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Vstone has announced a two-legged humanoid robot that sports an onboard, Intel Atom-based PC. The "Robovie-PC" can walk on joints that offer six degrees of freedom, offers an accelerometer and gyro sensors, includes a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and has a body padded with polyurethane foam, says the company.

At first sight, news that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system, is just another win for free software. But the details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance – and very expensive – enterprise systems.

The pending US Supreme Court decision regarding In re Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw v. Kappos, in principle about patents on business methods and software, has lead to briefs being filed by numerous companies and associations. Those in favour of extensive patent rights have already taken a position, without issuing major public statements, at the beginning of August. "Amicus curiae" briefs by those who oppose software patents were due to be filed by the end of September. When filing their briefs, the open source companies and free software associations issued press releases in which they demanded a conclusive course correction in the US patent system.

Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.

In December, Palm will open the official webOS developer program to support the creation of applications for the Pre and other upcoming smartphones. The company also launched its App Catalog of applications available for download.

Given the popularity of Gmail, it’s not surprising that a score of desktop applets have emerged for notifying users of new messages. I recently set out on a quest to find the best one. Here are the results.

Ken Starks reported on his experiment with running Linux ads on the Kim Kommando radio show in Austin, Texas. Ken sounds a bit discouraged, but he shouldn't be-- it was a success and it proves that advertising Linux works. Let's take a closer look at what happened, and what the goals of any advertising campaign should be.

Another month has passed since the release of KDE 4.3.0, so today the KDE Community announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2, a bugfix, translation and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.3.2 is a monthly update to KDE 4.3. It ships with a desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

I heard recently, and could not really believe it until I saw it, that Microsoft was encouraging people to throw "Tupperware(R) parties" at their homes in order to launch the new version of Microsoft's products. That is right...plain old down-to-earth "homies" extolling the virtues of quickly going to Vista...er...ah...Windows 7.

Replacing a motherboard on a Linux system is usually a 30-minute chore, but sometimes things go haywire. Carla Schroder tells a tale of kernel panics and kernel transplants.

Last week Adriaan de Groot, Claudia Rauch and Kenny Duffus visited Tampere, Finland representing KDE. This gave a chance to meet face to face with members of the local team and talk about next summer's Akademy 2010 conference.

3D design applications are somewhat an anomaly among Linux. Sweet Home 3D proves that good, free programs now exist in that market.

Innovation with a capital 'I' and totally good stuff. Karmic Koala sends out good karma.

In diff tool speak, a visual diff tool is a GUI application. Meld is such a tool: a tool for displaying differences between files (and directories) and also for merging the differences. Meld is programmed in Python.

Finally, after many months of development, testing and bugfixing a new version of q4wine has been released. q4wine is a wine configuration and management utility written in QT.

In this section of the tutorial, you will learn how to secure SSH and make your computer available across the internet.

Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman recently brought Microsoft's newly instituted CodePlex Foundation to task in his blog. The CodePlex Foundation's Miguel de Icaza, also mentioned in the blog, has since mounted a defense.

Your move Apple, oh wait - no! You've got to hand it to Palm, it's made itself one tenacious mole for Apple to whack. The company's long-running fight to keep the Palm Pre compatible with iTunes entered yet another round of assured futility over the weekend. This Saturday, Palm released version 1.2.1 of WebOS, which "resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with the latest version of iTunes (9.0.1)". It also fixes Exchange 2007 compatibility and some security issues, but that's not really the point of the rollout.

Imagination is a lightweight and simple DVD slide show maker written in C language and built with the GTK+2 toolkit, there are some other GUIs which do the job, but they usually require a lot of dependencies to be installed first and often their interfaces are bloated. Imagination has been designed from the ground up to be fast, light and easy-to-use.

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 9.04. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.