The Linux Movies Group is an organization for the advancement and mutual support of motion picture technologists using the Linux operating system. It's the most popular operating system for animation and visual effects in the motion picture industry.
Weblogging or blogging is a relatively new phenomenon, and an interesting decentralized social commentary and information propagation network. It has earned itself both accolades and criticism.
Mark was born and raised in South Africa, and studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town. He went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy, developed using Open Source software. He sold Thawte to the American company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation. In April 2002 Mark became the first African in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. Mark maintains that 'If we are to lift Africa from her current circumstances, we will need a generation of learners that are gifted with curiosity about the world in which they live, and the tools to understand and shape that world'. With this in mind he and his Foundation have invested in projects such as TuxLabs, HIP2B2, The School Tool Project (to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence)and The Ubuntu Project, a community project with participation from many volunteers, sponsored by Canonical Ltd.
Built within current Copyright law, Creative Commons is a new system that allows you to share your creations with others and use music, movies, images, and text online, marked with a Creative Commons licence. It's been gaining prominence steadily since its inception a few years ago. Creative Commons provides the space for artists to control their future, using the Internet.
Southern Smile is the engaging name given to a productive collaboration between countries in the developing world which share a common purpose in their dedication to the increasing use of Open Source software. This common bond between such countries as South Africa, Brazil, India and China, means the sharing of ideas and information, to the mutual benefit of all.
Today's home-PC's are more powerful than we realize: more often than not, our normal activities on our PC's rarely make use of its processing power. By parallel-linking ordinary computers in what is called Grid or Distributed Computing, the resulting computational power rivals that of so-called super-computers, at a fraction of the price.
Internet Voice, also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), is a technology that allows you to make telephone calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular (or analogue) phone line. Some services using VoIP may only allow you to call other people using the same service, but others may allow you to call anyone who has a telephone number - including local, long distance, mobile, and international numbers. Also, while some services only work over your computer or a special VoIP phone, other services allow you to use a traditional phone through an adaptor.
Google is a play on the word "googol", which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. The fanciful term refers to the number 10 raised to the hundredth power. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.
On 10th June, 2003, the first Mars Exploration Rover (MER-A) Spirit, was launched on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The MER-B Rover, Opportunity, followed on the 7th of July, 2003. Spirit landed on Mars on the 3rd of January, 2004, and Opportunity, on the 25th of that month.
It's about vulnerability... Your home computer is a popular target for intruders: they want what you've stored there. They look for credit card numbers, bank account information, and anything else they can find. By stealing that information, intruders can use your money to buy goods and services for themselves. But it's not just money-related information they're after: they also want your computer's resources, meaning your hard disc space, your fast processor, and your Internet connection. They use them to attack other computers on the Internet. In fact, the more computers an intruder uses, the harder it is for law enforcement to figure out where the attack is really coming from. If intruders can't be found, they can't be stopped, and they can't be prosecuted.
The eighth IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) World Conference on Computers in Education, WCCE 2005, is to be held at the University of Stellenbosch from 4th to 7th July this year. It will explore the use of Information and Communication Technologies in Education and the Teaching of Informatics, provide an opportunity for participants to review progress since WCCE 2001, report on successful (and unsuccessful) ICT projects in Education,and predict trends for the future.
Last year, a number of Chinese software companies joined forces with overseas vendors such as IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp, and Novell Inc. to form the China Open Source Software Promotion Alliance, China's first Open Source software organization. The objectives of the alliance include co-operative Linux development, promotion of Open Source development and application in China, driving exchanges and co-operation among Open Source communities in northeast Asia, and making contributions to the international Open Source community.
The most outstanding local example of making money from Open Source Software is undoubtedly the "Mark Shuttleworth Story", a garage-to-riches tale of hard work, Open Source and business acumen, resulting in the creation of South Africa's best-known IT multi-millionaire, and Africa's first astronaut!