Free Republic

Architect of Mission to Save Allied Airmen Trapped Behind Enemy Lines Awarded Bronze StarA New York City man was honored Sunday for his role in a little-known chapter of World War II. The U.S. government awarded George Vujnovich the bronze star for orchestrating the daring rescue of hundreds of trapped American airmen. "I feel we should have helped those men," says Vujnovich. For a half-century he lived a humble life as salesman in blue collar Queens, New York. During World War II he was a 29-year-old officer for the Office of Strategic Services - the CIA of its day -...

With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side. ..... All operating systems were left with their default options during the installation process and left with the default set of packages for each operating system except for the...

One of the main new features in Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system has been released as open source. Apple has released the code of the userland portion of its Grand Central Dispatch technology under the Apache License, version 2. Mac OS X also has kernel support for Grand Central Dispatch, which is also released as open source via the XNU project. While we're at it, let's take this opportunity to look into exactly what Grand Central Dispatch is.

According to a leak from a BestBuy employee, Microsoft is initiating a sort of "Anti-Linux Training" course for the employees, and those who take part in the said training are rewarded with a copy of Windows 7 for only ten dollars. The leaked screenshots of the campaign show Microsoft's comparison of its own system with an obscure "Linux" and how Windows is better in every way including security, "free downloads", and software and hardware compatibility. When Microsoft said a few weeks ago that its biggest threat was Linux, I suppose a campaign such as this was to be expected. We've...

The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway. The Plasma desktop shell comes with a new default theme called Air, which looks a lot less heavy than the previous Oxygen theme. Plasma has also been improved performance-wise, and it takes up less...

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

Barbara Lauwers Podoski, who launched one of the most successful psychological campaigns of World War II, which resulted in the surrender of more than 600 Czechoslovakian soldiers fighting for the Germans, died of cardiovascular disease Aug. 16 at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Washington, D.C. She was 95. One of the few female operatives in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, she found creative ways to undermine German morale. Much of her work remained secret until last year, when her OSS personnel records were declassified. The multilingual Barbara Lauwers, as she was then known, primarily...

OSHKOSH, Wis. -- Art Jibilian hoped his presence here at the largest private air show in the world would, in a small way, help right a terrible wrong that had been done so long ago. Mr. Jibilian, of Fremont Ohio, and surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the pioneering squadron of black fighter pilots, were honored here yesterday at AirVenture 2009 for their roles in Operation Halyard, the greatest rescue of downed American airmen in World War II.

Jim Thompson or James Harrison Wilson Thompson was born in Greenville, Delaware in 1906. He attended public schools in Wilmington, went on to boarding school at St. Paul's and attended Princeton University, the family university, from 1924 to 1928. Although Thompson had a keen interest in art, he chose to become an architect and went on to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a practicing architect in New York City until 1940. With the escalation of the war in Europe in the early 1940s, Thompson volunteered for service in the United States Army, an important turning point...

Red Hat has announced the release of Fedora 11, the latest version of the leading open-source Linux distribution: "The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open source operating system. The community's eleventh release includes the broadest feature set to date, spotlights developments in software management and sound, improves key virtualization components and introduces Fedora Community, a portal project beta."

The White House press office announced today that Vivek Kundra, the current chief technology officer of Washington DC, will be assuming the position of Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the White House. The appointment of a top CIO is another first: the position did not exist in any previous administrations. Kundra will also have final say on government technology purchases , and will have the authority to overrule his peers at subordinate agencies.

Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book--why open source software development has been so successful, the culture of open source, under what conditions open source is likely to thrive and not to thrive, and the Hayekian nature of the open source process. The conversation closes with a discussion of net neutrality.

It's the kind of stuff you'd find in a good spy novel. But St. Johnsbury native Paul Cyr not only lived the life of a secret agent and saboteur during World War II but lived to tell the tale — twice. A member of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS — America's wartime intelligence agency — Cyr parachuted into Occupied France in 1944 with orders to arm members of the Resistance. Having outwitted the Germans and the Gestapo, a year later Cyr found himself in China where he led an OSS team that blew up a railway bridge over...

The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with Russians that cost American lives. 'We've got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he's out of control and we must save him from himself'. The OSS head General did not trust Patton The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in...

Windows users have a real problem when it comes to updates. Sure they have Microsoft Update and certainly many applications include their own update mechanisms. Yet despite that, there seems to be a problem with Windows users actually updating. So allow me to make a suggestion. Microsoft (or a really smart ISV) should build a full application manager for Windows, similar to what most Linux distributions do today. For the non-Linux users out there - what Linux distros typically do is have a package management utility of some sort that pulls updates from a package repository (or repositories). Those updates...

South Side native George Vujnovich, 93, appeared at a ceremony in New York yesterday to accept an award as a hero in World War II's Operation Halyard. Never heard of it? Few have, despite the release last year of "The Forgotten 500," the first book about the daring mission to rescue 500 downed airmen in occupied Yugoslavia. Mr. Vujnovich, a Pittsburgh boy who became head of the Office of Strategic Services in Bari, Italy, organized what has been called the greatest air rescue of the war.

Published today are four programming guides to cover the VX800/820 Graphics Core & 2D (100 pages), VX800/820 3D & video (157 pages), CX700/VX700 Graphics Core & 2D (100 pages), and CX700/VX700 3D & video (91 pages). This is essentially just about 450 pages worth of register descriptions. We are still looking over this documentation to gauge its completeness. If you are a developer interested in this information, it can be found on the X.Org web-site. In addition to releasing 2D, 3D, and video register guides, VIA has also announced today it has partnered up with the OpenChrome team. A press...

Has anyone used or is anyone out Free Republica using Open Office Suite? What has your experience been like? When did it switch from free to member fee based?

This story was posted on FR back in 2007, but it's fitting to repeat now, since "Jibby" is in many of your prayers at this time. I'd like to share the story below about an O.S.S. World War Two veteran of the Halyard Mission rescue operation returning to Serbia 60 years later to pay tribute to the Serbian and American veterans who played out one of the great, heroic stories of World War Two that has remained largely hidden all these years. ____________________________________ The above is the back of signed photo given to OSS Radioman Arthur Jibilian by General Mihailovich...

WASHINGTON — Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.