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Simple C program to convert binary numbers to decimal. Written to appeal to a mass audience I may not have ;) Anyone can learn to code!

How do you put a value on the products created through open source?

Malware includes not just virii, but worms, trojans and root-kits. These known and widely available tools are not the only options available to intruders either... GNU/Linux users should not have any false sense of security just based on the fact that viruses designed for exclusively for windows won't run on GNU/Linux.

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

On the evening of July 12, Yahoo! Inc. released a statement relating to recent discussions involving Yahoo!, Microsoft Corp., and Carl Icahn. Microsoft believes the statement contains inaccuracies that need to be corrected. Among other things, the enhanced proposal for an alternate search transaction that we submitted late Friday was submitted at the request of Yahoo! Chairman Roy Bostock as a result of apparent attempts by Mr. Icahn to have Microsoft and Yahoo! engage on a search transaction on terms Mr. Icahn believed Microsoft would be willing to accept and which Microsoft understands Mr. Icahn had discussed with Yahoo!

The study Package Management Security, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the University of Arizona Tech Report, analyzed 10 package managers and found that all were vulnerable to exploits, allowing attackers to install unsafe software on target systems. Package managers are designed to automatically keep software up-to-date and thus safe from known vulnerabilities. The packages analyzed in the study were APT, APT-RPM, Pacman, Portage, Ports, Slaktool, Stork, Urpmi, Yast and YUM.

A new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has arrived, aimed at both Linux newbies and content creators. Boasting "out of the box" multimedia codecs, the freely downloadable PC/OS incorporates the lightweight XFCE desktop, and is said to offer a similar layout to the groundbreaking, but ultimately doomed BeOS. According to a blog by chief facilitator, Roberto Dohnert, "PC/OS is designed to play videos, music, and create content on a very simplified interface and platform. That's why my two-word mission statement is 'simplified computing.'"

Google's strict code of secrecy may work fine for protecting its internal operations. But the company isn't ingratiating itself to software developers by keeping major updates to its Android mobile software platform locked away in a Mountain View dungeon. Now, even those developers once very committed to pushing Google's technology forward are thinking about abandoning Android – the most closed open platform to not yet exist.

Adeona may have been the goddess of safe returns, but if a group of computer science professors and graduate students get their wish, they'll be viewed as the patron saints of secure laptop computer data, thanks to their new open source software service named after the Roman deity. Also, for those who worship at the altar of bargains, Adeona may indeed be a godsend: It's free.

I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week.

Concerned about the increasing popularity of Web applications, Marco Barulli of the Clipperz project has written one of the first detailed suggestions about how free and open source software (FOSS) should respond to the trend. Although neither Barulli nor Clipperz is well-known, his ideas are being listened to by such figures as Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a long-time advocate of FOSS in Web applications.

Installing Ubuntu-related software is simple, but choosing which software to install can still be a challenge. The more than 20,000 packages that Ubuntu offers up can be daunting. This is where sites like Gnomefiles.com can help. Here's how

For three health care centers, the challenge was clear: Find a way to improve internal communications by expanding e-mail accounts to all employees, including doctors, nurses, security staffers and dietary workers, without breaking their IT budgets. To do it, the hospitals needed to look at alternatives to traditional ways of creating and administering e-mail accounts. In the end, all three health centers chose an application that could do the work of Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange e-mail administration package while maintaining calendaring and other group features.

An open source software project, originally propped up by European Commission (EC) funds, has released an alpha version of its quality control program, Alitheia Core. Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS – pronounced squash) is intended to develop tools based on identified metrics to define and check the quality of open source software. European businesses, academics and open source software projects developed the new application.

No piece of software is immune to defects, which is why it's important to use tools that help find and fix bugs. That's the idea with the new Linux 2.6.26 kernel, which is providing the Linux ecosystem with an integrated kernel debugger to help improve the open source operating system. The 2.6.26 kernel continues the relentless release cycle of Linux kernels adding new features and driver support that help expand the operating system's capabilities. "The most surprising change was the addition of KGDB after discussions on kernel debuggers had gone on for a while," Dr. Gerald Pfeifer, director of inbound product management at Novell, told InternetNews.com. "This will prove very useful in handling some hard support situations and nicely complements the KDB kernel debugger that Novell has been shipping for years."

With Canonical having pulled many new packages into Ubuntu 8.10 from Debian unstable and there being the Linux 2.6.26-rc8 kernel, a near-final version of X.Org 7.4 / Mesa 7.1, and GCC 4.3 among them, we've decided to run a few early benchmarks of Intrepid Ibex. In this article we have enclosed 32 benchmark results from the Phoronix Test Suite comparing Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS to Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 2.

Take one small town, one small group of dedicated Linux Geeks and what do you get? You get a town that is destined to run Linux on their computers. The first session of Lindependence 2008 set sail for the history books yesterday and there were some surprises for those who put on this event...and even more for some of those who attended.

Ampache is a LAMP application that gives you a Web interface to your music collection, allowing you to search, rate, and play your music over the network. It even offers transcoding support to allow clients to play back lossless-encoded FLAC files from the server and stream them to clients as MP3 audio files. Packages for Ampache are in the standard Ubuntu Hardy repository as well as a 1-Click install for openSUSE 11. No Ampache packages are in the Fedora repositories. For this article I'll build Ampache 3.4.1 from source on a 64-bit Fedora 8 machine.

Blender is the open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation, capable of modeling, rendering, and animating 3D environments. Since Blender is completely free, everyone can download and use it immediately in commercial projects. It's not a shareware with limited tools, or time constraints; you can use it freely. In the past few years, the Blender user base has grown significantly. One of the positive aspects of Blender is its size -- it is only 10 MB and we can even run it directly from a portable drive. Another great aspect of Blender is that we can use various Operating Systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, leaving us the choice of which one to use.

Open source companies are finally getting hip to the IT channel, The VAR Guy believes. In fact, companies like Digium, GroundWork Open Source, Openbravo and Untangle are following Red Hat and Novell into the IT channel, on a global basis. Here's a look at their progress.