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Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems hasn't been fully sanctioned by anti-trust entities and Oracle already has a message for customers: we'll continue to care intensively about SPARC and Solaris. Something's missing here: MySQL.

One of the highlights of the behind-the-scenes changes in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the addition of Grand Central Dispatch. Apple have now open sourced the code to Grand Central under an Apache 2.0 licence. Grand Central is a user and kernel space library which adds new language features, runtime libraries and other enhancements to support concurrent code execution on multi-core hardware.

If you think about learning how to create dynamic database-driven web sites, the simplest way is to start with PHP and SQLite. Ubuntu is a wonderful Linux distribution that makes installation of this software extremely easy.

Bash functions, unlike functions in most programming languages do not allow you to return a value to the caller. When a bash function ends its return value is its status: zero for success, non-zero for failure. To return values, you can set a global variable with the result, or use command substitution, or you can pass in the name of a variable to use as the result variable. The examples below describe these different mechanisms.

In a surprise move, Apple has open-sourced its Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) technology under the Apache 2.0 public license. Baked into the recently released Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, GCD eases the programming challenges that developers face when coding for multicore processors. You can download a PDF of Apple's half-marketing, half-technical description of it here.

One of the first things most people do after installing a Linux distribution is to tweak settings and customize the desktop interface. One of the things I normally do in customizing the desktop interface is change the panel icon. Up until now I have been doing this by fiddling around in /usr/share/icons/$icon_theme and I never liked replacing system files even if the change was easy to revert.

So you've got a shiny new multicore processor and the urge to take it out for a spin. How do you know whether you're getting the most out of it? Akkana Peck tells you how to monitor your machine and make the most out of all that processing power.

Seriously, the "Days of our Lives" writers couldn't come up with this stuff if they tried. Just when everything was starting to seem all warm and fuzzy between Microsoft and the open-source community, this week brought so many twists and turns that it was difficult to keep up.

Just as Microsoft has being accused of playing dirty over sales tactics and patents, the software company has launched its first open source organization. The CodePlex Foundation aims to act as a liason between commercial enterprises and open source developers and communities while increasing open source participation, says the foundation.

This new script is for Network Engineers and System Engineers a like. Though I must admit it is more for the System Engineers who do not have access to the command line on the CDP enabled device. Have you ever wanted to know what CDP enabled devces ( and info related to those devices ) that were directly connected to your your Core Switch? But you just do not have the access to get that info. But you do have access to the monitoring system, which has SNMP access to the Core Switch. Well this is where my script comes into play... Stay tuned for updates, as I'm planning on adding to this script. So you can run it with the detail option and a detail port option.

ASUS's 7" display is now touch-sensitive. The source code for the Linux device's Qt interface is downloadable.

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Debian Lenny. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

He was one of the unsung heroes of World War Two, a brilliant mathematician and code-breaker who led the technological fight against Hitler. Some 55 years too late, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologised for the prosecution and persecution that ended up killing Alan Turing.

Netbooks are selling at a nice clip -- IDC predicts more than 20 million units sold by year's end -- as consumers and education buyers wolf up these streamlined, low-cost laptop alternatives. Next up: the enterprise. Netbooks is a "category with legs," says Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with Seattle-based consultancy RedMonk, pointing to recent market activity as an indicator of the netbook's viability. Most obvious, he says, is Google's decision to build a separate Linux-based operating system -- Chrome OS -- specifically for netbooks. Meantime, Microsoft is grappling with "hard questions about its OS pricing relative to netbooks," and virtually every major hardware maker, apart from Apple Inc., has an offering in the category.

Looking for a quick and easy way to set up a Web-based photo gallery? Consider GMPhoto. This application lets you create a snazzy Web-based photo album literally in a matter of minutes.

Recently LifeHacker had an article talking about five things they would like to see in Ubuntu. The article is very supportive of Ubuntu, and we appreciate that LifeHacker folks, and I wanted to follow up with a few notes about each of the five areas they focused on, particularly with relation to the recently released Alpha 5 development snapshot of the up-and-coming Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

moonOS 3.0 is based on Ubuntu 9.04 and uses the Enlightenment window manager. The moonOS 3.0 release includes many improvements making this distro even faster and easier to use than previous versions. Take a look at some things moonOS can do out of the box with this quick review, screenshot gallery, and moonOS overview video.

Slackware is becoming a real favaorite for me. It's fast, nimble and rock solid. However, I have a HP Mini 100 with a Broadcom 4312 (rev.01) wireless card. If you know anything about this card you know this is bad news....real bad news. But I decided to write this article to create some encouragement to those of you who are ready to leave Linux because you cannot get wireless going. It is possible, but it may not be easy. One thing for sure ...it is worth it.

Having your Linux distribution suddenly disappear from the internet would put a strain on anyone. It does happen from time to time, however, something the team at Fedora can testify to. Announcing in advance that your distro will pull a David Copperfield would prove far less stressful, and that's exactly what the good people at openSUSE have done.

Back in 2007, it seemed like the SCO nightmare was done; the company had suffered a summary judgment depriving it of its claim to the Unix copyrights and it had gone into bankruptcy proceedings. In the latter half of 2009, though, SCO is still here. Now, an appeals court has ruled [PDF] that part of the 2007 judgment was erroneous and must be reconsidered; some worry that SCO could come back, zombie-like, to terrorize again. The real threat may not be SCO, though, but what comes after. The agreement between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation was a mess which never clearly spelled out what was being sold. It is far from surprising that Novell and the company now known as the SCO Group disagree on its particulars. The lawyers involved in making that agreement, quite simply, did not do their job. Even so, the district court, in 2007, was able to obtain enough clarity from this document to conclude that there was no question at all of whether the Unix copyrights had been transferred to SCO. The result was a summary judgment throwing out SCO's claims regarding those copyrights. That judgment was welcomed in the community, but there may be justice to SCO's claim that it was a little too hasty.