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The growing success of open source software has naturally spurred on others to apply its lessons elsewhere. Open content is perhaps the most famous translation, notably through the widely-used Creative Commons licences. But one of the most challenging domains to come up with something equivalent to the Open Source Definition (OSD) is hardware – not surprisingly, perhaps, since hardware is analogue, not digital, and hence very different in nature.

Some of you may know the commercial Flexnet Licencing Application (©Macrovision). It's a client-server based solution for managing the usage of socalled Flexnet-enabled applications. You can hold licenses of more than one product on one license-server. As you typically have to buy licenses and licenses can be expensive it would be nice to have a monitoring solution to see the utilization of the precious licenses, whether they are underutilized (so money is wasted) or are always fully utilized (so that you can suspect that sometimes people cannot do their work, or only delayed) which is also a waste of resources. As far as I know there are commercial applications for performing such reports, but again you have to spend money. Why not build a simple system yourself, which shows the actual and past usage in an "MRTG style"?

This time of year the HPC world seems to be a little slow. Of course, it is summer and many people are on vacation (I have just returned) and normally not much seems to happen until September. Although in the middle of writing this I just read the news that Amazon introduced EC2 for HPC. I’ll be looking into this later and try to get some more details.

Burg-manager is an intuitive interface that simplify installation and configuration of burg bootloader. Burg-manager allows to install Burg and many beautiful themes from a big gallery.

What keeps Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer up at night? A few years ago, the answer likely involved Linux, Red Hat, MySQL and other disruptive open source upstarts. Fast forward to the present and Microsoft has two other big competitive concerns. Here they are.

Members of the open source hardware community released a public, working definition of what actually constitutes open hardware. The definition, which consists of 11 tenets that a piece of hardware must adhere to in order to qualify as open, is the first document of its kind in the open hardware community.

In keeping with our current theme of cool user-space file systems, this article examines the first user-space file system I ever used: SSHFS. SSHFS has a client that can mount and interact with a remote file system as though the file system were local. It uses sftp so it’s as secure as sftp is (I’m not a security expert so I can’t comment on the security of ssh). SSHFS can be very handy for working with remote file systems instead of copying files back and forth from remote systems or having to worry about a shared file system. People have even used it for making backups.

The latest Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 pre brings a long awaited feature: app tabs. This feature is very similar to the "Pin tab" option in Chrome: the app tabs use only favicons for the tabs and all the links you open from an app tab are opened to the right of all the app tabs.

ast week I published a short correspondence I had with Richard Stallman on the subject of the GNU GPL and copyright. As I mentioned, that was from a couple of years ago, but I thought it might be worth posting now given the lively interest in the issues it raises. Inspired partly by that older conversation, and also by some rather more heated ones on identi.ca, I sent off some questions to RMS on another subject: that of free software implementations of Microsoft's .NET.

There are 13 million-dollar open source hardware companies, but there have been no standards governing what defines the still nascent field. Until now, that is. Unlike open source software, because there have been no formal definitions, many people may not even be aware of the growing industry. But already some of those practicing its general principles have become household names among the geek set: Arduino, the programmable single-board microcontroller and software suite; Chumby, a popular Wi-Fi device; MakerBot, a low-priced 3D printer; and Adafruit, a maker of do-it-yourself hardware kits for things like MP3 players and more.

We can guide children to write simple sentences and paragraphs by creating different kinds of activities. Additionally, we can use many different applications to allow the student to record the sentence instead of writing it. This way, it is possible to evaluate their skills and to create motivating exercises to offer them better guidance to write simpler or more complex sentences. Reading this article written by by Vanesa S. Olsen and following the exercises we will learn the following : * Preparing and recording a sentence with many predefined words * Record, encode, and upload digitalized voice as a result of a Moodle exercise * Prepare images that combine clipart pictures with geometric shapes

Francois Gouget the coordinator of this years WineConf sent a e-mail to the wine-devel mailing list informing everyone of the date and location of WineConf 2010.

Today we are proud to introduce you guys to the revamped calculator application that will be part of the upcoming GNOME 3.0.0 desktop environment and Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system.

This is a short but potentially extremely handy guide to ghosting one Linux box to another (or simply making a full backup of a desktop/server). You might have a small office where you customise one desktop just how you like it and need to roll this out to N other PC's or simply want a backup of a server or desktop to another machine or even to an image file. The main tool here is netcat which is extremely powerful and has a multitude of other great uses that won't be covered here.

A quick collection of my favorite RSS feed reader applications for Ubuntu desktop. Even though it is totally out of place in my Gnome desktop, Akregator is my favorite among the lot. But after exploring a bit further, I found feed readers like Yarssr really good and easy to use. So here is my list of favorite 4 feed reader applications for Ubuntu.

Pardus Linux is one of those distributions that doesn't get the attention it probably deserves. Pardus makes a wonderful desktop system for those that prefer ease of use. Available as an install image or live CD, it ships with lots of great applications, multimedia support, and browser plugins.

Microsoft COO Kevin Turner this morning took aggressive shots at Apple, Oracle, Linux, VMware and Google — even painting Google as a Big Brother-type company that tries to say they’re not evil in their mission statement. Here are the details.

URD is a program to download binaries from usenet (newsgroups) through a web interface.While some other programs offer similar services (e.g. Ninan, Sabnzbd), URD doesn’t need external NZB files to function. URD lets you subscribe to newsgroups, and will then automatically analyse those articles to form downloadable ‘sets’, consisting of all the files belonging to a specific upload. These sets are displayed, and through point and click you can be downloading a binary in no time.

Among the many exciting announcements in their annual I/O conference, Google released the Android 2.2 SDK (FroYo) to developers. This highly anticipated platform upgrade brings with it exciting improvements and features for users and new tools for application developers and publishers. Here's what we made of it…

A library management system (also known as an integrated library system) is an automated resource planning system which enables a library to operate efficiently, freeing staff from unnecessary tasks. This type of software typically offers functionality such as cataloging, searching, reporting, acquisitions, library circulation and management embodied into a central system.