph, where Dilger writes:

Users who miss being able to automatically open a file using the
app that originally created it can pester their app’s developer to
get on the ball with UTI. Any application that has been updated
since 2005’s Tiger, but which does not yet support UTI, has opted
not to support an important feature of the Mac platform.

This is simply flat-out wrong. There is nothing any developer can do, with UTIs or with any other supported technology, to restore the functionality of creator codes in Snow Leopard. It’s just wrong. UTIs indicate a file’s type, not the application in which it should open by default. Furthermore, developers can’t even directly assign UTIs to files. UTIs are derived from file name extensions.

And then we come to the very last paragraph:

Everyone else, including many of us who didn’t ever understand why
the system launched files using a specific app rather than the one
we had defined for that given file type, can continue using the
Finder’s Open With menu, drag and drop app launching, or set a
permanent per-item default “creator” app for opening a selection
of documents by using the Get Info panel.

So, after claiming at the outset that Apple has “fixed” creator codes by “inventing a superior alternative”, followed by 3,000 words of muddled technical information regarding a technology that is unrelated to binding files to applications, Dilger admits that there is no replacement for creator codes in Snow Leopard, but it’s good news anyway because he never liked the previous behavior in the first place. His closing paragraph is technically accurate, but is completely at odds with the article’s title and opening premise — unless he meant that Apple has “fixed” creator codes in the same sense that one “fixes” a dog.

People want to believe that Apple wouldn’t take out a popular feature and replace it with nothing, but that’s the plain truth.

End of Interpolation, Back to the Main Point, Which, as a Gentle Post-Interpolation Reminder, Left Off With a Snide Remark About Snow Leopard’s File-to-Application Binding Policy Being Effectively the Same as That of Windows 3.0

Take a step back and consider that the term creator code itself shows just how different things are today. When the Mac was created, nearly all documents were proprietary binary file formats. The only app that could read MacWrite files was MacWrite, etc. Even when apps could read other apps’ file formats, they typically did so only through an import/export process. You could, say, import a Word document into ClarisWorks, but not by opening the file directly and writing back to it.

Today, on the other hand, many of the files we work with use common, open file formats: text files, JPEG and PNG graphics, MP3 audio, MP4 video, etc. When you double-clicked a MacPaint file in 1985, there was no question which app you wanted to open it: MacPaint. Today, though, there might be a dozen apps on your system that can open a JavaScript source code text file or an MP3 audio file. “The app that created it” can no longer be assumed to be the answer to the question “Which app would you prefer to open this file with by default?”

The situation is therefore far more complex today. One way Apple has dealt with this complexity is with the fairly-recent addition of the “Open With…” contextual menu in the Finder, which shows a list of apps that claim to be able to open files of the selected item’s type. And there’s always drag-and-drop.

The creator code long ago stopped meaning “the app that created the file”, and instead meant “the app this file should open with by default”. What matters is that the feature is now gone, not what it was called or what a hypothetical actual replacement in the future would be called.

And to be clear, the new binding policy in Snow Leopard is popular with many users. If you really want all files of the same type to open in the same app by default, then a system based exclusively on file name extensions works. Apple could have replaced creator codes with something superior, based on bundle identifiers, but they did not. And even if they plan to do so in the future,¹ there is no good reason for dropping creator code support from Launch Services now, before the replacement arrives. The simple truth is that many people — including, obviously, at Apple — prefer binding files to applications exclusively through file name extensions.

“Make it a preference” is often (if not usually) the wrong way to solve a problem, but a case like this, where many people prefer it one way and many prefer it the other, is exactly the sort of situation that calls for a preference setting.

I could go on and rant about the inherent inelegance of storing two essential pieces of a file’s metadata, name and type, in a single field — shackling what Apple proclaims to be “the world’s most advanced operating system” to a metadata limitation of MS-DOS from 1981 — but there’s no use crying over spilled milk.

Go to Source
http://daringfireball.net/2009/10/congrtlns-osx

Creating a bootable USB to install Windows 7 quicker than with a CD Rom, isn’t difficult, but it certainly isn’t easy.  If you want an easier way to create a bootable USB to install Windows, then here are four free applications that will make it easy to do:

1. Unbootin
2. A bootable USB
3. WinToFlash
4. Make USB Disk Bootable

Source: Intowindows

Related posts:

1. How to Create and Configure a VHD in Windows 7
2. Shortcut To Create New Folders In Windows 7
3. How To Install Windows 7 From a USB Hard Flash/Hard Drive
4. Microsoft to Sell Windows 7 on USB Drives (And A HOWTO: Do It Yourself)
5. How To Create a Windows 7 Homegroup
6. Install Missing Windows 7 Apps With Windows Live Essential Applications

a bootable USB, Make USB Disk Bootable, unbootin, USB, Windows 7, WinToFlash

Go to Source
http://windows7news.com/2009/08/30/four-tools-to-create-a-windows-7-bootable-usb/

Netgear launched a new open source router called the RangeMax Wireless-N, a Linux-based unit with both Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare USB storage access.

The company is supporting the downloading of firmware and community development around the router at a site called MyOpenRouter.com.

This is precisely what I wanted to see when I started writing my blog posts about “Always On” at Corante in 2003.

The idea is that with storage and processing at the router, applications can live in the air independent of the PC. Clients on such a network might include security systems, RFID chips so you could find your stuff, and medical applications living on your body.

I was allowed to speak about this vision at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, and it is gratifying to see it finally being supported.

Unfortunately, router vendors resisted this concept for a long time. Early Linux routers seemed to emerge by accident, after programmers found they were using open source code without releasing it, and they were not supported by marketing.

Now things are changing. It will be fun to see where it goes from here:

• Security systems that can let police watch your break-in in progress, even from their police cars.
• Home automation systems that know when to water the plants and turn the lights on-and-off while you’re gone.
• Music systems that find you and deliver your tunes to the nearest speakers.
• A way to find your keys, your wallet, and your hat if you’re senile or just have ADHD.
• Systems that monitor the aged so they can age at home, not a nursing home.
• Medical systems that monitor your heart and blood sugar while you sleep, so ER techs are there as you have your heart attack instead of your getting the victory hug from the fellow in the brite nitegown.

All this, and more, can be developed on a platform where routers act as servers, wireless does the work of wires, and clients can be as small as a single RFID chip.

Now get to work and make yourself some money.

Go to Source
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zdnet/open-source/~3/KRdqN7YOtwk/

The New York Times has announced plans to release the next version of its Document Viewer under an open source license. The new viewer will be ready for launch in a few weeks and offers users interactive tools for annotating pages to share with others.

The Times has actively supported and participated in the open source community for years by releasing the code to various back-end tools and maintaining its own blog chronicling the activities of the development team. This is the first time, however, that it has released a customer-facing tool to share with other media outlets.

"[I]t's a tool. We're not giving away stories. We're not giving away tipsheets… If we can leverage the power of this growing community of developers and journalists who are becoming more technological to create something that will enhance journalism and transparency, then everyone benefits," Aron Pilhofer, the Times' editor for interactive newsroom technologies, told BayNewser.

Hopefully, the move is among the first of many by mainstream media outlets to harness the power of crowdsourcing. As the readership traditional media services like newspapers and magazines continues to decline, a willingness to work together and embrace rather than avoid the advantages of the Internet’s impact on the industry may be the only way many outlets will continue to operate in the black.

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While the ATI Radeon HD 5800 graphics cards were introduced last week, the open-source support for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series is finally maturing. The Linux 2.6.32 kernel will feature kernel mode-setting support for these ATI R600/700 graphics processors as well as the DRM support for allowing 3D acceleration. The classic Mesa support for the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 4000 series is maturing and is now able to run basic OpenGL games and applications, while the Gallium3D support is still a ways out. However, now that there is finally the Catalyst 9.10 driver within Ubuntu Karmic Koala that supports the latest kernel, we are finally able to directly compare the performance of AMD’s Catalyst driver and that of the latest open-source code. In this article we have benchmarks showing the 2D performance between these two driver options with both an R600 and R700 graphics card.

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