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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that he still wanted to form an alliance with Yahoo to combat the dominance of Google in search advertising. But in his annual forecast to financial analysts of Microsoft’s plans for the year, he ruled out any revival of last year’s aborted deal to purchase Yahoo.

No high concept today. Just straight up information... maybe with an attitude - we hadn't finished writing the post before we wrote this lead.

Google wants to join Mozilla in the European Commission case against Microsoft regarding its bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. Earlier this month Mozilla's Mitchell Baker said that "Microsoft's business practices have fundamentally diminished (in fact, came very close to eliminating) competition, choice and innovation in how people access the Internet." In a post on Google's Public Policy Blog, the Vice President of product management, Sundar Pichai, details why they requested to join the proceedings as an interested third party.

[Look who's joining the party? - Scott]

It's not like we haven't almost begged Time Warner and others to give us a hand here. We've presented plans to help local residents budget themselves into full subscription plans...all we asked for is a reduced rate to start with. They didn't have the courtesy to write us a PUAR letter. That's fine...we'll find a way to go around them.

Location, privacy and web standards: as the first alpha and beta releases of Fennec, Mozilla's mobile browser, come out, Mozilla VP Jay Sullivan tells us the phone isn't a separate world any more.

Ubuntu 9.04 is getting closer and closer to the final release and we thought that it would be nice to give you guys a sneak peek at some of the upcoming features. One of these new features was introduced with tonight's updates and it is a brand new login screen a.k.a. GDM (GNOME Display Manager) theme, which is black and has a nice Ubuntu logo in the right bottom corner. The new login screen is entitled "Human" and it was created by Kenneth Wimer and Mat Tomaszewski for Canonical.

The day of the mold-your-own OS has come, and Linux is the clay. Linux provides free and open access to the source for the OS itself. Developers are free to tailor a custom Linux -- even down to the level of the kernel itself. You can trim away drivers, services, and other OS components unneeded by the task for which the custom distribution will be targeted.

As phishing messages go, it was never likely to be the most successful. A high ranking member of the British Government asking his friends for 3000 bucks because he had lost his wallet while abroad? I don’t think so.

This guide presents an introduction to Firewall Builder. Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder) is a GUI firewall configuration and management tool that supports iptables (netfilter), ipfilter, pf, ipfw, Cisco PIX (FWSM, ASA) and Cisco routers extended access lists. Both professional network administrators and hobbyists managing firewalls with policies more complex that is allowed by simple web based UI can simplify management tasks with the application. The program runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows and Mac OS X and can manage both local and remote firewalls.

There's no doubt that more and more scrutiny is being applied to patents around the world, with particularly hopeful moves in the US in the wake of the Bilski judgment. So it's a wise move on the FSF's part to turn up the pressure with their EndSoftwarePatents.org campaign.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer had some interesting things to say yesterday about which companies Microsoft sees as its competitors in the client operating system space. You'd think Apple was their number one competitor - and you'd be wrong. Microsoft sees two other competitors as their primary adversaries.

The UK government has published an updated policy on open source in government. The new policy takes a more aggressive position on government use of open source than the original policy, published in 2004. That document set out five policy points that allowed open source based solutions to be considered alongside proprietary solutions and tried to avoid lock in to proprietary software. The new policy document notes how the 2004 policy has already had effects, such as 50 per cent use of Apache web server within departmental web sites, and the NHS "Spine" migration to a Linux based infrastructure, which will cover 35 per cent of NHS organisations.

What to say to your children when they can no longer use windows on the PC A comment in an earlier post 10 cool things you can do with linux and not with windows stated that it would be a big challenge to find 10 advantages of linux for kids. Well lets give it a try, 1. What to say if your kids can't play there favorite windows games anymore.

SSL won't come to a rest: the newest attack isn't about encryption or errors in the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, it's about the weakest link in the chain -- the user.

Afraid to boldly go into the stark world of virtualization. Fear not, there is hope, if you have a plan and can follow these 3 easy steps.

Proxmox VE is a “bare metal” ISO Linux distribution that is a virtual machine platform. It is geared towards enterprise users and designed to be installed on enterprise grade hardware. The Proxmox VE distribution combines two virtual machine technologies; KVM and OpenVZ as well as a web interface to manage everything. Proxmox VE also integrates into its web interface a way to manage multiple computers as a cluster. For the rest of the article Proxmox VE shall be referred to as PVE. This review covers the latest stable release PVE 1.1.

This "What's new in PHP V5.3" series covers new and exciting features in PHP V5.3, which is scheduled to release soon. Part 1 looks at the changes made to the object-oriented programming and object handling in PHP V5.3, Part 2 looks at lambda functions and closures. In Part 3, we look at namespaces, which is one of the most anticipated and the most debated feature in this release of PHP. In Part 4, we take a close look at Phar, which is an archive format that can be used within PHP. In this final part of the series, learn about things to consider when upgrading from PHP V5.2. There are changes that break backward-compatibility and features that are deprecated in PHP V5.3 for removal in future versions. Some enhancements to existing features within PHP are also covered.

When budgets are tightening pretty much everywhere, selling businesses on new software systems is not an easy job. However, open source development and support firms are using the world's economic malaise to underscore their value propositions, hoping cash-strapped companies may give free software a closer look.

As The VAR Guy has reported, Cisco is offering a $100,000 bounty to Linux developers that write innovative AXP (Application Extension Platform) applications. But how can software developers actually win the money from Cisco? The networking giant offers some clues in this video. Take a look.

Apt-Cacher-NG - HTTP download proxy for software packages. Apt-Cacher-ng is a software package that keeps a cache, on the disk, of Debian/Ubuntu Packages and Release files.When an apt-get like client issues a request for a file, Apt-Cacher intercepts it and if the file is already cached it serves it to the client immediately, otherwise it fetches the file from the Internet, saves it on the cache, and then serves it to the client. This means that several Debian machines can be upgraded but each package need to be downloaded only once.