Legacy file formats are evil. They tend to have no written specifications, and when you start reverse-engineering them, you often discover layers of questionable solutions built on top of even more questionable solutions that are carried around for backwards compatibility sake.
So why go through pains of supporting them at all? Simply put, because it's the legacy which isn't always in the past really, because businesses don't like upgrades. Designers keep local cliparts in all kinds of arcane file formats, big publishing houses keep using DOC instead of DOCX, and system integration companies still toss around VSD files.
Tuesday, August 09 2011 @ 07:36 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
Ever heard of WebKit2 and wondering what it means from a Qt perspective? Here’s an attempt to explain QtWebKit and QtWebKit2 in simple terms. I make no attempt to be completely technically correct, it’s meant to be able to explain terminology to the WebKit uninitiated.
systemd for Administrators, Part IX - On /etc/sysconfig and /etc/default
Monday, July 18 2011 @ 07:27 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
So, here's a bit of an opinion piece on the /etc/sysconfig/ and /etc/default directories that exist on the various distributions in one form or another, and why I believe their use should be faded out. Like everything I say on this blog what follows is just my personal opinion, and not the gospel and has nothing to do with the position of the Fedora project or my employer. The topic of /etc/sysconfig has been coming up in discussions over and over again. I hope with this blog story I can explain a bit what we as systemd upstream think about these files.
Saturday, July 16 2011 @ 10:13 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
Greetings PHP geeks,
Don't panic! This is not a proposal to add errors or remove this popular extension. Not yet anyway, because it's too popular to do that now.
The documentation team is discussing the database security situation, and educating users to move away from the commonly used ext/mysql extension is part of this.
This proposal only deals with education, and requests permission to officially convince people to stop using this old extension.
There we are, after giving you access to some of the latest features coming in Flash through the Incubator program, I am happy to announce the availability of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 in public beta (for desktop). You will find below the list of features available in this release. Please test your content against these builds, report any bug you find, log bugs
Sunday, July 03 2011 @ 10:25 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
Now that NVIDIA has officially released the 275.xx Linux driver, they're onto the 280.xx driver series. Just in time for the US holiday weekend they have released the NVIDIA 280.04 binary Linux driver beta.
Two-factor SSH authentication via Google secures Linux logins
Tuesday, June 21 2011 @ 06:24 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
When Google introduced two-factor authentication for the Google and Google Apps accounts, they also created a pluggable authentication module (PAM) for Linux. This is great news for people running Linux servers who want to protect their remotely-accessible SSH accounts with two-factor authentication. For free.
Just under a year ago I wrote about how Adobe had abandoned 64-bit Linux, at least temporarily. Linux users who chose to run a 64-bit OS were left with a range of unsatisfactory choices: use an outdated beta with known security vulnerabilities; run an FOSS alternative, most likely gnash, despite limits in functionality and compatibility; or run a 32-bit browser in a 64-bit operating system.
One thing that keeps Linux in the back foot is the lack of good quality applications that can compete with the best out there. The advent of paid softwares section in Ubuntu Software Center is a start, things like that can kick start application development for Linux in a big way. But things were not as bad I thought it would be. On further browsing, I found out that there are indeed a good number of paid applications for Linux, some of them were a total surprise for me. Here are some of those paid applications for Linux which I found interesting.
Fedora 15 is out. Get it while it is hot! It is probably the biggest distribution release of a all time with being first in shipping both GNOME 3 and systemd.
Since this is the first distribution release based on systemd, it might be interesting to read up on what it is all about. Here's a little compilation of the available documentation for systemd.
