Archive

To buy a flashy new ultra-thin framed 3D TV or not: Like many consumers over the holiday buying hustle, I struggled with that question. I finally gave in and decided to buy one. That decision was not an impulse-only submission, however. I was toying for a while with replacing my aging 42-inch plasma...

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argu...

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argu...

Netflix on Monday released the source code for its Chaos Monkey tool into the open source jungle. Chaos Monkey is a tool the company built in the Amazon Web Services system. Its job is to randomly kill virtual machines and services within Netflix's architecture. The idea is to test systems in real-w...

HP brought Enyo -- the open source object-oriented JavaScript framework for webOS -- out of beta this week, six months after the ill-fated operating system was contributed to the open source community. Enyo 2.0 now has a community of developers, a broad set of cross-platform user interface widgets, ...

The 5-year-old subscription streaming video service known as "Hulu Plus" has doubled its subscriber numbers in the last seven months to more than 2 million, according to numbers bandied about by the company. Hulu is a joint venture between investors and television operators: Comcast's NBCUniversal, ...

Last month, I succumbed to a peculiar urge to go out to my local, friendly big-box consumer electronics retailer and drop almost a hundred dollars on a product that had been panned by the critics on launch, had a dubious life expectancy because of that, and had been almost universally rejected by th...

If there was ever any doubt as to Canonical's true intentions with its touch-enabled Unity interface, those doubts were laid to rest last week. Unity has often been described as a "mobile-inspired" interface, and voila! Canonical has finally admitted that it plans to bring Ubuntu onto mobile devices...

With the leaked Honeycomb 3.1 operating system installed, my Logitech Revue Google TV box was, for all intents and purposes, driving a giant Honeycomb tablet. The only problem was that there wasn't really any nonsubscription, ad-supported content -- none that I was interested in, anyway -- on the bo...

I've long held the opinion that the most effective way to get Internet-based content onto a TV is to simply hook a laptop up to the flat screen with an HDMI cable. The laptop acts as an oversized remote control. You get a full Flash-based Web browser, hard drive and keyboard on your TV. It's not the...

Well it's 2011 at last, and those of us here in the FOSS community have a great deal to look forward to this year. Android is going nowhere but up, Ubuntu is gearing up to capture the hearts and minds of the masses, and Linux-friendly ARM is poised for even more great things. It's going to be a grea...

So Turkey Day has come and gone for another year here in the good old U-S-of-A, but what comes next might be even better -- at least from a geek's perspective. That's right, it's Black Friday once again, and the tech shopping deals are ripe for the picking. Who has time to worry about Novell, Attach...

In the collective psyche of the Linux community, there has traditionally been one primary enemy. Just as Dr. Strange had Baron Mordo, just as Aragorn had Sauron, Harry had Lord Voldemort, and Odysseus had Poseidon, so we in the world of FOSS have had Microsoft. That, however, appears to be changing....

The Boxee video-on-demand software maker aims to change the way consumers get free movie and TV entertainment from the Internet with its first hardware venture, called "Boxee Box." The open source software company debuted its new hardware device at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, N.Y., o...

On Jan. 26, Lucid Imagination opened for business as the commercial entity for the Apache Lucene-Solr ecosystem. The new company hopes to unite both the Lucene and the open source developer communities under its wing by offering product support, training, consulting services and value-added software...