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A good offsite backup strategy is not sending boxes of unencrypted tapes home with your party-hearty college intern. Carla Schroder reviews the Spideroak online backup service to see if they offer something better, more secure, and more convenient.

Linus Torvalds is a regular visitor to Australia in January. He comes out for some sunshine and to attend the annual linux.conf.au organised by Linux Australia. He took some time out to speak to Rodney Gedda about a host of topics including point releases, filesystems and what it is like switching to GNOME. He also puts Windows 7 in perspective.

Ten applications to install after a clean Ubuntu or Kubuntu 8.10 installation: Amarok, SMPlayer, KTorrent, XChat, BasKet, Wesnoth, K3b, Emacs, Yakuake, TVTime.

A few days ago, Kristin wrote about Marketcetera's first full production release of its open source automated trading platform. Aimed at hedge fund managers, traders, brokers and dealers, the system is standardized, open, scalable and modular. Ars Technica also points out that over 20 financial institutions have already adopted Marketcetera. The question is: Why doesn't the financial community at large wake up to this kind of opportunity to reduce costs and customize trading through an open source offering?

Getting started with Linux can be an intimidating task, particularly for people who have never tried any operating system besides Windows. In truth, however, very little about Linux is actually difficult to use. It's simply a different OS, with its own approach to doing things. Once you learn your way around a Linux desktop, you're likely to find that it's no more challenging to work with than Windows or Mac OS.

The seventh annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is scheduled to get underway early next month. I caught up with one of the event's organizers, Gareth Greenaway, to find get the inside scoop on what's new, what's different, and what they've learned from past events.

For the last 10 years Google has been on an upward trajectory making gobs of money and astounding us all with there seemingly endless fount of innovation. For a time, there seemed to be a new product announcement every week. Google has always been very savvy about exploiting the news cycle, and keeping the brand in the public eye, but no company can grow forever and a couple of recent news stories suggest that Google's era of non-stop growth is finally over.

CrunchEee version 8.10.02 has been released. This is an ASUS Eee PC netbook optimized version of CrunchBang Linux.

According to current plans, version 11 of Fedora, which is expected to arrive in late May, will use Ext4 as its standard file system. That's what the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) recently decided, following a heated discussion in an IRC meeting. If however Ext3's successor encounters big problems with the pre-release versions of Fedora 11, the developers will dump that plan and revert to Ext3.

Black Duck Software released a list of the top 10 projects launched in 2008 that have the most promising future in the open source community. The company also says if you're trying to decide which FOSS horse to back in the next year or so, you should put your money on mobile apps.

The Wikimedia Foundation have published a draft plan for the process of switching from the GNU Free Documentaion Licence (GFDL) over to the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Licence (CC-BY-SA) for Wikipedia. The change in licensing was made possible by the publication of the GFDL 1.3, which was itself prompted by an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Red Hat North American Channel Chief Roger Egan answers six key questions about Red Hat’s partner strategy for the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and JBoss Middleware. Here's the podcast.

In preparation for hopefully the final beta version of KOffice 2.0, the bug squad will host a Bug Krush Day next Sunday Jan 25th from approximately 10 am CET. Everybody who has an interest in making KOffice 2.0 usable should try to be present. Especially note that you do not have to have any programming experience to take part of this Krush. The purpose of the exercise is to test the applications and to try to find as many bugs as possible.

Four months after Mesa 7.2 was released, Mesa 7.3 has now officially surfaced. Mesa 7.3 has been in testing since earlier this month with it having gone through three release candidates. The new features found in this latest version of the standard Open-Source OpenGL stack is proper support for GLSL 1.20 and the Intel DRI driver now supports the Graphics Execution Manager and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2.

I've had my $10 Sparcstation 20 sitting on the desk for awhile. I don't have a monitor, mouse or keyboard hooked up, so I've been running it over the serial port, which was surprisingly easy to do, via my Windows box and PuTTY, which provides for connections over SSH on the network or via the serial port. (I've also used Tera Term and Minicom (the latter in Linux), as well as the cu utility in Linux and OpenBSD to facilitate serial connection to this box.)

Plenty of folks are getting certified on Linux. But what's the next big open source certification? The VAR Guy is betting on Asterisk.

When your editor posted the Grumpy Editor's next project, he certainly did not anticipate that it would take more than a year and a half for the next installment to be written. Or that, even after all that time, the project of moving LWN's accounting from proprietary software to free software would be incomplete. But the world is full of surprises, even in places where surprises are most unwelcome - like accounting. Happily, your editor's surprises do not involve counterparty risk, credit-default swaps, or anything else of that sort.

The Open Source Alliance (OSA) published its Annual Predictions Survey this week. It serves up the opinions of business leaders about Obama's impact on IT, where they think the technology market is headed, and why it's a bad idea to put projects on hold until the economy turns around. Anthony Gold, VP & GM of Open Source Business at Unisys, says he expects the new presidential administration to favorably impact the IT industry because President Barack Obama clearly understands the importance of technology.

Sony has brought a new mini-notebook to the market that is small, light, stylish and with Windows Vista, although its instant-on feature is Linux-powered.

PDT 2.0 expands on the first release with new usability and object-oriented programming features for PHP (define) developers. The new PDT 2.0 release comes as the PHP language itself continues to evolve and as new languages like Ruby challenge PHP in the web application development space. "To make things clear, PDT 2.0 is focused on creating better usability for PHP developers that create Web applications," Roy Ganor project lead for Eclipse PDT, told InternetNews.com.