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Media

Submission + - Netflix's Roku Releases GPL software

Submitted by digitalderbs
digitalderbs writes: The Netflix player company, Roku, has released their software under the GPL, as required by the GPL of the software the Roku player uses. Could this lead to software players on other platforms? They, however, imply that not all of their software has been GPL'ed.

"Certain components of the software included with the Netflix Player by Roku are subject to separate license terms, including "free" or "open source" software ("Separately Licensed Code"). As required by the terms of the relevant Separately Licensed Code licenses, Roku makes the "free" and "open source" code provided under such licenses, and Roku's modifications to such code, available on Roku's website, at no charge. If you believe any additional source code files should be provided under the applicable open source license, please contact us at support@roku.com and provide in detail the product or code module in question."
Graphics

Submission + - Chip problems erode Nvidia profit (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Nvidia has announced it will miss profit targets because of problems with production, reduced demand and a price war with competitors. The company claims that revenue in the second quarter will reach between $875 million and $950 million, but that its profit margin would be narrower than previously predicted. Problems with defective laptops graphics chips are causing higher than normal failure rates in notebooks from unspecified manufacturers, and the cost of repairing and returning these models is expected to reach between $150 and $200 million."
Supercomputing

Submission + - Apache Hadoop Wins Terabyte Sort Benchmark (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
owenomalley
owenomalley writes: "One of Yahoo's Hadoop clusters sorted 1 terabyte of data in 209 seconds, which beat the previous record of 297 seconds in the annual general purpose (daytona) terabyte sort benchmark. Apache Hadoop is an open source Java framework for writing data-intensive distributed programs, and includes both a distributed file system and a map/reduce implementation. The sort benchmark, which was created in 1998 by Jim Gray, specifies the input data (10 billion 100 byte records), which must be completely sorted and written to disk. This is the first time that either a Java or an open source program has won. Yahoo is both the largest user of Hadoop with 13,000+ nodes running hundreds of thousands of jobs a month and the largest contributor, although non-Yahoo usage and contributions are increasing rapidly."
Software

Submission + - RPM Package Manager (RPM) version 5.0.0 released (rpm5.org) 2

Submitted by
Robert Scheck
Robert Scheck writes: "http://rpm5.org/ — 2008-01-05 — After seven months of comprehensive development, the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was released as stable version 5.0.0. The relaunch of the RPM project in spring 2007 and today's following availability of RPM 5 marks a major milestone for the previously rather Linux-centric RPM. RPM now finally evolved into a fully cross-platform and reusable software packaging tool.

WHAT IS NEW IN RPM 5.0.0

The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was completely revamped from scratch and as one major result mostly all third-party libraries now can be linked externally and in a very flexible way. Support for the ancient and obsolete "rpmrc" files was completely removed, as everything is now configured through RPM "macros" under run-time only.

The RPM code base was ported to all major platforms, including the BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin. Additionally, the code base was heavily cleaned up and now can be compiled with all major C compiler suites, including GNU GCC, Sun Studio and Intel C/C++.

The RPM packages, in addition to the default Gzip and optional Bzip2 compression, now support also LZMA compression. Additionally, initial support for the XML Archive (XAR) file format was added where the implementation establishes a wrapper archive format for mapping the four sections used in RPM format packages (Lead, Signature, Header and Payload) to files with the same name in a XAR format package. Finally, support for the old RPMv3 (LSB) package format was removed to cleanup and simplify the code base. RPM 5, with respect to RPM format packages, now supports RPMv4 format only.

Additional features for use in package specifications (.spec files) were added, including new standard and even custom tags, new standard sections, etc. Most notably, RPM is now able to automatically track vendor distribution files with its new vcheck(1) based "%track" section and now can automatically download the vendor distribution files, too.

ABOUT RPM

RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating Unix software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. There is also a library API, permitting advanced developers to manage such transactions from programming languages such as C, Perl or Python.

Traditionally, RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Mandriva Linux, and many others. But RPM is also used for software packaging on many other Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS X by the cross-platform Unix software distribution OpenPKG. Additionally, the RPM archive format is an official part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB). RPM is released as free software under the GNU LGPL distribution license.

HISTORY OF RPM

RPM was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing for use in the Red Hat Linux distribution. Later the development of RPM became a classical free software community effort, now lead since many years by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson. In spring 2007 the RPM project was relaunched by Jeff Johnson on a new infrastructure provided by the OpenPKG project and its Ralf S. Engelschall. With the RPM 5 milestone, RPM finally evolved into a fully portable and vendor-agnostic packaging tool, which especially is no longer tied to its historical Linux roots."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - DirecTV DVR Alleged to Violate GPL 1

Submitted by Linux_Crusader
Linux_Crusader writes: A while back, the new HR20 DVR (Tivo clone) from DirecTV was found to be running uClinux 2.4.29. Unfortunately, hot on the heels of the Monsoon lawsuit, DirecTV has put in place a policy that they will not provide GPL sources under any circumstances. Instead they will just snail-mail you a copy of the GPL license when you request the code. What do we as a community need to do to better educate corporate Linux users?
Yahoo!

Submission + - Yahoo building open source Map/Reduce and GFS (yahoo.net)

Submitted by
owenomalley
owenomalley writes: "Yahoo is developing Hadoop, which is an open source implementation of key pieces of Google's infrastructure (namely, Map/Reduce and GFS). Hadoop's framework allows you to write applications that reliably process very large datasets (100's of terabytes) efficiently on large (1000+) clusters of computers. Without a framework like Hadoop, writing applications on large clusters requires a lot of duplicated effort as each application deals with distribution, reliability, and reporting. Hadoop handles those parts for you and just requires you to write your application logic.

Hadoop is managed under Apache."
Linux Business

Submission + - Samba Success in the Enterprise?

Submitted by
gunnk
gunnk writes: "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is "amateur" software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"
Programming

Submission + - Breaking into C++ Software Engineering Field

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Does anyone have any tips for breaking into the C++ software engineering field? It seems every job ad I look at with C++ (or C for that matter) is demanding 5-10 years professional experience with the language. How do I get this experience without a job coding with the language? Currently all I can find are DBA jobs since my work experience is mostly with SQL Server, so is there any recommendation for helping me to get on the development path and to find a job using C++?
Java

Java's Greatest Missed Opportunity? 362

Posted by Zonk from the steaming-cup-of-dissapointment dept.
jg21 writes "It looks like Bruce Eckel has hit the nail on the head again. No sooner did he finish stirring debate by writing about the 'departure of the Java hyper-enthusiasts,' previously discussed here on Slashdot, than he now rubs salt in the wound by highlighting in AJAXWorld Magazine how and why Java missed its golden opportunity to become the language undergirding Rich Internet Applications. He comments: 'We must ask why Java applets haven't become ubiquitous on the internet as the client-side standard for RIAs....This is an especially poignant question because Gosling and team justified rushing Java out the door (thus casting in stone many poorly-considered decisions) so that it could enable the internet revolution. That's why the AWT and Applets were thrown in at the last second, reportedly taking a month from conception to completion.'"
The Internet

Submission + - What's in a job title?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Currently I call my self a Systems Administrator. I've been told that may not be such a good job title when trying to move up/get ahead. Here is what I do:
  • Write all the company's web applications (WebObjects/Java)
  • Maintain the company's web site/ftp site/mail server. I also write all the HTML pages (aka webmaster which isn't 'in' anymore, apparently)
  • LAN/WAN & VPN connectivity.
  • Maintain file servers
  • Maintain LDAP server
  • Maintain DNS
  • Desktop support
  • Server maintenance training
  • DBA (MySQL, some Oracle)
  • I maintain 8 servers in three countries.

Don't know if it matters but I also report to the VP of Engineering/IT who reports to the CEO. What do you think, what title would you choose? Title's like head yahoo doesn't really work :-)

I could just be full of it...

(No offense to any Systems Administrators out there...)
The Courts

Submission + - isoHunt Forced to Shut Down

Submitted by
werewolf1031
werewolf1031 writes: "One of the world's most well-known torrent indexing sites has been shut down under orders from its ISP's lawyers, according to the temporary page currently being served at isoHunt.com. From the site:
"Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice, as of 14:45 PST. No doubt related to our lawsuit brought by the MPAA, but we don't have more information at this time until people responsible comes to work tomorrow. We will be back in operation once we sort out this mess with our current ISP, or we get new hardware ready at our new ISP."
Although isoHunt.com operated outside the United States, the servers hosting the site were physically within the US, apparently providing adequate legal grounds for the shutdown. The site administrators had been trading legal barbs with the MPAA for two years before the ISP's lawyers took matters into their own hands. Presently, the site's temporary front page is being hosted by a Canadian ISP, pending recovery of their servers in the U.S.

At a time when the movie industry is attempting to harness the distribution powers of the BitTorrent protocol, are they in the end biting the hand that feeds by preemptively alienating many of their potential future customers?"
Slashdot.org

Submission + - What is going on with 'loose' vs 'lose'?

Submitted by Insecure grammar nazi
Insecure grammar nazi writes: Fairly recently on /. there have been a number of cases in which people seem to confuse lose (to come to be without) with loose (free or released from fastening or attachment). Normally I would expect the grammar nazis to set these people straight, but the prevalence of these mistakes seems to have increased to the point where more people get it wrong than right!
Lately I have noticed the same mistakes occuring quite frequently on other forums and interactive web-sites across the 'net.
Is this all a part of some deliberate backlash against these two words because people honestly feel that they are more correctly spelt the other way around? Is it just some planet-wide (slashdot-wide?) joke to which I am not privy? Or is the entire planet conspiring to mess with my mind and make me feel left out?

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