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Google controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes? Brad Smith of Microsoft said Yahoo’s gains would be at the cost of American businesses. It does not. Google does not set the prices. Its advertisers do, bidding against one another for the amount they will pay when a user clicks on one of their ads. They do the same for ads on Yahoo and Microsoft search sites, too. Auction pricing is so deeply embedded in this business that you can see why Google and Yahoo innocently thought that their advertising pact, which was announced in July and is to be put into effect next month, would sail through a regulatory review to which they voluntarily submitted. The review continues.

Following the release on Tuesday of details about debates and decisions at this year's Kernel Summit, LWN.net has now reported on the second and final day of the conference. Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and some 80 other important and nearly all male kernel developers discussed their approaches to the further development of Linux and exchanged experiences. Like the LWN.net articles covering the first day, Jonathan Corbet's reports on the second day of the kernel Summit are available exclusively to LWN.net subscribers until the 25th of September. As has been the case in previous years, other sources of information on the summit are scarce – it often takes weeks or months for additional information on decisions reached at the conference to trickle out on blogs or posts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

A few days ago I wrote a tutorial showing how to compile Wine 1.1.4 from source in Ubuntu 8.04 and how to install it. In the meantime, version 1.1.5 was released on September 19, and since the compile from source and install procedure has not changed, I will explain here how to install the last Wine release using the official WineHQ APT repository. What follows are a few easy to do steps for getting the last Wine release up and running on your Ubuntu Hardy system:

This benchmark shows how Apache2 (version 2.2.3) and lighttpd (version 1.4.13) perform compared to each other when delivering a static HTML file (about 50KB in size). This benchmark was created with the help of ab (Apache benchmark) on a VMware vm (Debian Etch); if you try this yourself, your numbers might differ (depending on your hardware), but the tendency should be the same.

Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code

Steve Ballmer is many things: Microsoft CEO, 43rd richest person on the planet, monkey dancing video star. Wikipedia says that he has "been known to be very passionate in expressing his enthusiasm." We have 10 reasons to suggest he should be in a rubber room eating soft fruit...

Last month we looked at the EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R motherboards from Gigabyte. These two Intel P45 motherboards had turned out to be great contenders as long as you are using a newer Linux distribution that ships with a very recent Linux kernel. Today though on the review block we have two new motherboards compliments of ASRock. The ASRock P43R1600Twins-WiFi and P45R2000-WiFi utilize the Intel P43 and P45 Chipsets, respectively, but the duo share the Intel ICH10R Southbridge and both feature an integrated 802.11g WiFi module along with system memory support for both DDR2 and DDR3 standards. There are also a few other extras with the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi such as ATI CrossFire support, dual Gigabit LAN, and two eSATA connectors. What's important though is whether these relatively low-cost motherboards work under Linux, and we will tell you that today.

One of the things that many people buying new computer or other hardware consider is the hardware compatibility with GNU/Linux. Actually many people do not even think about that. They just go to the shop, buy something that they liked and after that go home and install some distribution. And logically, after some hours of effort they start complaining around the forums how GNU/Linux is stupid operating system and how they can not run their computer/hardware on it. So, what mistake that user make all the time?

Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken -- putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court. Blaise Mouttet, a small inventor in Alexandria, Va., thinks he knows why. The problem, he said, is that"there are too many lawyers and not enough inventors involved with the patent system."

The "official" explanation of "foo" - RFC 3092. Hope you're having a great Sunday :) Following up on a joke post we did last week regarding RFC 3093 For the Firewall Enhancement Protocol, I found a site that lists even more of them. In fact, if you visit WYAE you can find a pretty good listing of all the known joke RFC's that have been released (all the way through 2008). Who knew there were so many in-jokes out-there ;)

Super GRUB Disk can fix a wide variety of boot-up problems on GRUB-based systems. It's easy to use, yet versatile. And, it's quite well-documented. As good as it is though, it doesn't seem to get a lot of publicity in the Linux press. (I only know about it from perusing a Linux help forum.)

I use XP in VMware Player to run some CAD applications on my Ubuntu system. I don't actually have to use XP for them as they function under Wine but I've been too busy to reinstall them and recreate their configurations. This setup works more or less but there are a few bugs and performance problems I've had to find workarounds for.

Powered by the 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, the Toshiba NB100 comes in two variants – one with Linux Ubuntu 8.04 with OpenOffice 2.4, while one offers Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition.

A company called Moderro Technologies this week unveiled the Xpack Web 2.0 Cloud Computer, a palm-sized appliance dedicated to cloud computing. The US$395 computer was being demonstrated at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week, and is set to begin shipping in late October.

There's no doubt that Linux is a secure operating system. However, nothing is perfect. Millions of lines of code are churned through the kernel every second and it only takes a single programming mistake to open a door into the operating system. If that line of code happens to face the Internet, that's a backdoor to your server.

Earlier this year, your editor asked a high-profile kernel developer, in a public discussion at a conference, about the seemingly large number of kernel-related security bugs. Was the number of these vulnerabilities of concern, and what was being done about it? The answer that came back was that security issues aren't a huge concern, that most of the reported issues were obscure local exploits requiring the presence of specific hardware. Serious issues, like the vmsplice() vulnerability, are rare.

One of the many questions users who switch from Windows to Linux have is how to compile C/C++ sources and what IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) Linux has to offer. Most of them study C or C++ at school or home and are usually used from Windows with an IDE like Dev-C++ or Code::Blocks.

A video game is helping university students prepare for careers in business and information technology. At the San Mateo IBM Innovation Center on Thursday, San Francisco State University student Andrey Lyubimov played a simulation on a large screen in which he came across various"co-workers" at a call center.

What is the longest you have programmed for in one sitting? 36 hours. Though I work from home, I work more than in my old company. But this is ok, as it offers other advantages.

Finally, an answer you can give your kids when they get up the nerve to ask :) We made it to another weekend (somehow) by working, and/or sleeping and/or both for another 5 days ;) It's time for a joke or two to help us forget the fact that we're on-call all weekend :P