Old school gamer? Wanna play?! Check out our free game servers....

Nokia today announced that its Qt cross-platform user interface (UI) and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the open source LGPL version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. In addition:

* Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities.
* Service offerings for Qt will be expanded to ensure that all Qt development projects can have access to the same levels of support, independent of the selected license.

This will allow developers to write closed source software that links to the Qt library without buying a commercial licence. See this page for some answers to common questions about the change.

Following on from our recent server migration, any longtime users who have been availing of the altFIRE POP mail service (doesn't effect recently registered users) need to adjust the mail server address in their mail client settings.

Basically, if you use Outlook Express or Thunderbird to get your altFIRE email, you need to change the incoming and outgoing server to mail.altfire.com (previously mail2.digiweb.ie).

If you can't figure this out (!) you can still get to your mail via the webmail facility, which is now also pointed at the new servers.

Following three years of continuous improvement, OpenOffice.org has now reached the landmark version 3.0, with a host of new features including native support for Mac OS X users. Head to http://download.openoffice.org to download the en-US, da, de, fr, it, ja, ru, sv versions, and monitor the platforms and languages page for details of the availability of other versions.

In addition to read and write support for the Microsoft Office binary file formats (.doc; .xls, .ppt, etc.), OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now capable of opening files created with Office 2007 or Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). Thus, OpenOffice.org users can interact with users still using Microsoft Office. The various filters for the MS file formats also make mixed environments possible, so that some users stay on Microsoft Office while others use OpenOffice.org

Standards Norway, the organization that manages technical standards for the Scandinavian country, took a serious blow last week when key members resigned in protest over procedural irregularities in the approval process for Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format. The 23-person technical committee has lost 13 of its members.

The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technical committee.

Standards Norway has defended its conduct and asserts that its vote in favor of OOXML approval was based on the outcome of a public inquiry in which a majority of the responses it received encouraged support of OOXML. The standards body has also admitted, however, that a significant number of those responses were identical submissions authored by Microsoft.

A letter of resignation written by the departing members and made public by The Inquirer accuses the standards body of folding to pressure from Microsoft, violating its own procedural rules, and ignoring the analysis of the technical committee tasked with evaluating OOXML.

"It is sad when organisations that work for our common interest fail the task. Through the OOXML work, Standard Norway has shown, with a clear margin, that they are not fit to represent Norway in the ISO," the letter says. "Standard Norway chose to defy their own technical committee and vote yes to a specification that is immature, useless, and unworthy of being called an ISO standard."

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie is among the technical committee members who are resigning over the OOXML decision. In the letter, he stresses the importance of open standards and the need for formats that are universally accessible to everyone.

"Standardization of formats for content on the Web is more important than ever. A large part of mankind's communication is done digitally, and all, ALL, must have the ability to read and write these formats," he wrote.

Fallout from the OOXML controversy continues to be felt around the world. ISO is facing a revolt from dissatisfied participants who feel that their technical input was ignored, and national standards bodies from various countries are suffering internal friction over alleged misconduct. The implosion of the Standards Norway technical committee reflects the ongoing turmoil created by the ambiguity surrounding ISO's approval of OOXML.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 has arrived!

If you want to set up a virtualization environment on your PC or Mac, but don't want to spend money on Parallels or VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox is a free and full-featured package that may fit your needs very well (I use it to run Windows on my Ubuntu desktop)

What's new in version 2.0?

* 64-bit OS guest support (only on 64-bit hosts, as one might expect)
* New native Leopard user interface on Mac OS X hosts
* New-version notifier
* Guest property information interface
* Host Interface Networking on Mac OS X hosts
* Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)
* Added SATA asynchronous IO when accessing raw partitions

Check it out here.

Birmingham City University officials say as many as 1000 students are outsourcing their homework to coders in India. The students attend or have attended universities and A-School (Britain’s equivalent of the last two years of a US high school) and outsourced homework as simple as a minor coding project to full-blown post-graduate dissertations. Birmingham officials say students sometimes paid as little as 10 quid for homework.

Birmingham City University have been monitoring outsourcing websites since 2004 and say the cheating is almost impossible to detect. This makes sense because programming is much more structured than say writing an essay — really there are only so many ways you can write a function or program.

It’s easier than you might think to get your homework outsourced. A quick search through Google brings up several companies and perhaps the most prominent one — with the most common sense name — is rentacoder.com. Operating on an auction system, students and companies place ads describing the coding project and programmers then bid on the job. The lowest bidder wins. The university claims that students pay from 10 dollars for a small homework project to 200 dollars for a dissertation.

Companies have been outsourcing their coding for years and it was only a matter of time before students started using the same systems. Of course, you can argue that students who outsource their homework overseas are only hurting themselves when they finally get a job. We can only hope that employers give a comprehensive interview that tests coding skills, but unfortunately some organizations are primarily concerned about whether the applicant has a degree from a prestigious college or university.

Outsourcing of IT homework is just a small part of a growing trend to sending services overseas. Recently several U.S. newspapers have outsourced their copyediting to India and the Philippines. In many ways this makes sense, because of the time difference newspaper reporters can send their stories to India where it will be daytime. The stories will then be edited and sent back in time for the printing presses to run.

Dell has said it is mid-way through a plan to shave 10pc of its workforce, with 7,000 jobs cut in the past year.
In its first quarterly results, the company said it recorded US6m in expenses in relation to restructuring, including severance costs and facility closures.

Last month, Dell workers in Ireland were stunned by the news that 250 executive jobs were to be cut as part of compulsory redundancies at its Cherrywood operation in Dublin.

Around 50 of the jobs were to be cut from the company’s Limerick manufacturing operations.

The company has reported that overall some 7,000 jobs have been cut in the past year, including 3,700 in the first quarter.

Various acquisitions brought in an extra 2,700 employees to the company’s fold, which brought the overall net reduction to 5pc.

In total, chief executive Michael Dell is planning 10pc in total net reduction by year’s end.

In expressing its outlook for the quarter ahead, the company said it will continue to incur costs as it realigns its business, reducing headcount along the way.

“The company is seeing conservatism in IT spending in the US, particularly with its global and large customers, as well as public, small and medium business accounts. Dell expects the conservatism to continue through the summer, particularly as many of these customer segments are seasonally slower.

“Dell does not expect the significant component-cost reductions experienced during the first half of last year. In addition, the company also expects to have lower investment and other income driven by reduced investment balanced with lower interest rates and increased interest expense driven by a higher level of debt.

It said it expects performance to improve through sales of computers in emerging markets, as well as demand for notebook computers and servers.

“Against this backdrop, the company recently shared its goal to lower total cost and is targeting USbn in annualised savings by fiscal 2011,” the company stated.

For the first quarter of 2008, Dell reported a 9pc increase in revenues from US.7bn last year to USbn. Out of this, the company reported a profit of US4m, up 4pc on last year.

Product shipments in the quarter increased 22pc, with servers growing three times the industry rate at 21pc. Storage revenue increased 15 pc and enhanced services revenue was up 13pc.

Notebook unit growth, termed a ‘Dell strategic priority’, rose sharply at 43pc and 1.2 times the industry growth rate. Consumer units grew at more than two times the industry rate and the company increased its global share by 1.2 points to 8.8pc during the quarter.

“We are executing on all points of our strategy to drive growth in every product category and in every part of the world,” Michael Dell explained.

“These results are early signs of our progress against our five strategic priorities. Through a continued focus, we expect to continue growing faster than the industry and increase our revenue, profitability and cash flow for greater shareholder value,” Dell said.

Dublin Zoo was forced to shut down its switchboard yesterday after thousands of Irish mobile users fell for a new take on one of the oldest phone tricks in the book.

Text messages have been doing the rounds in Ireland telling unwitting recipients to call a number and ask for one of a number of named contacts.

The Irish Independent reports that the zoo’s switchboard went into meltdown yesterday, and has now been forced to answer all calls with a recorded message saying: "If you are calling to speak to Mr Rory Lion, C Lion, G Raffe or anyone similar please be aware that you are the victim of a hoax message." Other contacts include Ana Conda and Rory Lyons.

A spokeswoman for the zoo told RTE radio that it had always received similar calls, usually around April Fool’s Day. But now that pranksters have gone high-tech, the zoo had been hit with over 100,000 calls in the last two weeks.

“We have lost our sense of humour now with calls coming in at a rate of about 13 a minute,” she told the station.

The jape is, of course, as old as the telephone itself, and has traditionally been played on office juniors or work experience kids. Similar twists include calling Battersea Dogs Home and asking for Mr Bassett, and sending building site neophytes down to the storeroom to ask for some tartan paint and a set of skyhooks.

We tried to call Dublin Zoo to check on the situation, but were told the PR dept’s junior had yet to return after they were sent to the stationery dept to ask for a long weight.

People are too trusting, especially when there's chocolate on the line. A survey out today by the organizers of the tech-security conference Infosecurity Europe found that 21% of 576 London office workers stopped on the street were willing to share their computer passwords with a good looking woman holding a clipboard. People were offered a chocolate bar in exchange for the information. More than half of the people surveyed said they used the same password for everything.

Women far more likely to give away their passwords to total strangers than their male counterparts, with 45% of women versus 10% of men prepared to give away their password, to strangers masquerading as market researches with the lure of a chocolate bar as an incentive for filling in the survey. The survey was actually part of a social engineering exercise to raise awareness about information security. The survey was conducted outside Liverpool Street Station in the City of London.

If ppl will give up passwords for chocolate, what would they do for a goddam golden ticket?