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In our age of instant gratification, no one likes waiting for anything. That's why the sluggish launch time of a typical personal computer can make a consumer irritable. It's also why instant-on computing has become a sort of Holy Grail for hardware and software makers in the industry. The pursuit o...

Linux and Apple OS X users are usually insulated from the security woes of their Microsoft Windows counterparts, but that doesn't seem to be the case with a recent vulnerability involving the handling of Uniform Resource Identifier protocols. Those protocols instruct a browser to perform certain tas...

Worldwide revenues from standalone open source software will reach $5.8 billion by 2011, according to a report released last week by IDC. Revenue from open source software will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent from 2006 to 2011, according to predictions from the Framingham, Mass.-

A tiff between the world's largest chipmaker and an organization selling low-priced laptops to the developing world will ultimately benefit poor kids, according to one tech aid expert. "I think it's wonderful that Intel and OLPC are now competing," Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News and director of Gee...

A mind map combines both the power of a picture with the suggestion of words. You may have seen mind maps, but you may not have known the name for them. Sometimes they look like clusters of bubbles; other times, like elaborate tree structures. Because mind mapping has been connected with business br...

Transparency has become a rallying cry for critics of existing electronic voting systems made by secretive corporations jealously guarding the software code inside their products. One way to assure transparency in voting systems, those critics maintain, is to require the disclosure of any code used ...

Some 204 million mobile phones, or 14 percent of the world market, will be running on Linux by 2012, according to a report released this week from the London office of ABI Research. "Linux in the cellular phone is not a question of if, but when," declared ABI Research Director Stuart Carlaw. Develop...

For the first time ever, Wikipedia last month cracked into comScore's top 10 hottest properties on the Web, largely due to the exposure the online encyclopedia receives from search engines like Google. During January, comScore reported that Wikipedia and its affiliated sites garnered 42.9 million un...

The software industry isn't what it used to be. Open source software, globalization and outsourcing have irrevocably changed the sector and the skills needed by those who choose to work in it. That's the reason Carnegie Mellon West announced last week a new degree program that it maintains will give...

Browser usage numbers for 2006 are beginning to appear on the Web, and for the first time in many moons the market share of Microsoft's dominant offering, Internet Explorer, has dipped below 80 percent. While Internet Explorer's star was sinking, its chief competitor's, Mozilla Firefox, was ascendin...

A legal test used to assess the validity of patents threatens the development of free and open source software, according to a civil liberties group. The test can be used to create legal obstacles to free and open source collaborations, according to a "friends of the court" brief filed Wednesday by ...

Popularity may be a menace as well as a benefit for the open source software movement, according to an analyst at Forrester Research in Boston, Mass. In a report titled "Vendors Refine Their Open Source Strategies/The Risk of Subverting Open Source Freedoms Mounts," Senior Analyst Michael Goulde cau...

Popularity may be a menace as well as a benefit for the open source software movement, according to an analyst at Forrester Research in Boston, Mass. In a report titled "Vendors Refine Their Open Source Strategies/The Risk of Subverting Open Source Freedoms Mounts," Senior Analyst Michael Goulde cau...

The widespread adoption of open-source software by corporations and governments has raised some security concerns in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the agency is responding. It has funded a three-year grant reportedly worth US$1.24 million to -- among other things -- set up a daily au...

As revelers wish each other happy New Year this weekend, members of the open-source community will be reveling in events from the past year -- a year that saw their movement make significant strides in strengthening its position on the technology landscape. "This year we saw a lot of CIOs and a lot ...

Everyone has heard the expression, "You get what you pay for." It suggests that the functionality of something is directly proportional to its price. But that rule of thumb is being turned on its head by open-source software. Open-source software is free, but it differs from "freeware" in some major...

Anyone who has ever bought a car knows that one of first hard choices they must make is how to service it. Do you stick with the dealer who sold it to you, or do you take it to one of the 495,000 businesses providing after-market service to auto owners? However, as vehicles become more and more depe...

A developer of security software for Linux had some harsh words yesterday for what he sees as a lax attitude toward security in the operating system's community. "Linux is being presented by commercial vendors as a professional, enterprise-ready product," Brad Spengler, of grsecurity, said. "When it...

A company that makes a tool for finding bugs in software code disclosed this week that the Linux kernel is far less flawed than many programs people pay money for. According to San Francisco-based Coverity, its source-code auditing tool found the Linux 2.6 kernel had 985 bugs in its 5.7 million line...

Industry analysts say the fastest growing operating system in the world -- Linux -- could be experiencing growing pains as growth outpaces the supply of IT professionals with expertise in this area. "Linux is increasing its market share so rapidly that, in consequence, some companies find it difficu...