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The U.S. government sought to influence the European Commission over Microsoft's antitrust case, according to Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Kroes said the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, Belgium, had asked her to be "nicer" to Microsoft ahead of her decision to fine the software giant 280 million euros ($357 million) in July. The commissioner criticized the approach. "This is of course an intervention which is not possible," Kroes told Dutch newspaper Financieele Dagblad this week.

Mandriva is out with their latest Mandriva Linux release, 2007. They're touting AIGLX and Xgl as this releases main feature along with a newly updated theme. In addition to superficial enhancements they've also included a round of updates to KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice, and the Linux kernel.

The PostgreSQL project released the first beta for PostgreSQL 8.2 for widespread testing on Monday. According to PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus, the 8.2 beta includes a number of new features, better support for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) SQL:2003 standard, and numerous performance improvements.

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced a bug squashing party to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from September 29th to October 1st. Manoj Srivastava announced that the general resolution on asset handling has passed. As Debian experiments with funding, the author of DWN is going to experiment with spending less time on Debian. Please understand that due to this there may be no future issues of DWN in the current form or that they will only be released less frequently.

Microsoft's lobbying of the Bush Administration to intervene on its behalf in its antitrust battle with the EU, is bearing fruit. Yesterday, European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said that representatives of the US government contacted her before she fined Microsoft $357.3m in July for non-compliance with the EU's landmark 2004 antitrust ruling. The unnamed officials, from the US embassy in Brussels, asked Kroes to be "nicer" to Microsoft.

The rise of always-on, high speed Internet connections represents new teaching opportunities for high school and college instructors, many of whom daily face classrooms full of Web-savvy students. But with schools strapped for resources, it’s frequently difficult to scrape together funds to first buy the right hardware and software and then find teachers with the right skills to make the most of the technology.

Linksys makes some fine wireless broadband routers, but one of the best things about these devices is that their firmware is based on Linux and can be replaced with third-party software, allowing anyone to have the functionality of an expensive, professional-grade router for less than $100. The GPL-licensed DD-WRT package offers lots of enhancements over the stock Linksys firmware and supports a wide range of hardware, including models from Buffalo, Belkin, and other vendors.

For those who followed Jason's PHP tutorials earlier this year it is fairly obvious that he is a PHP fan at heart. But now he has started to learn Python and is fast becoming a fan as it opens up new an unimagined possibilities. Here he outlines why he finds Python so compelling.

South Africa-developed KnowledgeTree, an open source document management application, is now available in two additional versions catering to enterprise and small business users.

The Free Software Foundation has moved to clarify what it says is inaccurate information being presented about the second discussion draft of the next version of the GNU General Public License.

While the release of the new open source Scalix 11 Community Edition messaging server is still a few months away, the binaries have been brought out in a preview package that is, according to the license that comes with it, "pre-release software with known issues and is not suitable for production use." We tried it out, just to see where Scalix is heading. The good news -- it's heading in the right direction for small and medium-sized businesses.

Notes from the aKadamy 2006 Conference.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Red Hat Inc. (RHAT.O: Quote, Profile, Research), a distributor of open-source Linux software, expects its sales in the greater China region to double in fiscal 2007 and grow by 85 percent in fiscal 2008, an executive said on Tuesday. "Our plan is to have 100 percent growth this year, and 85 percent growth next year," Michael Chen, general manager of Red Hat China, told Reuters in an interview.

Version 5.0 of GroundWork Monitor, an open-source-based server and network monitoring system, was released last week.

Symantec's bi-annual Internet threat report shows vulnerabilities for IE, Firefox, and Safari have increased in the last six months.

The manufacturer of Maryland's new electronic voter registration machines said yesterday that technicians have fixed the software glitch that caused machines in every precinct to freeze and reboot during the Sept. 12 primary election but acknowledged that two other flaws remain undiagnosed.

IBM said it is considering a plan to add Red Flag Linux support for its approximately 300 software applications as part of its long-term strategy in China. The open source software distribution from Beijing-based Red Flag Software would be the third Linux system to win support from IBM. The firm currently supports systems from market leaders Red Hat and Novell.

University of Connecticut Health Center has chosen to adopt OpenClinica Enterprise for its clinical research studies. OpenClinica is an open source web-based software platform that enables sponsors and investigators to manage clinical research data in multi-site studies.

Cubic Compass Software (CCS), a provider of enterprise portal software, announced the availability of an open source portal toolkit for salesforce.com's suite of on-demand CRM applications. The portal is tightly integrated with Salesforce to give Sales, Marketing, and Support professionals a view of all customer interactions online within Salesforce and provides their customers with self-service access to account information.

140 Top Exhibitors, Extensive Technical Training, and New Innovative Programming Offer Knowledge in Real Time at 15th Annual Conference; September 25-28