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Earlier this week Google announced that several products will be shut down or will be modified. Included in the list were two social services: Jaiku and Dodgeball. Jaiku is a Twitter-like service that was acquired by Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in late 2007. Dodgeball is a location-based meeting service that was acquired by Google in May of 2005. The Dodgeball founders quit Google in April 2007 and both were vocal that they weren't happy with how Google was handling the service.

The last version of Pagico on Ubuntu was v2.3, released a long while ago. As Ubuntu not being our prioritized platform, we didn’t put too much energy on it. However, things have changed. Now we’re more interested in supporting this fantastic desktop platform than ever, and this time we’re not going to let it fall behind. Together with the v3.2.2 software, the Pagico on Ubuntu brings you the best user experience and unique feature set as an organizer software.

Earlier this month we shared that Tungsten Graphics was creating a new VIA 3D stack for one of their clients. This new work has many improvements over the current Mesa and DRM code both on the technical level as well when it comes to what's supported for use by end-users. This morning the code for Tungsten's new support has been pushed out to OpenChrome.

For the past couple of weeks I have been focusing my free time on continuing the development of scsigen v2.0. I am currently working on the Linux 2.6 version and it will be followed by Sun’s Solaris/OpenSolaris. Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD will come afterward. From experience I have learned to always find out what the user wants or desires in features and functionality. I am not here to introduce a new industry but provide easy-to-use solutions that are contained in simple packages. Project details are listed in the link provided above.

It has been awhile since anyone has posted any updates about e17 (myself included). The enlightenment project is still moving along at good speed. The window manager for enlightenment - simply called e - is stable. I have been using it constantly since 2004 as my X desktop on both Linux and FreeBSD without any issues. What many users may not know is how much over the last year or so has risen up around enlightenment.

The ReactOS project has seen some major progress during 2008. The project, which aims to create a Windows NT-compatible operating system, has published a 'year-in-review' article concerning 2008, detailing the various area of work. It provides some interesting insights into the project's development. Last year was a busy one for ReactOS. After the kernel rewrite, which allowed them to stabilise the kernel, the gained the ability to direct attention towards elements slightly higher up the software stack, such as the graphics subsystem and filesystem support.

gaming theory I have thought for some time that having games on windows was what kept me from using Linux. I've been a gamer for a good part of my life and it was one of the reasons i didn't know what to do with Linux. I had a console (still do, and a PSP for that matter) but the greatest games were made for PC's. A lot of people nowadays are saying "if we just had the windows games in Linux we would have a lot more users". But it's not the games that made windows big. It's the windows user base that made the windows gaming industry big! If you would develop a game and you wanted to make money, what platform would you be developing for? The platform with a small percentage of the market or the platform with the rest of the market. Difficult choice eh?

The European Union's new complaint against Microsoft really takes one back. Like, a decade or so. Its objection--that bundling a browser into the operating system violates antitrust law--is the same one that U.S. regulators raised in 1996. The newest allegations stem from a 2007 complaint by Norway's Opera that Microsoft was hurting competition by including Internet Explorer in Windows and by not better adhering to Web standards.

The OpenBSD 4.4-equipped Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (circa 2002) is cranking along very nicely. Who knew you could squeeze so much computing goodness out of 1.3 GHz of processing power? In 768 MB of RAM, I'm running tons of apps at once. I can run Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the GIMP, Pidgin and Firefox and still not swap to disk. I don't think that's so unusual, but usual or not, it's pretty nice. In my world, 768 MB is a lot of RAM, and I'm glad to find out that it's more than enough to do my work.

God bless local news. Annie Schubert was expecting a "bread and butter" Dell running Windows for school. But when she fired up her accidental Ubuntu machine, confusion was only the beginning of her problems. You see, Annie was ready to enroll in online classes at Madison Area Technical College (emphasis mine), so she bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-loaded. MATC lists as its requirements Microsoft Word and internet access, so when her Verizon DSL install CD wouldn't work and the word "Microsoft" was nowhere to be found, she called Dell. There, a gracious callcenter support drone told her that Ubuntu was just fine for everything she needed to do (true, I would say) and that it's just perfect for college students. Annie agreed.

All manner of campaigns have been tried to persuade Windows users to make the switch to GNU/Linux and every year is heralded as the year of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Whether these things come to pass or not only time will tell, but the latest electronic assault on the integrity of computers which emanates from the British Government via a European directive might just tilt the balance in favour of free and open software. I suspect however that the hard-core Redmondnites will blunder on as usual making the internet a gold mine for any individual, corporation or government maliciously inclined to steal or plant information your computer. So, what exactly is warrantless intrusion? Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

It’s no secret that I’m a Linux fan. I love it. I use it. I tell of its goodness far and wide. It’s also true, however, that I administer and use a variety of operating systems throughout any given day. I like to think that makes me more objective than some, and I like to think more people will pay attention to me if I don’t bash every other operating system out there.

It has been gratifying to see the number of businesses and personal computers moving to Open Source software and the Linux Operating System. In our organization alone, the numbers, while small on a grand scale, are quite significant from where we stand. We've installed hundreds of Linux systems in the past two years and the retention rate of those systems are what we get excited about. However...

As a new parent, one of my concerns is the possible exposure of my daughter to adult oriented materials when she reaches internet surfing age. I’ve still got some years to go before I really need to come to the task of protecting my child from the cr@p that is pervasive throughout the internet, but as an IT professional, this is the biggest gripe I hear from parents all over. How can you protect your children while allowing them the freedom to use the internet responsibly and productively in order to become successful students and therefore successful adults?

Windows-only shops looking to do a little virtualization on the cheap need look no further than Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Hyper-V and the freebie Hyper-V Server 2008 standalone host. However, our tests showed that customers with even mildly complex virtualization requirements should run Hyper-V on top of Enterprise or Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2008 and manage guest virtual machines by adding System Center Virtual Machine Manager--which brings on licensing costs. As for non-Windows environments, Microsoft's claim that Hyper-V is capable of mixed operating system virtualization is technically accurate, but the latest version of Novell's SUSE Enterprise is the only flavor of Linux supported across the Hyper-V range.

Most software developers, whether open source or proprietary, would agree that the success or failure of any endeavour depends on building a community. This may be a community of fellow developers, advocates or just users, but unless a significant number of people take a project to their hearts, it's unlikely to make an impact. If you're an elite coder who dreams in C++, making your mark on a free software project could be relatively easy; you take the code – magically available under the GPL – and work out how to do something new or more efficient with it and then bash out your edits on a keyboard. You release your patch and the community sings your praises while you begin the process over again with the same or another project.

We recently held a olpc / LTSP presentation in Vienna, which gave us the opportunity to be experimental and check the wonderful world of using Sugar on various platforms via LTSP. We hooked up 2 Acer Aspire One netbooks, a Thin Client (Artec), a laptop acting as LTSP and ejabberd server, along with 2 traditional XOs. Before going into the details of the experiment some explanation is due. LTSP stands for Linux Terminal Server Project, and refers to the use of a mainframe like infrastructure, where minimal systems without hardrives and little CPU and RAM can be used as diskless terminals.

The 451 Group, a market intelligence consultancy that proudly distinguishes itself from its "pay-for-play-propaganda" competitors, predicts that 2009 will be a big year for open-source software merger and acquisition activity.

[So even though a bad economy hurts companies selling both Proprietary and Open Source solutions, merging them will help? - Scott]

This whole "intellectual property" mania is a mental illness that deserves its own entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's like that great movie, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God." Give yourself a treat and watch it; it's a wonderful film that takes place after the fall of the Incan empire. Lope de Aguirre, played by the perfectly mad Klaus Kinski, leads a band of Spanish conquistadors on a quest for El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold. The quest is doomed, of course, as they struggle through hostile terrain and hostile locals, pushed onward by their own greed and ruthlessness.

January is here and it's that time of year for penguin-lovers everywhere to make their annual migration south to Australia to flock together. Linux.conf.au is one of the world's most popular technical Linux conferences, and for it's 10th anniversary is being held at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. The conference runs for a week, with two days of mini-confs followed by the main conference programme and culminating in an Open Day on Saturday.