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Are rumors of Sun's demise greatly exaggerated? Maybe so, if the company's open-source storage strategy is any indication. Sun has struggled for years to shed its image as an old-school IT dinosaur. Lately, with the economy tanking and Sun's stock price tagging along for the ride, its quest for profitability looks more than ever like an exercise in futility.

If you are writing a software which exposes APIs to be used by a third party, then first thing you have to do is to make sure that all the integers parameters have been validated. Every incoming value to your function should be considered as tainted.

Russell Coker is not a man who sleeps with his computers. But he does come pretty close - two servers are positioned in a little cabinet in his bedroom, one being his server and the other his Security Enhanced Linux "play machine." The play machine is open to anyone to log in and try to break the security. The root password is out in public - this is one of the many ways in which he engages with the wider FOSS community and a way by which he tried to improve what has become the project to which he devotes a considerable amount of time.

Last week I had the privilege to chat via IM with Orv Beach, the Publicity Chair for the Southern California Linux Expo, about how SCALE uses FLOSS to productively plan and implement their event. SCALE is currently one of the biggest Linux conferences in the US…but I’ll let Orv fill you in on rest. This year’s Expo will be February 20th - 22nd, 2009. Find out more at the official website.

This summary made sense at digit saucer in time - I mean, this summary made sense at some point in time ;)

People often wonder how to get new capabilities—new packages, new features in existing packages, or even bug fixes—included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The process for doing so is straightforward, but may be foreign to those with a background in traditional software products.

Continuing my holiday machine maintenance saga I move on to some notable trials and tribulations with Ubuntu, but not before I report on a little more holiday cheer.

Ubiquity is a very popular Firefox extension that adds a flexible natural language command line to Firefox, and is developed by the folks at Mozilla. It's now out in a more useful new version, with a sleeker look, a more stable core, and the ability to create good looking skins. If you're familiar with using the Awesome Bar in Firefox, you'll take to Ubiquity quickly, although it pays to spend a little time learning how its commands work. Here's a peek at the new version.

The biggest winner in terms of what cloud service open source developers plan to use is Google's App Engine at 28 percent of respondents. Amazon came in second at 15 percent.

WiFi encryption has just got even less secure now that the Russians reckon you can crack WPA and WPA2 passwords with both ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards.

Free office solution OpenOffice.org is still in the best of shape, based on reactions from project members to Novell developer Michael Meeks's recent pessimistic view. The Linux Foundation is one of many who are concerned. All want one thing: more.

There was a big fuss earlier this week when The Sunday Times of London published an article claiming that every Google search was the equivalent of boiling a pot of tea. Turned out it was a tempest in a tea pot. The Times attributed this bit of profundity to a prestigious Harvard University physicist named Alex Wissner-Gross, who is working on research on the environmental impact of computing.

Many Windows users ask the same questions over and over again. Here are the true to life answers to those questions.

Snowl came out of conversations in the Mozilla community starting in 2007 about how to improve messaging on the Internet," Mozilla developer Myk Melez told InternetNews.com. "Its goal is to find ways to help users track and participate in conversations wherever they happen, not just on social networks."

I didn't want to write this column. I live as Windows-free an existence as most people can these days. Of course I have to run Windows as part of my job, in order to make sure that Samba, the software I write, will interoperate correctly with all the multiple Windows versions out there. I also have to install some Windows applications using the Open Source Wine project, which emulates Windows on Linux well enough that some binary Windows applications will install and run straight off the DvD. Like most people, there are some Windows applications I just can't do without, although in this case it's my three year old son who finds an amazing amount of joy in his toddler games, none of which have yet been ported to Linux. Wine works amazingly well these days for this sort of thing, well enough that my wife no longer complains about the computer "being hard to use".

[What part of (W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator - WINE, do people not get? Call me a stickler but if its not an emulator, then why do we let people get away with saying it is? - Scott]

Andrew Shebanow didn't imagine that asking for feedback about how Palm's app store should work would open up a flood of input. He also didn't expect the move would change his job description. But now both have happened. On Jan. 8, Shebanow, who is working on a third-party application distribution system for Palm's new operating system, posted an item on his blog looking for input from developers on how that system should work. He threw out a few questions, such as: how should application updating and installation work; should Palm offer payment processing or leave it to third parties; should application trials be available; and how should Palm handle featured applications.

Fear not the command line! Akkana Peck reveals one of the great secrets of the Linux command line, and that is you don't have to be a great typist--there are plenty of fast shortcuts and help for everyone. Many of them are easy to remember, like CTRL+U for Undo, and CTRL+W for "erase last Word." Come on inside to learn more.

ITTIA announced the availability of its DB-SQL lightweight, Linux-compatible SQL R-DBMS (relational database management system) for Freescale's ARM-based i.MX family of system-on-chips (SoCs). DB-SQL can support embedded-systems database functionality on i.MX-based devices including PDAs, portable media players, and industrial measurement systems, says the company.

IBM announced today that it will increase the number of technical inventions it makes freely available to others by 50 per cent, and seek less patent protection for its inventions, in an effort to stimulate worldwide innovation and economic growth. The company successfully filed 4,186 US patents in 2008, more than any organisation has achieved before, according to the IT giant. "IBM's leadership in the strategic use of intellectual property is based on balancing proprietary and open innovation," said IBM director of research John Kelly.

Google has its own alternative to Twitter, Jaiku, which it acquired in October of 2007. It hasn't gone far on its own, but Google has just announced that it will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase and will open source it.