micrOdOts.org / ramblings [of the ABsurd]

The Tech Report: "Yep, the rumors are true. AMD does indeed intend to do away with the ATI name, eliminating the "ATI Radeon" co-branding the company has steadfastly maintained since its acquisition of ATI. The firm briefed us on its plans late last week and explained several factors influencing its decision."

Techcrunch: "An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States."

Technology & Life Integration: "The thing with proprietary operating systems is that they are all the same. To these companies the operating system they are peddling is simply a product. Nothing more and nothing less."

Scott Photographics: "This tutorial will hopefully help inspire you to create your own custom wallpapers and produce a great results in the GIMP."

Phoronix: "Earlier this month Canonical introduced its own multi-touch framework for Ubuntu that is set to premiere with Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and it's called UTouch and is joined by their own gesture/touch language"

PC World: "Analysis: The Microsoft co-founder's patent violation claims are likely to hurt consumers with technology price hikes financing a gigantic corporate patent war."

Database Journal: "CouchDB is a great example of forward-thinking technology that's worth a look even if you're not currently in need of a database solution. This article introduces you to CouchDB, showing you how to get started using this fascinating solution and even integrate it into your PHP website."

Linux Journal: "This short guide shows you how to scan for infected files by booting into SystemRescueCD and running ClamAV, a virus checker."

The H Open: "According to a report by Phoronix, Indian vendor Knowledge Quest Infotech is working on a native ZFS port to Linux. The company, whose areas of expertise include the Linux kernel and cluster file systems, reportedly plans to release the port in mid-September"

Scribbles and Snaps: "digiKam provides a set of tools that can help you to fix lens distortion with relative ease. In fact, the application sports the Auto-Correction feature that attempts to fix lens distortion with a minimum of tweaking."

Datamation: "Key to any operating system buying decision is its lifespan for support and maintenance updates. As it turns out, most of the major operating system vendors offer support lengths that, on the surface, don't differ radically from each other -- though there are exceptions to the rule that IT managers need to keep in mind if they're going to get the most support for their dollar."

MakeUseOf: "We have reviewed a number of free email clients before. There is the ever so popular Thunderbird, there is Evolution for Linux and then there is Outlook for Windows."

The Prior Art: "Former Microsoft executive and billionaire Paul Allen sued several major Internet companies and three large retailers for patent infringement today, asserting that four patents originating at Interval Research, Allen's dot-com era think tank, cover basic web browsing and e-commerce technologies."

LinuxDevices: "The Linux Mint team has released the final version of Linux Mint 9 ("Isadora"), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool, and menu and interface improvements"

Ghacks: "And in this article I am going to show you how to enable and use tiling feature in KDE 4.5. After that, it's up to you to decide if this feature helps to make your work more or less efficient."

levien.zonnetjes.net: "After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful... So I decided to give OSS4 a try."

Tech Source: "As a certified geek, it is always pleasing to see movies that involve computer hacking or hackers in action. Although most of these films don't always represent the real deal, some of them have what it takes to excite, amuse, and inspire those who are passionate about computers."

O'Reilly Broadcast: "Back in June I wrote about Adobe dropping support for Flash Player on 64-bit Linux. Since the existing version of the 64-bit Linux Flash client had a serious security vulnerability staying with the last release isn't really an option."

Lifehacker: "Running multiple operating systems side-by-side gives you the chance to test applications, run platform-specific software, and tons more without ever rebooting. It's also extremely cool. Here's how to run Windows, Mac, and Linux simultaneously and pain-free as possible."

LWN.net: "A longstanding bug in the Linux kernel�quite possibly since the first 2.6 release in 2003�has been fixed by a recent patch, but the nearly two-month delay between the report and the fix is raising some eyebrows. It is a local privilege escalation flaw that can be triggered by malicious X clients forcing the server to overrun its stack."