May
Sub-archives
May 02, 2007
Microsoft's Open XML Wins Approval as a Standard
Microsoft's Open XML format has won ECMA approval as a standard, giving Redmond, so often the opponent of open-source software, a better footing to compete with OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument Format (ODF). read more...
SA Linux supercomputer to aid HIV research
South Africa's department of science and technology, Intel and the Meraka Institute yesterday unveiled a new high performance computer (HPC) designed to assist in HIV and Aids research. The HPC, based at the CSIR's Meraka Institute in Pretoria was officially switched on by deputy minister of science and technology Derek Hanekom and visiting Intel chairman Craig Barrett. The supercomputer uses a cluster of 32 dual-processor servers powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors and 32 dual-processor servers with Intel Xeon processors, running Red Hat Linux Advanced Server. read more...
OpenOffice.org 2.1 released
OpenOffice.org's third release of the year, version 2.1 is available as a 94 meg download, marginally bigger than the 92.7 megs of version 2.0. At a casual glance there is nothing obviously new in this version, but there are several improvements on interoperability and final presentation of documents. For users, the presentations application, Impress, now supports an option for multiple monitors to allow users to choose where to display the presentation. The spreadsheet application, Calc, has improved on its HTML export capability so that browsers are able to recreate the original spreadsheet's appearance more accurately. read more...
Open-source group seeks reversal of 'junk patent'
A legal centre is trying to overturn a patent it says threatens three open-source educational projects, a sign of the tension between patent holders and the collaborative programming community. The Software Freedom Law Center said on Thursday that it has asked the US Patent Office to re-examine a patent awarded to education software company Blackboard. It claims that the patent is bogus and could undermine three open-source education software projects it represents: Sakai, Moodle and ATutor. The patent, number 6,988,138, is titled "Internet-based education support system and methods", and relates to a central feature of Blackboard's software: the ability to grant different people, such as students and teachers, different access rights to online resources such as grades, files or quizzes. read more...
Google Open-Sources AJAX Toolkit
Google Inc has open-sourced its tool set for building Web applications, the Google Web Toolkit. ADVERTISEMENT According to a notice issued by Chris Ulbrich, a spokesperson for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, the company has open-sourced the GWT 1.3 release candidate. Previous versions of the GWT were only partly open-sourced, Ulbrich said. In a Dec. 12 blog post, Bruce Johnson, technical lead for GWT at Google, said, "Today is quite a milestone for Google Web Toolkit: with the GWT 1.3 Release Candidate, our team is very happy to announce that all of GWT is open source under the Apache 2.0 license." Google introduced GWT last May as a free development framework for writing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web applications in the Java language. The toolset features a debugging browser and a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. read more...
