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Zend Technologies is rallying vendors and the open source community to promote industry wide consistency in PHP and promote greater developer uptake. Zend has created the PHP Collaboration Project with backing from 14 software and hardware companies

LONG-TIME Tech Heads readers will know I've been exploring Linux operating systems over the last year. In 12 months must have tried at least as many Linux distributions and, finally, think I have found the perfect one for novices and experienced users alike. In August, Novell SUSE announced a project called OPEN SUSE, to produce an operating system in conjunction with the Open Source community. It was a first for SUSE, but I'll wager it won't be the last because the resulting OS is dazzling.

Aria C. Munro writes: "Ideal for authors, web editors, and writers of all kinds, OpenOffice.org is compatible with Microsoft Office products, without the price."

Munro adds: "Significant improvements have been made in the functionality of proprietary office suite filters, allowing for improved compatibility between office applications, including Microsoft Office. In addition, import support for Corel WordPerfect documents has been added, allowing for easier cross-suite communication.

"Available in 36 languages, with more on the way, and able to run natively on Windows, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (X11) and several other platforms, OpenOffice.org banishes software segregation and isolation and dramatically levels the playing field. And, with its support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, OpenOffice.org eliminates the fear of vendor lock in or format obsolescence. The OpenDocument format can be used by any office application, ensuring that documents can be viewed, edited and printed for generations to come."

rfinnvik writes "VMWare Inc. has released a new free (as in beer) virtual machine runtime called VMware Player.

hyperSystems, Inc. announces the introduction of customization services for Gallery, an open source web based photo album organizer. Customization services for Gallery will include template creation, search engine optimization, keyword generation, e-commerce integration and software installation.

Mono is the leading non-Microsoft implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification. The CLI is the foundation of .NET. Because Mono runs on a number of platforms, it is the main choice today for people who want to run .NET applications on non-Microsoft platforms such as Linux.

.NETDJ's editor in chief recently interviewed Mono's creator, Miguel de Icaza, via telephone - directly from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington!

Celerity 4-Gb Host Adapter, ATTO FibreBridge 2400C/R/D Fibre Channel-to-SCSI bridge verified

With a study noting the gains of open-source software over proprietary Microsoft software reverberating throughout Europe this week, a new software industry alliance pledging cooperation among its members was launched Thursday.

The European Software Association (ESA) was unveiled in Brussels with a goal of speaking as a common voice for a fragmented industry. It has 26 members including Microsoft.

Although the ESA had its origins in meetings with Microsoft's Bill Gates, it maintains that it is not a surrogate for the software colossus.

While sat here watching Ben Goodger doing a talk about Firefox at EuroOSCON, it got me thinking about this concept of taking a huge and bloated project (such as Netscape) and cutting it down to the core and releasing a spin-off project such as Firefox. With all of the recent discussion and email I have been receiving triggered from Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org, it makes sense if this process was drilled into OpenOffice.org.

BEIJING - The Chinese Government should stick to its policy of strongly supporting open-source software to build a robust domestic industry, an industry veteran has said. "Open-source software provides a big opportunity for China to develop its fledgling software industry," said Lu Shouqun, president of the China Open Source Software Promotion Union.

Lu, also a former senior government official, was responding to a report released by the China Software Industry Association (CSIA) in late August which called for the government to review its preference for open-source software. The government's "excessive preference" for the open-source Linux platform is harming the domestic software industry, and Linux's business model is flawed as the low, or no, charge is thwarting the profitability of Linux developers, the CSIA asserted in the report.

Tim at ID software writes "Quake 4 for GNU/Linux is available now! The installer has been uploaded to our ftp and on the bittorrent tracker. We're very pleased to announce that this it with both a dedicated server and a native client

There are many fancy reasons that OpenOffice.org is a great choice for your office work. For example, it's open source and it supports an open format document standard, OpenDocument. But let's put "openness" to the side. Let me get down to the nitty-gritty: It's free (as in free beer) and it works. What's not to like?

Sean Michael Kerner has written an article about the Free Software Foundation acknowledging Microsoft. He quotes:

"Since we so rarely have an opportunity to say something positive about Microsoft, let me begin by congratulating them," Georg Greve, president of the FSFE, said in a statement.

" According the FSFE, two of the new shared source licenses may well meet the requirements of the Free Software Definition. It warns, however, that its evaluation was only preliminary and that the other licenses offered by Microsoft are still clearly proprietary "non-free" licenses..."

And in a conference call this afternoon, I heard a recap of Microsoft's presentation at a State CIO conference. They evidently recognize that the community process is taking over IT, especially in government. So, they're now just a member of the community doing what they can to just get along. - Ed.

A rising rival to Microsoft's Office suite gets a major overhaul. Also: Marc Andreessen sees a bright future for PHP.

Listen at your leisure to The advantages of SOA podcast, an informative interview with Matthew Oberlin, who is an expert in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation. He will discuss SOA being evolutionary, not revolutionary - it's really about business activities being reusable, building SOA components for the SOA programming model and the main elements of the SOA environment. The podcast provides insight into the fundamental principles behind the SOA programming model.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer was on good form during a Q&A session with an audience at a Gartner Symposium in Florida yesterday, having the audience in stitches on more than one occasion, as well as coming out with the kind of marketing speak wont to baffle and enlighten in equal measure.

Asked for his thoughts on the fact that when it comes to platform migrations, more people are moving from Unix to Linux than from Unix to Windows, he conceded that: "We're not winning more than we're losing." Which is a roundabout way of conceding that it's losing to Linux more often than winning.

Now this is very special, the T.sonic 310 from Transcend is a radically distinctive hybrid that combines all the advantages of a hi-speed USB 2.0 flash drive with a high quality MP3 player, but that’s not all. Transcend has managed to integrate a unique feature into the T.sonic 310’s innovative cubist design, a TouchPad controller. The T.sonic 310’s easy to use futuristic TouchPad, responds to your fingertip control and allows you to raise or lower the volume, replay/skip tracks and fast forward/rewind music during playback.

The T.sonic 310 supports Linux Kernel 2.4 or later.

Advantage: open source.

What about stability? You've spent a lot of time, effort and money building sophisticated business intelligence systems. So what happens when your vendor decides it's time for an upgrade? This is a good idea if that piece of software never worked right, or if you need a new feature provided by the upgrade.

Part of what makes open source software thrive is code sharing and reuse. The Create initiative at freedesktop.org targets this issue by bringing together developers from Inkscape, Scribus, Krita, the Open Clip Art Library, and the GIMP, among others, along with interested individuals. Together they are collaborating on a set of specifications they believe will simplify work for developers and distributions, and usability for end users.

Achieve a level of high reliability in a microprocessor system by adding a second identical processor to a system to monitor and verify the system processor operation -- also known as the lockstep processor technique. This tip demonstrates the integrated lockstep facility (LSF) in the PowerPC 750GX processor.