Tag: OPEN SOURCE

Firefox commands enough market share to make it the world's second most popular browser, but Internet Explorer has always kept a significant lead thanks to its presence in the enterprise market. Microsoft is very good at making things easy for large businesses, and Mozilla showed little interest in approaching that market until 2007. But Mozilla's efforts to improve deploying and managing Firefox ...

We already knew that the PR2 robot could fold a mean basket of laundry. But we had no idea it could also play a mean game of billiards. In the matter of a week, the Willow Garage team that developed the PR2 has taught its brainchild how to play pool -- although, as Gizmodo reports, it certainly wasn't easy. Willow Garage had to create a special bridge and grip to enable its bot to hold a cue, ...

Share Most people have always been taught to take anything they read on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. The site's usually pretty reliable for general information, or for those times when you need to sound off on the intricacies of Vulcan law. But its open-source format still leaves it vulnerable to a host of factual inaccuracies that usually deter students or academics from citing the online ...

Now that the dust from the recent U.K. parliamentary elections appears to have settled, the new Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition government has wasted no time in publicizing its new agenda. And, as ArsTechnica reports, major changes may be on the horizon. Today, the new government issued its official unified policy statement (.PDF), which aims to reverse many of the controversial policies of the ...

Let us just say that we hate IM-speak and Webby abbreviations, but being that this is a family-friendly publication, a simple "WTF" will have to suffice for our reaction on this one. Our minds are really blown by this: A middle school teacher, Karen, had a mini-meltdown when she spotted a student showing off the capabilities of his Linux-powered laptop and handing out Linux discs provided by ...

When it comes to productivity software, it's hard to cover all the bases better than Microsoft's Office suite. It handles writing letters, tracking numbers in spreadsheets, making presentations, and even creating simple databases for archiving large amounts of data. It's the worldwide standard -- but it isn't cheap. A full copy with all the bells and whistles can set you back nearly $700 (unless ...

Those of you who have been out of school for a while may not realize just how expensive college textbooks have become. Truth is, most college students could probably feed themselves fillet mignon for a year with what they pay for textbooks. The costly textbook market is starting to come under pressure from both the academics who author the texts and groups who believe knowledge and information ...

The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu is making gains in some pretty important places, namely the French military police force National Gendarmerie. The government-run organization is planing to migrate all of its desktop PCs to Ubuntu by 2014, leaving the world of Microsoft behind it. The French National Assembly already switched all its PCs to Ubuntu in 2007, but its 1,200 desktops pales in ...

The Linux revolution is making a run for the smart phone market. This isn't exactly new news. In fact, Linux started taking off in the cell phone market in about 2003. Major companies from NEC to Samsung are shipping phones loaded with the open source OS, though primarily in China, and Motorola seems to be slowly-but-surely letting Linux take over its hand-held line up. Certain versions of the ...

One of the new poster children for the new social web is one most of us will probably never get our hands on. The XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation is a low-cost, low-powered, rugged laptop aimed at developing nations. In case you haven't been paying attention, the XO or OLPC (or $100 Laptop as it's called) is a first-of-its-kind project loaded with new technologies and ...