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Channel Intelligence, a company based in Florida, filed a lawsuit for patent infringement in Delaware on Tuesday against a long list of startups and other companies and individuals who have one thing in common - they offer wish lists for products people may want others to buy for them. Notable in their absence is Amazon, Ebay and most other large etailers, all of which maintain wish lists for users.

One of the development process advantages brought by git (and by BitKeeper before it) is the ability to see the up-to-the-second, bleeding-edge status of Linus's tree. So any developer who wants to know where the front edge of development lies can grab that tree and make patches fit into it. But the value of the mainline repository for development would appear to be less than it once was. The mainline is no longer where the action is.

"Hurrah! 2.0 has been released!" said Matthew Dillon, announcing the eighth major release of DragonFly BSD. This release is the first to include HAMMER, a new clustering filesystem that already boasts an impressive list of features, including: "crash recovery on-mount, no fsck; fine-grained snapshots, snapshot management, snapshot-support for filesystem-wide data integrity checks; historically accessible by default; mirroring: queueless incremental mirroring, master to multi-slave; undo and rollback; reblocking; multi-volume, maximum storage capacity of 1-Exabyte."

It's a sure thing that you can sit for a range of Microsoft certifications at almost any event where two or more 'Softies are gathered together in Bill's name. Now Intel is leveraging its own developer muscle by organising Linux certification exams for attendees of the Intel Developer Forum held late August in San Francisco.

Implicit Networks Inc., based in Seattle, claims the three companies and Adobe Systems Inc. are violating two patents for computer-server software that performs faster security functions. The patents were issued from 1998 and 2001 applications. The complaint, filed July 15 in federal court in Seattle, targets IBM's Websphere Application Server, Oracle's Application Server and BEA WebLogic Server, SAP's NetWeaver and Adobe's JRun and ColdFusion products.

Forget fear, uncertainty and doubt. How do Windows Vista and Linux really compare against each other? It's one thing to talk about the familiar applications available to Windows users contrasted with the rich suite of free open source apps for Linux, but something totally different to actually compare the loads of the two operating systems as they perform functionally identical tasks.

A look at zsh's extended globbing functionality with plenty of examples.

Don't tell Greg Kroah-Hartman that Linux hurts for device drivers. He's heard too much of that rap, and he's already done plenty to stop it. We should thank him and help pick up the ball. I'm doing both here.

"I believe that if we don't find ways to use technology to the benefit of our freedoms, it will be used by others to its detriment. Is there really anything in between? Somehow our past experiences and current concerns don't inspire confidence. "

Often times when developing programs there is a need to build the program in/for multiple configurations. Many times, autoconf and its resulting configure script do what you need. Other times you can just change a #define in your code. But sometimes, autoconf isn't an option and changing a define doesn't quite work (say you need to pass your defines/undefines to m4 or some other tool that can't handle include files). The solution is probably to change your makefile. The method presented here results in a fairly compact change to your makefile

Long time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF - for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002. Now it's on store shelves in Beijing as well.

PC users seeking an environmentally friendly desktop system can add the new CherryPal C100 desktop to the list of contenders. The machine, announced Monday, was designed by green computer maker CherryPal and contains no moving parts. With 80 percent fewer components, the minimalist system uses a scant 2 watts of power.

Where most computer science departments emphasize theory and mention free and open source software (FOSS) only indirectly, Seneca College in Toronto, Canada, offers a different approach: a hands-on introduction to the community in partnership with the Mozilla and Fedora projects. Now in its third year, the program is expanding rapidly and receiving attention from other academic institutions that hope to imitate it.

Once it was the desktop, now mobile phones and embedded devices represent the future of Linux, according to open source fans. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, painted a future of Linux's manifest destiny - running everything from aerospace systems to the phone in your pocket. According to Zemlin, Linux has 18 per cent of the embedded market, beating Windows on 16 per cent. The opportunity is in mopping up the 43.7 per cent of the embedded market that's currently using proprietary operating systems. As with the Linux desktop, though, there are just one or two challenges that must be overcome, he told the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), in Portland, Oregon.

It's quite fascinating how many virtualization designs there are out there. Even in Linux itself there are so many different approaches. To reduce the scope a bit for this post we'll ignore all the designs that can't revirtualize the CPU to allow other operative systems to run.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Extreme Networks, Inc. on behalf of its clients, two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

These days there are plenty of ways to back up your computer files. The options are easy when you're dealing with one computer -- just back up your files to an external hard drive and forget about it -- but when several machines are involved, each with a different operating system, things can get complicated. If you frequently work on more than one computer, having access to your synchronized files no matter where you are can also be useful. PowerFolder, a backup and file synchronizing service, helps you cover all your bases, no matter what platform or how many computers you're using.

As the battle for ultra-slim PCs heats up, a US company has released the Linux-based CherryPal, a PC that the company claims uses just 2W of power at peak performance. The CherryPal mini-desktop runs an embedded version of Debian on a Freescale processor running at 400MHz, with 256MB of RAM and 4GB of internal flash storage.

Glubble is a free proprietary Firefox add-on from Glaxstar that limits the activity your child can perform online by blocking access to Web sites and filtering Google search results. For parents, a tool like Glubble can seem like the perfect answer to the problem of protecting kids from the unsavory elements of the Internet. But as I discovered through my use of Glubble, the questions surrounding the idea of Internet filtering don't come with easy answers.

The most widely used open source software packages for the enterprise are exposing users to significant and unnecessary business risks, according to an open source security study from security firm Fortify Software. The study, released Monday, concludes that open source software development communities have yet to adopt a secure development process and often leave dangerous vulnerabilities unaddressed.