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In 1999, a scientist wanted to look at some data from soil samples collected on Mars in 1975 by the Viking lander. He wanted to test a theory about detecting the existence of Martian bacteria and microbes–in other words, finding life on Mars. The scientist thought he would find what he needed on a NASA website somewhere, but it wasn’t that easy. The original data had been misplaced, and when the huge magnetic tapes that stored the data were found, they were “in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.” Someone finally found a ream of paper printouts propping a door open and humanity’s understanding of the universe expanded a bit more. The tragic sense that would have accompanied the loss of this knowledge is echoed in accounts of the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, and probably why book-burnings are seen as a sure sign that a society is unhealthy

The openSUSE team on July 20 released version 10.3 Alpha 6. In addition to extensive upgrades, this is the first alpha containing the new refactored libzypp software management library, with some "rough edges," says the team. Targets include x86, x86-64 and PowerPC. It's been about six weeks since the openSUSE team released Alpha 5, featuring kernel version 2.6.22.rc4 and a choice between GNOME and KDE desktops. Novell is shooting for completion of v10.3 for general release in October, the team stated.

Red Hat graphic designers are no strangers to the pains of proprietary formats. Over the years, many have lost photographs, archived projects, and important portfolio work when formats have been changed. They’ve been forced to upgrade before they’re ready, too. That’s why they’re interested in open source design tools, like Inkscape and Scribus, which are becoming more popular and widely used. And when Red Hat offered to create a logo, t-shirt, and poster to raise awareness for ODF, it wasn’t hard to motivate Red Hat designers to get involved.

Hoping to inspire people to write code that can run on its multi-core processors, Intel has open sourced one of its development packages. Users of all shapes and sizes can now download the code for Intel's Threading Building Blocks (TBB) – a C++ template library that caters to the design of parallel code. By open-sourcing this product under the GPLv2 (General Public License), Intel expects more developers – particularly those playing with Linux – will give parallel programming a go. This is a self-serving effort in that Intel desperately needs an influx of parallel code in the coming years, so that software will run well across multi-core chips.

Mount and Unmount ISO,MDF,NRG Images Using AcetoneISO (GUI Tool)

Bob Beck announced the creation of the OpenBSD Foundation with three directors including himself, Kjell Wooding, and Ken Westerback. "The OpenBSD Foundation is pleased to announce today it has completed its organization as a Canadian federal non-profit corporation and is ready for public interaction,"

A few months back we looked at the Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card, which was a factory-overclocked $100 graphics card from Gigabyte that came topped with a passively cooled copper heatsink. Today we are back with Gigabyte as we look at their step-up from the 8500GT, which is the 8600GT GV-NX86T256D.

Space enthusiast and engineer Paul Wooster wants to open the source code for outer space, because, he says, it should be easier for everyone who wants to contribute to human activities in space to do so, not just people with advanced degrees in rocketry. To that end, Wooster has established DevelopSpace, a community based on open source philosophies, designed to attract anyone interested in sharing their skills in order to make more space exploration possible.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) shocked the world today by approving a "badgeware" style license. Members of the OSI board, speaking here at OSCON, announced that Socialtext's Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) received its blessing this morning. The license proves similar to non-OSI approved badgeware or attribution licenses used by numerous open source companies. Some leaders of the OSI have been attacking companies such as Sugar CRM and CentricCRM for claiming to be "open source" companies despite relying on the unapproved attribution licenses.

Ever wished for an easy way to transform SQL result sets into XML? It's a PEAR package named XML_Query2XML, and it provides a comprehensive framework to efficiently turn the results of a database query into a customizable XML document.

With all the hype about Sabayon Linux we at ReviewLinux.Com just had to take a first look at this Linux distribution. The live DVD booted fine and we enjoyed taking a look at this fully software packed Linux distro.

In this article I’d like to describe a text-mode Bittorrent client - rTorrent. It will be helpful to people that share a computer with other household members because it allows them to download files regardless of the logged in user. What’s more, because it is a text-mode client (runs under ncurses) you can watch how it works through any ssh client, web browser (ajaxterm) or even cell phone (MidpSSH). Wikipedia and the official website says that the very optimized code makes rTorrent much faster than the official client. So, do you want more? Bring it on!

Ubuntu gets buzz like mad. Ubuntu is the next wave in Linux. Ubuntu is led by Mark Shuttleworth, a world-famous, charismatic person who buzzes around the world in his private jet, bringing the GNU/Linux gospel to the masses. And Ubuntu has now held its first Ubuntu Live conference, which was a decent first effort but nowhere near as polished as Red Hat's annual get-togethers.

In the previous piece on Mandriva's usability, we looked at the good and the bad of booting to the Live CD and then finally installing the distribution. In this article, we will pick up with installing software, the available selection of such software and the overall analysis of the distro.

Levelstar used embedded Linux to create a PDA (personal digital assistant) for visually impaired users. The "Icon" has a custom hardware design with built-in 30GB hard drive, WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB, and comes with a full complement of "life managing software,"

In a recent lkml thread, the idea of getting the entire Linux kernel history into a git repository was discussed. Linus Torvalds noted, "I actually tried to get something like this together back in the BK days and early in the SCO saga. It was pretty painful to try to find all the historic trees and patches - they're all in different format, and some of them are unreliable." He added, "I've been thinking about trying to re-create some really old history into git, but it's still a lot of work.. And obviously not very useful, just interesting from an archaeological standpoint." Much information on early Linux kernels is gathered at oldlinux.org, and Linus already has the full 2.5.0 to 2.6.12-rc2 history imported from BitKeeper available in git.

The first ever Ubuntu Live conference, running concurrently with the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, ran for three days starting on Sunday, and crammed in as many keynotes, sessions, and tutorials as anyone could possibly want.

Nominations are officially open for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 10th-14thAMIA Fall conference at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Deadline for entries is August 24th, 2007. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by theIMIA Open Source Working Group. Free and open source software isn't 'magic pixie dust'. There are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine's free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individual or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook, K.S. Bhaskar -- Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale -- Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter -- Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA/e-cology and Will Ross of Mendocino Informatics.

A grass roots one-day Linux and open source conference will be held at the Toronto Congress Centre on Saturday, Oct. 13 beginning at 8:30 AM. The organizers of "Ontario Linux Fest 2007" are seeking to ramp up sponsors, speakers, attendees, and volunteers.

A group of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology organizations today announced their support for the open-source development of EPCglobal-compliant Low-Level Reader Protocol (LLRP) software libraries, which enable EPCglobal UHF Gen 2 communications via the LLRP universal reader-to-network interface. Linuxlookup.com has more on the seven RFID organizations supporting Open-Source.