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E-commerce teams within IT departments must do more with less, so they need to maximize their resources through shrewd and clever management, according to Gartner. Although IT budgets are shrinking anywhere between 5 to 25 percent, IT e-commerce organisations are expected to sharpen the online shopping experiences of their companies' customers. A big reason for the heightened expectations is that sites like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Flickr and Facebook continue to push the envelope in terms of new features and the online experience in general, said Gene Alvarez, Gartner's vice president of e-commerce and CRM research.

As has been well publicized by now, the Linux kernel lacks the sort of tracing features which can be found in certain other Unix-like kernels. That gap is not the result of a want of trying. In the past, developers trying to put tracing infrastructure into the kernel have often run into a number of challenges, including opposition from their colleagues who do not see the value of that infrastructure and resent its perceived overhead. More recently, it would seem that the increased interest in tracing has helped developers to overcome some of those objections; an ongoing discussion shows, though, that concerns about tracing are still alive and have the potential to derail the addition of tracing facilities to the kernel.

Ubuntu's commercial backer won't fluff its own cloud, but Canonical isn't eschewing online services in the battle against Microsoft. Canonical has begun beta tests of a web-based service that'll let you store and synchronize files on your Jaunty Jackalope PC with other Jackalope-powered machines. Called Ubuntu One, it's designed to provide you with access to your files using a web interface when you're away from your main machine. The service also promises to let you share documents with others.

Yesterday's debut of the New York Times' "Times Reader 2.0" marked the news-reading software's shift to Adobe's AIR technology. Earlier versions of the program for Windows and Mac ran on Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.

Having recently purchased Sun Microsystems, Oracle has now bought virtualisation specialist Virtual Iron for an unspecified amount. The purchase gives Oracle another server virtualisation solution, including Virtual Iron's management software. In a statement Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Vice President of Linux and Virtualisation Engineering, said "With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle expects to enable customers to more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption.

Dell has announced a lower-cost version of its popular Mini 10 netbook, which runs Ubuntu Linux. The Dell Inspiron Mini 10v sells for $300, offering a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, 10-inch display, 120GB or 160GB hard drive, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam, the company says.

Nobody really controls the Internet — untold numbers of servers located in hundreds of jurisdictions simply can't be policed by any one individual, organization, or government. What is controlled, however, is the assignment of IP addresses and domain names — a function that is carried out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. That control is set to expire later this year, and ideas on who should take it from there are already beginning to circulate.

A relatively new product to hit the hardware scene is Pogoplug, which is a little device that can connect to a USB 2.0 hard drive and an Ethernet connection, and then instantly makes the drive an Internet-accessible storage device.

After long internal discussions, the Fedora Directory Server (FDS) developers have changed the name of their project to the 389 Directory Server (389DS). One of the main arguments for the name change is that the "Fedora" name, initially intended to be a generic brand for all of the Red Hat open source projects, turned out to be an obstacle preventing cooperation from other Linux distributions.

The hard drive is the biggest speed bottleneck in any computer system. Linux has a number of tools for optimizing your hard drives and speeding up performance for different tasks. Paul Rubens shows us how.

Every day finds another rumor regarding the release date for the Palm Pre. Palm and Sprint are still not forthcoming about a specific launch. At first, it seemed that both companies were simply building excitement over the Pre, but as time drags on — and believe me it has started to drag — it feels like something else is at work. Back in January, when Palm first announced the Pre and granted many of us a one-on-one look at the phone, it wasn’t surprising that Palm wouldn’t let anyone actually hold the phone. Most of us just wrote that off to the fact that the Pre was in the very early beta stage and Palm wanted to control the demos to make sure that things not quite ready weren’t fussed over. I can understand that.

Despite a national open source strategy and a well-publicised set of minimum interoperability standards for government, the South African education department has launched a teacher laptop project that excludes free and open source software (FOSS).

The companies that create and modernize operating systems are under the same economic pressures as the IT departments of corporations - large and small - that create and maintain their own applications atop those operating systems. And it comes as no surprise that the development of the venerable OpenVMS proprietary operating system - under the control of Hewlett-Packard since its 2001 acquisition of Compaq - is moving largely to India. The news of the changes in the OpenVMS development organization came to light when Ann McQuaid, general manager of the OpenVMS platform, sent out a letter to AlphaServer and Integrity shops that have applications running on OpenVMS.

Today, we at Qt Software have opened our repositories to the public. Any developer can now help guide and shape the future development of Qt by contributions of code, translations, examples and other material to Qt and Qt-related projects. We have also published our roadmap and released Qt Jambi under the LGPL. Read on for details.

Announcing the release of AVG 8.5 for Linux, AVG says the solution is available in both server and free workstation editions, and offers “streamlined scanning capabilities, new anti-virus filtering and improved performance and ease of use for Linux-based users.” AVG Australia’s Lloyd Borrett says AVG Server Edition 8.5 for Linux/Free BSD provides protection for both e-mail and file servers in a single distribution package, and is robust enough to support millions of e-mails a day, and is suitable for use even by large enterprises and ISPs.

Microsoft Corp., for the first time in the company's history, sold bonds to investors, capitalizing on its sterling credit rating and investor appetite to raise $3.75 billion. The software giant Monday was able to sell bonds at interest rates that were only a slight premium to U.S. government debt and at much lower rates than other corporations. The move sparked speculation that the Redmond, Wash., giant could be planning to use the money for an acquisition as it seeks to revive growth. But people familiar with the matter said the company doesn't have a specific deal in mind for the cash, moving instead to take advantage of market conditions. Analysts predicted Microsoft is more likely to use the funds to continue to buy back its stock, which has fallen more than 30% over the past year.

According to Dell's Ubuntu page in recent months, the number of machines that Dell has offered in the UK with Ubuntu Linux instead of Microsoft Windows has dwindled from three (a netbook, laptop and desktop) to, apparently, none. Meanwhile the news from Dell US is that there is a new version of Ubuntu coming for the Dell Mini 10 netbook.

This week we have more straight reporting from Studio Dave with a look at some conference activity, cool developments in the world of Ardour and news about some new and updated programs for your complete Linux music production studio.

LXer Feature: 11-May-2009

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0 beta of its Prism software. Formerly called WebRunner, this program closes the gap between local applications and web applications. Under Windows, Linux or Mac OS X you can, for example, use Prism to run web applications directly from the desktop or the dock. They then become dedicated program icons and can be accessed directly, without using a browser's navigation bar or having to type in a URL. Web sites can also be treated in this way and assigned a direct launch icon.