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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Microsoft's suit against TomTom, which alleged infringement of eight of its patents - including three that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. I wrote there that this seemed part of a larger attack on Linux, and not just one on TomTom, as Microsoft nonetheless insisted.

Years ago when we started reviewing ASRock motherboards, most of them were fairly basic with very few features compared to what could be found on the ASUS or Gigabyte motherboards. With time though ASRock has begun ramping up their motherboards with more features, new innovative designs, and other improvements that cater towards the desires of enthusiasts and gamers. These days there are ASRock motherboards that can compete with those from major OEMs both in terms of features and in terms of performance, while delivering a better price. One example of a modern, feature-rich ASRock motherboard is the N7AD-SLI. The ASRock N7AD-SLI has NVIDIA SLI support, Gigabit LAN, IEEE-1394 Firewire, S/PDIF output, OC Tuner, solid capacitors, and an instant boot technology. This motherboard is centered around NVIDIA's nForce 740i SLI Chipset.

My main laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.4 for a few months now, and that laptop has pretty much become my main PC for getting things done both at home and at the office. And I've been quite happy with the stability and performance of the operating system as well as the applications I've installed from packages and ports. My anxiety comes from upgrading. OpenBSD is on a six-month upgrade cycle. Version 4.5 will be out in May. While I've been using OpenBSD off and on since 4.2, I've only done one upgrade, from 4.2 to 4.3, and while it wasn't the most painful experience, neither was it as easy as firing up Synaptic or running apt-get update apt-get upgrade in Debian. Not by a long shot.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. We've also had a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, as well as Stephen C. Johnson on YACC, Luca Cardelli on Modula-3, Walter Bright on D, Simon Peyton-Jones on Haskell and more recently, Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language.

Sure, it's handy being able to run Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office on Linux or the Mac thanks to WINE and Crossover Linux and Mac, but you know what's even cooler? Running WoW (World of Warcraft) or Guild Wars on them. That's why I'm really pleased to see that CrossOver, the company behind WINE, the programs that lets you run Windows programs on Linux and Mac OS, has just released new editions of CrossOver Games for Mac and Linux, version 7.2.0. At first, you might think, "Are they kidding, you can't run -- seriously run -- a demanding Windows game on Linux or the Mac." You'd be wrong.

Vinay Gupta is a Scottish-Indian engineer who designs low-cost homes for poor parts of the world or disaster zones, and then makes them freely available on the internet so others can do the building. His flagship is the Hexayurt shelter system, which costs around $200 (£142). It uses common building materials, including insulation boards - which, he claims, are a third of the cost of a tent. The business plan is to cut the price of essential goods and services to the point where the poor can afford them. Gupta is just one example of a global movement that offers an alternative to the scandalous tales of banking avarice that have saturated the world's media.

In a meeting with financial analysts last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laid out who he thinks are the biggest threats today to Windows on the client side. Surprisingly, Apple wasn't number one. It wasn't number two or three either. Referring to a pie chart at the meeting that gauges threats to Windows, Ballmer said that Windows itself, both licensed and pirated, were the top two threats to Microsoft in the client OS space, followed by Linux, then Apple. Ballmer quipped: "Windows license, number one market share. Number two market share goes to Windows pirated, or unlicensed. That's a competitor that's tough to beat; they've got a good price and a heck of a product, but we're working on it."

Including Dia in this series is just a bit of a stretch, because it is not a conventional “vector graphic editor”. Instead, Dia operates at a somewhat higher level of abstraction. But since that abstraction is very appropriate for dataflow diagrams (such as the one I picked as a comparison project), I think it’s important to note what it can do. Dia is very useful, but it’s sometimes frustrating, because the idea of it suggests expectations well beyond what it can actually do. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

If you've been waiting for someone to lower the cash required for a physical to virtual conversion, your wait is over.

Yesterday afternoon I was speaking with a local administrator of one of the companies that I work for and in the past we had discussed topics such as GNU/Linux among other technical things but certain “concerns” always seem to come back up, not only with him but also other Microsoft using technical individuals that assume open source is bad, against Microsoft and anything good, and/or insecure (”a result of the source being available to everyone”). Where have these false ideas sprouted from?

A security update for cURL, the file transfer utility, and its associated libcurl library has been released to fix a vulnerability which could allow an attacker to examine files on a system, or possibly even write files. The cause of the problem is the cURL (Client for URL) automatic redirection feature.

There are some devs out there that don't like PHP, then there are those that do.

Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver.

Want to know more about cloud and grid computing? Learn how you can use Infrastructure as a Service to get a full computer infrastructure using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). See the similarities, differences, and issues to consider in grid and cloud computing. Explore some of the security issues and choices for Web development in the cloud, and see how you can be environmentally friendly using cloud computing.

Indiana University has released open source software, called Variations, that allows you to create a digital music library system. College and university libraries may digitize audio and musical scores to provide to their users in an interactive, online environment, including streaming audio and scanned score images.

Jeremy White the CEO of CodeWeavers announced the release of CrossOver Games 7.2.0 for Mac and Linux. Below is the message Jeremy sent to their announce mailing list.

With many retail outlets in South Africa now selling notebook and netbook computers with Linux pre-installed, I can’t really say that I am at all excited by the notion and find myself feeling very apprehensive about the way Linux is being introduced to the local market. My reason for feeling this way stems from the belief that most (if not all) people making the decision to buy these notebook or netbook computers do it based on the price tag, and not because the machine runs Fedora-based Linpus Linux. The salesperson selling this product has no comprehension of the Linux operating system or any of the programs available, and therefore is incapable of influencing the buyer to do it for any other reason.

According to Wikipedia, Software Architecture is "the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software components, the externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships between them". Probably, if you need to go to Wikipedia to read the complete definition and background of Software Architecture, you aren't ready to buy this book, but let's see.

The most exciting bit of kit I've played with in ages isn't a cutting edge graphics card, or a multimedia tablet. It's a netbook - a Samsung NC-10 with a bog standard Atom chip, a bit of RAM and an ancient operating system. It isn't just a great bit of kit, though. It's the canary in the coalmine, chirping that the tech industry has completely lost touch with reality - and that it's caught us in its Reality Distortion Field.

Have you ever come across a situation where you wanted to convert a video from one format to another in your Linux machine and you have absolutely no idea how to do it? What about playing DVD on Ubuntu or rip your favorite VCD to mpeg file? Below, I have come up with a great list of software that you can use to handle your video/audio files in Linux. All the software listed are compatible with any of the Linux distros out there. The installation instructions and screenshots are based on Ubuntu, so if you are on a different distro, you will have to change the command accordingly.