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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the economy as an excuse for his company's first quarterly loss in 23 years as a public company, but if his big rivals were making money, it begs the question, why was Microsoft doing so poorly?

These players are among the top audio players for console available on Linux. You can run them in a shell instance without the need of an X Server, and although several use only a command-line interface (like ogg123 of mpg123), several come with a nice, ncurses-based interface which makes music management easier and pleasant.

Under the pressure to move away from brown, Ubuntu's artwork took a sharp decline in overall consistence as some parts tried to move away from the traditional soft brown, while others very much sticked to the old theme.

Recently I have been reading articles about the new Btrfs and its benchmarks for the Linux kernel. I have also been reading other articles relating to file system maintenance. At this point, regarding the article on file system maintenance, I am going to have to say “who cares.”

Acer's Nvidia Ion-based micro desktop PC, Revo, will go on sale in the UK on 5 May, with Ubuntu Linux among the available operating systems. Open source software fans shouldn't rush to the shops, though - Acer expects to tweak the Ubuntu machine's spec very shortly after release.

In tech circles, Washington state may be best known as Microsoft's stomping grounds -- but it's also home to a thriving community of people devoted to Linux and other open-source programs. That community is gathering Saturday and Sunday in Bellingham for one of its big annual events: LinuxFest Northwest, now in its 10th year.

As the last round of quarterly reports rolled in, Apple's didn't look so hot—until they were followed by mediocre results from Microsoft and an absolute disaster for Sony. This time around, with everyone's expectations lowered by months of economic turmoil, Apple's results looked pretty good, but Microsoft put a quick stop to any speculation that the good news for Cupertino was a general sign. The economy hit Microsoft hard, knocking profits down by nearly a third from where they were a year ago, with nearly every division of the company seeing a drop in revenue. After these results, I fear for Sony.

What does benchmarking a Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a Radeon HD 4890 graphics card with Intel Core i7, and dual quad-core AMD Opterons look like? Well, if the systems are running Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, or Mac OS X, it can look like this..

The National Science Foundation on Thursday said it has awarded nearly $5 million in grants to 14 universities so they can participate in theIBM (NYSE: IBM)-Google (NSDQ: GOOG) cloud computing initiative for research projects. Through the NSF's Cluster Exploratory, or CLuE, program, the universities will use software and services running on the IBM-Google data center. The companies launched the joint university initiative in 2007 to help teach computer science students.

Your Computer makin' you crazy? These error messages may or may not help you out ;)

Along with Linux, Java's been one of the biggest boons for Oracle. It's become the anchor of Oracle's middleware and developer strategy, and - with Linux - ended Oracle's one-time dependence on Microsoft as the only alternative to IBM. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin has said he does not see Oracle's commitment to Linux lessening just because it wants to take ownership of a Solaris business.

Now that I've pretty much got my Xfce 4.4 desktop where I want it in OpenBSD, I've been spending more and more time not in Xfce but in the Fvwm2 window manager that's the default for this OS.

A general rule of marketing is "The more noise they make, the less they have to crow about." Who makes the most noise about "innovation"? I bet you can guess....

Another member of the Windows ecosystem takes a rhetorical stance in favor of a software monoculture, in this case, the Adobe Acrobat PDF reader/viewer.

If you're a Linux fan, there's a bit of a tendency to think that Linux and open source are two ways of saying the same thing. However, plenty of FOSS projects exist that don't have anything to do with Linux, and plenty of projects originated on Linux that now are available on other systems.

Earlier this month Intel had pushed out the xf86-video-intel 2.7 graphics driver that brought a variety of new features and fixes. This 2.7 X.Org driver has been rolled into Intel's "2009Q1 Package" along with Mesa 7.4 plus a few more patches, the Linux 2.6.29.1 kernel plus a few more patches, and libdrm 2.4.9. It is also suggested that X Server 1.6.1 be used with this recommended Intel software configuration.

On the server, Ubuntu is now ramping its efforts too, which is an area where Mark Shuttleworth also sees a place where Ubuntu can exceed what Debian does. "We see Debian as the system administrators choice," Shuttleworth said . "And we see Ubuntu as bringing a level of corporate identity and backing to that platform which makes it acceptable and palatable in a large scale organizational environment."

The modern workforce is increasingly mobile, with many jobs performed in the field, far from standard workplace tools, such as desk-bound computers and wired networks. Even for more mobile devices, connectivity is limited to wireless accessible areas. Learn about the development of a Mobile Workforce Framework based on the open source Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) for supporting teams who must work in remote areas with limited or no network access. This article focuses on the value of a common open source platform to myriad remote teams, the reduction in paper and travel to perform synchronization, and improved paper-free access to critical information when "off the net."

Without encryption protecting your email messages, you might as well be sending postcards because anyone can intercept and read them. Juliet Kemp tells how to protect your email privacy with GPG and Thunderbird.

Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, was released on April 23rd, also celebrating the 10th Ubuntu release. Since its first version back in October 2004, Ubuntu went through many improvements and quickly became one of the most popular distributions out there, with a huge and continuously thriving community and a fast development method. Free CDs through the ShipIt service can be also ordered, which is another way from which users can benefit of Ubuntu and spread it.