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Btrfs Free Tutorial

pacneil — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:32:42 +0000

New Btrfs Free Tutorial and Request for End User Feedback on Btrfs

“Those who follow Linux have certainly heard of Btrfs, a relatively new high performance file system that has a lot of people excited about its potential. Two months ago during LinuxCon Japan, we were pleased to sit down with lead developer Chris Mason from Oracle to record a short webinar that focuses on demonstrating RAID5 and RAID6 as well as recently completed features in Btrfs. …….”

I followed the link above and listened to the webinar. It requires flash, for those of you that eschew anything javascript. However, if you can handle flash, and if you are curious about btrfs (pronounced butterfs) this is a great introduction including a brief roadmap for vision of the future of btrfs.

I recommend it.

Open source goes to high school

pacneil — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:42:38 +0000

by Mike Esser

Before heading out to film this story on the Open High School of Utah, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had a lot of the same questions most people would have about an online high school: What kind of students go to high school online? How are teachers building their curriculum from open educational resources and what does it look like? How are the students interacting with their teachers and other students in an online venue?

After spending a day with the founding members, administration, faculty, and a room full of students and their parents, we got answers to all those questions, and left feeling like we were witnessing the beginnings of something phenomenal.

Technology rules at Open High where their approach to learning embraces the idea that teaching shouldn’t be as static as the textbooks on which it’s based. Shattering traditional methods, the Open High School of Utah curriculum is built from open educational resources. These resources are the foundation for their content and are aligned with Utah state standards to ensure the highest quality educational experience. The teachers enhance with screencasts, interactive components, and engaging activities to create high quality curricula for their students.

Open Source for America

pacneil — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:59:47 +0000

Andy Updegrove announced in a post on ConsortiumInfo.orgthe formation of a new group to advocate for the use of Open Source software in government. He also announced his appointment to the board of advisors.

A new web site has been created for the group, Open Source for America, or OSA.

The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the U.S. Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the U.S. Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits. The mission incorporates three goals: (1) to effectuate changes in U.S. Federal government policies and practices so that all the government may more fully benefit from and utilize free and open source software; (2) to help coordinate these communities to collaborate with the Federal government on technology requirements; and (3) to raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders in the executive and legislative branches about the values and implications of open source software. OSA may also participate in standards development and other activities that may support its open source mission.

We hope that OSA will provide an effective counterbalance to the hired lobbyists that are paid advocates for proprietary software companies. In this time of financial challenges, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) can be an important tool in stretching limited budgets, both in the private sector and government.

To quote from the press release:

With the U.S. Federal Government increasingly focused on utilizing and adopting technologies to better serve citizens, there is growing recognition of the freedoms that open source software and open technology solutions can provide – an open, transparent and cost-effective option – for government agencies. Gartner recently estimated by 2011 more than 25 percent of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source, contain open source application components or be developed as community source.

Best wishes to all who are working on this project. As an Open Source advocate I believe that the taxpayers will be the ultimate beneficiaries.

VLC 1.0 officially released after more than 10 years of work

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:36:45 +0000

The open source VLC Media Player finally reached version 1.0 on Tuesday. The new version, codenamed Goldeneye, represents over a decade of development. The program offers support for playing practically every kind of video content in existence and has an exhaustive feature set that includes many advanced capabilities.

The software first emerged as an academic project called VideoLAN in 1996, which was created by a group of students at Ecole Centrale Paris. They aimed to build client and server components for deploying streaming video over a network. The source code was relicensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 2001, opening the door for third-party participation in the development effort. VLC has attracted a tremendous community of contributors who continue to advance the program and add new features.