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If you've considered a free DNS service for your client resolving needs, there is more than one game in town, now. DNS Advantage, a NeuStar, Inc. service, has just come online. Should you think about switching away from OpenDNS? Should OpenDNS be worried?

Getting my feet wet in OpenBSD has gotten me thinking about how different operating systems handle software updates -- and how important security patches and bug fixes really are. I'm thinking most of you will say they're very important. If you have a Debian-based Linux system, for instance, there are updates available almost every day, both security- and bug-related. Live CDs are different. Knopix 5.1.1 has been around a very long time -- over a year at this point -- and plenty of people are using it, even though it's had no update of any kind in that period of time.

Even though VoIP is one of newest, most revolutionary networking and telephony technologies, people still want faxing, only now they want to do it via IP. Which to me makes as much sense as demanding Morse code-enabled telephones. Me, I keep a plain old analog fax machine just to humor other people. Which is like heating bathwater on the stove even though we have modern plumbing and a water heater.

Months after its initial announcement, the Mozilla Foundation's new nonprofit branch Mozilla Messaging, finally opened for business for the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client on Feb. 19. The commercial side of Mozilla, Mozilla Corp., had announced in July what was by then already an open secret: Its focus would be on the Firefox Web browser. That left open the question of what to do with Thunderbird. In September, Mozilla Corp. announced that it would be spinning off Thunderbird into its own company with the working name MailCo.

OOXML is essentially a complete replication of every chunk of data that a Microsoft Office application might possibly save in a file. The OOXML specification has been both criticized and defended by a number of people, leading many to wonder what the big deal is. This article illustrates the basis of technical, rather than political, objections to treating OOXML as a standard.

Disclaimer: this is what we call “in eigener Sache” in German, meaning something like “on his own account”, according to LEO. What I want to say is - in a short “executive summary”: I just opened ZaReason Europe, based in Germany. So I tried to write something like a press release (link included), and to explain.

The SCO Group was offered a sweetheart of a deal on Valentine's Day last week when Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners (SNCP) gave the embattled Unix vendor $100 million to bail itself out of bankruptcy. The company's CEO, Darl McBride, isn't feeling the love, however. When the deal closes, he'll "resign immediately." Already angered by McBride's claims that Linux contains code that belongs to SCO, many in the Linux community were overjoyed when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September. Now, a company once thought to be at the end of the line seems poised to walk another mile.

If you've been thinking of building yourself a dedicated storage server, this is a good time to do it. Prices are so low now that even a small home network can have a dedicated storage and backup server for not much money. SATA hard drives have large capacities and high speeds for low prices, and you don't need the latest greatest quad-core processor or trainloads of RAM. The ultimate in flexibility and reliability combines Linux software RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) and LVM (Linux Volume Manager).

There are so many sites that claim to tell you what hardware works with Linux and what hardware does not, but do any of them really work well?

The VAR Guy listened intently as Novell’s VP of Global Channel Sales, Pat Bernard, described her four-point strategy to rebuild the company’s partner organization. Although Novell faces an uphill climb in several areas, Bernard’s experience in the enterprise software space could be a plus. Here's the scoop.

I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers' list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I'm going to post the results of 1 question at a time.

Usually, the North American computer giants introduce their latest and greatest products to the U.S. market first, with Europe an afterthought. Not this time. Dell is bringing its latest Ubuntu-powered laptop, the Inspiron 1525, to the Europeans first. Americans will need to wait until later in February for Dell's newest Ubuntu Linux computer.

As a developer, one of the most powerful tools that C/C++ arms you with to improve processing time and prevent memory corruption is the control over how memory is allocated or deallocated in your code. This tutorial demystifies memory management concepts by telling you how to create your very own memory manager for specific situations.

The KDE community is happy to announce another update for the KDE 3 branch. KDE 3.5.9 is the latest bugfix and translation update for those who cannot or do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet. While currently no subsequent release for KDE 3 is planned, we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future.

Perhaps the number one reason why people neglect to back up their desktops is the lack of workable solution. It can be difficult to find a method configurable enough to suite everyone's needs. One promising answer may be Restore, an application for enterprise and data center backup for Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux systems. It is GPLv2-licensed and freely available to download as a set of Debian/Ubuntu packages, virtual machine, or 455MB installable live CD.

At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it. Yet, in practice, community members judge distributions all the time. They don't use a single metric, and at times a distro's appeal is as simple as the fact that it is new or has released a new version. Yet, whenever community members choose a distribution to download or to build their own distribution upon, or to borrow a tool from, they are making a verdict on it.

Embrace the standards, nicely, or get out of browsers. If there was a functioning market for web browsers and operating systems, the past few weeks would have seen two announcements from Microsoft. After a firestorm of criticism from the web design community about Internet Explorer 8's misguided mode switching proposal, Redmond would have publicly backed down. Second, Microsoft would have bowed to 90,000 users demanding that Windows XP continue to be sold.

You're probably familiar with the live CD concept -- a fully functional operating system on a CD that can be run on any computer that boots from its optical drive, without affecting the one(s) already installed. In a similar vein, you can set up Linux to run from a USB hard drive drive on any computer that can boot from USB. The live system offers automatic detection and configuration of the display adapter and screen, storage devices, and other peripherals. A bootable USB drive can run a mainstream Linux distribution such as Debian GNU/Linux, and can be secured, personalised, upgraded, and otherwise modified to suit your needs.

"To quote you a number of years ago: 'Linux is evolution, not intelligent design'," noted Greg KH, quoting Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Linus expanded on the statement, "evolution often does odd (and 'suboptimal') things exactly because it does incremental changes that DO NOT BREAK at any point." He continued, "in other words, exactly *because* evolution requires 'bisectability' (any non-viable point in between is a dead end by definition) and does things incrementally, it doesn't do big flips." When alternative examples in evolution were pointed out, Linus suggested that the kernel was much simpler than a mammal and more similar to bacteria:..

The debate over the OOXML (Office Open XML) format and the competing ODF (open document format) is still alive and kicking, but Microsoft just wants everyone to get along. The software giant had been lobbying for its OOXML format's ratification as an ISO standard at a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva later this month, after a failed attempt in September last year.