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By displaying the size of files underneath the files itself, you are immediately aware of the files which occupy a lot of space and those which are not. This is especially useful if you are using a paltry 80 GB hard drive laptop like me ;-).

SiTouch has announced the release of a new wireless keyboard. This is a very cool looking keyboard with back lit keys for low light. For those of us who occasionally work late on our computer this feature is appreciated.

Did you ever see one of those terrible Sci-Fi movies involving a killer Octopus? Ceph, while named after just such a animal, is not a creature about to eat an unlucky Spring Breaker, but a new parallel distributed file system. The client portion of Ceph just went into the 2.6.34 kernel so learn a bit more about it.

Richard Stallman seems an unstoppable force of nature, constantly fighting for the things he believes in. And yet in a new interview he says: “I have certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born.”

Dig deep into the performance of the new 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processor and how to maximize its features for your applications.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Mandriva 2010.0) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Mandriva 2010.0 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

a digital video camera with resolution from 160x128 to 1280x1024 pixels, laser pointer or optional ultrasonic ranging, and WLAN 802.11b/g networking on a quad-motor tracked mobile robotic base. Looks like a cool toy, doesn't it? Now add a rugged aluminum housing, gps a camera inside the housing and heavier tracks and you get this:

The cross-site scripting filter that ships with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser can be abused by attackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks on websites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to this threat.

A computer security researcher has launched a project designed to provide people greater privacy when using Google, as the company expands the scope of data its collects about its users.

If you ask what's missing from open source software, one of the top responses is often "documentation." While there's piles and piles of great code stuffed up on Google Code, SourceForge.net, and others, the actual documentation to accompany it is often lacking. This is why it's doubly sad to keep seeing bounty programs aimed at generating more and more code, and more and more coders, but very little being done to address documentation.

Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project.

For a long time KDE has come with an assortment of games. Collectively, this suite of games is simply called “KDE Games“. With the advent of KDE 4, all of the KDE games were given face lifts and a standard set of features that make moving from game to game a seamless exercise. The games are two dimensional and do not run inside of a separate layer like SDL. Instead they run inside a normal KDE window, utilizing the standard QT interface. Nevertheless, the rendering of of the graphics is amazingly impressive because of the use of SVG vector graphics. With SVG, the animations are smooth and the images are scalable. You can play in a small window or maximize it without losing any of its quality.

In 2007, Sun released the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, as a closed source but free application which allowed Microsoft Office users to export and import documents in Open Document Format. Although the Oracle site still, at the time of writing, offers the software for free with the tagline "Get it now: FREE", users clicking through will find that Oracle are now charging $90, per user, for a right-to-use license for the plug-in and offering support costing $19.80 per user for the first year. Oracle also requires a minimum order of 100 licenses, which means the minimum purchase is $9,000.

Many technologies such as Flash, MP3 and DVD are proprietary or patent encumbered and can not be included on the Ubuntu CD. Thankfully, it’s extremely easy to set up your new Ubuntu system to play just about any media file you can throw at it.

Google is reportedly working on a tablet computer based on its Android operating system, not the Chrome OS. Google has declined to comment on the tablet rumor, but that hasn't stopped analysts from mulling over the operating system choice.

On March 10, 2010, the HelenOS project released version 0.4.2 of their operating system. HelenOS sits on top of the SPARTAN kernel, which supports SMP, multi-tasking and multi-threading on a variety of common architectures. One of the developers behind HelenOS, Jakub Jermar, was willing to take time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions.

There are some superb desktop Linux distributions that are designed to work with very old hardware. For example, Puppy Linux is a great choice to quickly turn an old PC into a secure, easy to use word processing, email and light web browsing workstation. Puppy can work minor miracles on very old hardware, and I carry a Puppy boot CD-ROM around with me as my emergency recovery system.

Getting traditional TV to work in linux can be an exercise in frustration at times. For those with a Hauppauge PVR 150/250/350/500, you are in luck. The following tutorial will get you up and going in no time. It Is aimed at ubuntu users, but if you are a bit resourceful, you will be able to get it to work on the distro of your choice.

Hello again for another interview with KDE people. Last time we had Aleix Pol with us. Now it is time for Thiago Macieira. One of the first KDE developers, he is still working towards world domination at Qt Software as he will explain to us in the interview. For the Italian readers here is the original interview.

Apple ups the ante against Android with iPhone OS version 4 -- but first they have to answer to the 3.3.1 worm.