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The Boston Globe has an article on the difficulties President Obama will face with spending $50 Billion in Health IT: "As Barack Obama prepares to spend billions on health information technology as part of his plan to revive the US economy, some specialists are warning against investing too heavily in existing electronic record keeping systems...If America's physician practices suddenly rushed to install the systems of their choice, it would only dramatically intensify the [tower of] Babel that already exists," wrote David Kibbe, a senior adviser to the academy and a longtime proponent of health information technology, and Bruce Klepper, a healthcare market analyst..."

The Southern California Linux Expo opened registration for its 2009 event on December 30th. The event will take place February 20-22nd, 2009, in Los Angeles, California. The SCaLE organizers have filled the available speaker tracks, and this year's events include co-hosted mini-conferences, such as the Women in Open Source Conference (a continuation of last year's discussions to encourage women of all ages to become involved in FOSS), and the Open Source Software in Education Conference (focusing on FOSS in the K-12 setting).

With the number of netbooks on the market continuing to increase each month and more of these mobile devices switching to solid-state drives for their reliability, extended battery life, and faster performance, SSDs are becoming quite common and finding themselves meeting many Linux hosts. How though does the real-world performance differ between hard disk drives and solid-state drives on Linux? We have run several tests atop Ubuntu on a Samsung netbook with a HDD and SSD. In addition, we have also looked at the encryption performance using both types of drives.

Like other Operating systems, there are some great Instant messengers for Linux. These IM’s comes with features like any other, including custom emoticons, web-cam support, nudges, themes, plugins, customizations and lots more. Here’s a list of 10 Best Instant messengers for Linux, I hope it comes in handy.

Leah Duncan loves cheese and salami. And given that fact, the Australian Linux community is probably lucky that she didn't like the micro-organisms used in the making of such foods enough to complete a degree in Microbiology some years ago.

Security and updates, which are often the same thing. There is no longer any doubt that hackers and malware writers are going after open source projects as they once went after Windows. Vulnerabilities are being found, discovered, created, exchanged. The best protection against vulnerabilities is to keep software updated, but most open source lacks update services. That’s one part of the Windows license that is worth paying for, and there does not seem to be an open source equivalent.

Last year was the one of the most active years for legal developments in the history of free and open source (“FOSS”). http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=27 This year, 2008, has seen a continuation of important legal developments for FOSS. My list of the top ten FOSS legal developments in 2008 follows:

The perception by the majority of search users that they gain high quality results is the core value in Google's crown jewel, i.e. its search engine. Should Google persist in seeking the lowest cost solution to its being gamed, via software algorithms, while at the same time scrounging more user data gratis, it risks alienating a significant fraction of its user base. Its financial model depends upon its search engine retaining its high perceived value. Google's current counter attacks are insufficient, ineffective and sometimes misdirected. Therefore, I think Google is putting its financial model in jeopardy.

The end of the year tends to be a time of reflection and retrospective for many people. So I too thought about writing up my thoughts on the most important events in 2008. There's plenty to talk about with OLPC's (largely just perceived) move to Windows XP, Walter Bender leaving OLPC and subsequently founding Sugar Labs, olpcnews announcing the "post-1CC era", the announcement of the XO-2 design, the release of Sugar 8.2, the return of G1G1 at the end of the year, etc.

Last November, Openbravo, an open-source software (OSS) company in business for less than three years, celebrated the one-millionth combined download of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point-of-sale applications. While the number of actual deployments is far less, given that developers often download the software as part of a tire-kicking exercise, the high interest in an open-source application as sophisticated as ERP reflects the increasing traction that OSS is gaining in the corporate world.

Analysis – Last month, Microsoft’s market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. Initial data sets provided by Net Applications suggest that the Internet Explorer will drop once again significantly in December to below 69% and Mozilla will climb above 21%. IE8 is just around the corner, but current market share data suggests that Microsoft has no effective tool to stop the bleeding at this time - and Mozilla can pick up two out of every three users Microsoft surrenders.

CES rollouts will run the gamut from MSI's Wind "hybrid" netbook -- with a mix of SSD and HDD drives in a single machine -- to a high-end notebook with a secondary display. And Windows 7 could be closer than anyone thinks

This year at Phoronix we published 333 full-length original articles/reviews and wrote 691 news pieces -- with nearly all of them being about Linux or computer hardware in some form. Our total number of articles written at Phoronix since its inception in 2004 is over 1,300 articles and then about 2,000 news postings in the past two years. Below are our most popular articles this year. Mac OS X 10.5 vs...

LinuxPlanet Classics: Getting the fingerprint reader working hasn't advanced much since this article was first run, so here we go again, with some updated references. Please note that fingerprint readers, like all biometric devices, are easy to foil and do not provide strong security; but they are convenient.

KWordQuiz, KVocTrain, and other KDE-based programs use the KVTML file format for their data files. The format is just a fairly simple XML format but, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything available to convert a text file to this format. So, once again, AWK to the rescue.

Rather than announcing a road-map for 2009 or sharing all of the accomplishments this year that were made within the Compiz development community, Kristian Lyngstol has shared some grave concerns for this project that brought "desktop bling" to Linux. Kristian has outlined a few areas that that he believes need to be addressed otherwise it could mean the death of Compiz. Compiz in fact is just losing developers at this point and with the different forks taking place there is much stagnation occurring within Compiz.

Over the past few years, scheduled releases of open source projects have become the norm. Projects tend to release new versions according to a regular schedule as opposed to releasing when the developers consider all the work proposed, has been completed. Releasing "When it's done" is based upon the simple proposition that if you only release when you think the software is complete and usable, then that release will be of higher quality. How a project makes that decision of completeness would be up to the project; an active benevolent dictator's project could be simply decreed complete, while a larger community project may use voting or other feedback, to create an aggregate decision. Whichever way though, there will always be the possibility of issues missed, or downgraded without the community noticing and therefore holding up the release while those issues are fixed.

For many, migrating to Linux is a rite of passage that equates to a thing of joy. For others, it's a nightmare waiting to happen. It's wonderful when it's the former; it's a real show stopper when it's the latter. But that nightmare doesn't have to happen, especially when you know, first hand, the most common mistakes new Linux administrators make. This article will help you avoid those mistakes by laying out the most typical Linux missteps.

The past year has seen strides in open source's place in the industry, cementing its role as a major force in the enterprise -- with several key players and stakeholders rising to the top. Just what do they have planned for the next twelve months? Also this year, the breakneck pace of development in networking technology continued apace. But with concerns about security and energy consumption at all time highs, there's still a great deal of work that needs to get done. And quickly.

A new centre aimed at speeding the development of mobile computing devices around the Linux-based Moblin OS opened in Taipei. The idea is for Taiwanese companies to use the centre as a testing ground for new netbooks and mobile Internet devices (MIDs), as well as develop more applications around Moblin.