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Has Bill Gates finally gone mad, or is he just after some of the Steve Ballmer media attention? The former Microsoft main man has chucked a bucket full of live mosquitoes over the audience at a tech conference, apparently to make a point about malaria in third world countries. Shame he was never that inventive about marketing Windows huh?

Marketcetera calls its Automated Trading Platform the first open source platform of its kind for traders, hedge fund managers and broker and dealers. Though open source software is gaining wider acceptance in business, getting the Wall Street world to open up to open source presented a "fairly uphill battle," according to CEO Graham Miller.

We all love it when things run on time. There are certain things which need to happen when the clock strikes the hour - buses and trains need to arrive, a cron job on your server needs to spark some script or the other to life, your kids need to be at school.

Opera is set to shake up the way it handles JavaScript claiming that its new engine, Carakan, will be the fastest JavaScript engine available. Carakan (pronounced Tsharakan) is now 2.5 times faster than Futhark, the JavaScript engine in the Opera 10 browser. It could be even faster when ready, the company said. The company plans to release Carakan as soon as possible in an as-yet-undetermined version of the Opera browser.

"You get what you pay for" is a common FUDphrase used to discredit Linux and FOSS, because so much of it is available free of cost. Which scares the purveyors of overpriced crapware, who would rather walk barefoot through broken glass and burning dung than write software that customers actually feel happy paying for. It's hooey and we know it. But there is a related truism that is valid, which is "Whoever pays the piper calls the tune." You could shorten this to "money talks." And that is definitely true.

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, we take to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration.

Novell's open-source .Net clone is alive and well, and it's turning up in surprising, useful places. You may remember Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net platform spearheaded by Miguel de Icaza of Gnome fame. It's been a controversial project since its inception. Detractors among the open-source community have variously described it as a trap, a kludge, or simply a waste of effort.

This tutorial shows how you can mirror your web site from your main web server to a backup server (both running Fedora 10) that can take over if the main server fails. We use the tool rsync for this, and we make it run through a cron job that checks every x minutes if there is something to update on the mirror. Thus your backup server should usually be up to date if it has to take over.

German Wikipedia users now have several print options. They can print pages via the print version option on the Wikipedia page, or they can order a complied document through a new print-on-demand option. The print-on-demand feature is the result of work that started in 2007 between the Wikimedia Foundation and PediaPress. While the print-on-demand (POD) service is currently only available on the German language Wikipedia, English language Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project support is coming in spring 2009

SlashGear caught up with Xfce creator Olivier Fourdan, whose desktop environment has not only been selected by Intel for Moblin but can be found on many existing Linux netbooks, and talked Intel, Moblin, the future for netbooks and what challenges he sees for open-source newcomer Android.

The One Laptop Per Child project has quietly shut the door on small-scale OLPC deployments, preferring to focus on large-scale installations only. The move is a serious blow to many already-existing projects in countries such as South Africa which were built around the programme in order to get OLPCs into schools.

Ubuntu Jaunty Alpha 4 has been released, two months ahead of a final release in April. Jaunty, or Ubuntu 9.04, has a few small changes in this release including X.Org 1.6, better font settings and notification improvements.

CodeWeavers is having a Pre-Valentine's Day Sale to give their customers plenty of time in order to have the perfect gift. Nothing says "I Love You" like no more need for Microsoft Windows!

Is Ubuntu ready for prime time in the enterprise? Ubuntu users think so, according to a recent survey from Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, Canonical, and IT consultancy Red Monk. Unlike many surveys that land on the desks of IT journos each week, the one done by Canonical and Red Monk was based on a very large number of responses. People from 6,819 companies answered questions about the operating systems they have deployed in their organizations and how these OSes are used to support mission-critical and other workloads.

Some pundits think Canonical's new Ubuntu Server Edition user survey is designed to attract more customers to Canonical's server software. In reality, I think Canoncial had a far different — and far wiser — goal for the survey. Here it is.

In continuation to my last post, I wish to pick up from where I left off. I had expressed some disappointment with my initial experience just after I installed the Intreprid Ibex (8.10) server edition of Ubuntu...

No, this isn't a book that directly maps to FOSS or Linux or programming...exactly. On the other hand, the paths to programming in open and closed source usually move through this realm, so I think it is relevant. Picture yourself a would-be programmer who likes to code in your spare time, but you've got a problem. To really become any good at what you'd like to be your profession, there are math requirements, and you think math is almost as interesting as watching wind erode granite. Fortunately for you, O'Reilly and the Head Start series has come to your rescue. They created "Head Start Algebra".

RIAA-fan Biden's influence in the Obama administration may be larger than anticipated, at least when it comes to file sharing: His good pals with RIAA and BSA connections keep getting Department of Justice's seats.

If you are a gamer, we want YOU to give us your feedback with this short 10 minute survey. Open Source software has had a tremendous influence in nearly every area of computing - including the gaming space. The goal of this survey is to get a deeper understanding of the current general perception of Free and Open Source games

[I normally do nto post surveys but I checked this out and it seemed legitimate. - Scott]

SCO Group boss Jeff Hunsaker has done away with corporate speak in his latest seasonal note to partners and customers and replaced it with a terse, blunt message that reads: "Blah. Blah. Blah." Sadly the CEO and president of the bloodied and bruised software company was not immediately available for comment, but we think this link here speaks for itself and we have a screen dump here just in case it mysteriously disappears.