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Can it be that Linux is the savior of the IT world in this recession? hat's more stable than a rock, faster than a spinning disk, more powerful than a Windows system twice its size, and able to leap platforms like no other operating system? Surprise! It's Linux.

Ever wondered just how many people use the Internet? The answer, according to the latest figures, would seem to be 1 billion. We breakdown that billion to find out where they are all coming from. I can recall getting far too excited last year when the World of Warcraft population whizzed past the 11 million mark.

Microsoft cuts 5,000 jobs. That's the big news of the week. Not just because the layoffs will cut one in 20 of Microsoft's 91,000 employees. Not only because it signals just how hard Microsoft has been hurt by the failure of Vista and by shifts in the way big customers license and use software. Not even because of the grim sign it represents for the rest of the IT industry ...................... No, it's big because it means Microsoft has begun to hit bottom.

Linux is great. It's a free, open-source operating system (OS) based on work done by Linus Torvalds in the early '90s. Again, it's free, powerful and easy to ... Oh wait, it's a pain to use.

Ubuntu has released the second "maintenance update" to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (long-term support). The 8.04.2 LTS release features some 200 software updates, as well as new i386 and amd64 installation CDs aimed at reducing the amount of code that must be downloaded following a fresh install.

Sun Microsystems axed 1,300 employees on Thursday, the first wave in a series of planned redundancies intended to cut head count by almost a fifth. The company said in a statement it had cut workers across all levels, including employees in vice president and director positions. It did not say who'd been cut, but The Reg has learned that the departed include individuals working on and around some of the company's highly touted open-source projects.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on a Fedora 10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

If you've been following President Obama's search for a CTO for the country, you may have seen BusinessWeek's report that the choice he will make has narrowed down to two candidates, both born in India: Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, and Vivek Kundra, CTO in the government of Washington, D.C. Now, ex-Sun CEO Scott McNealy has revealed that he has been asked to prepare a paper for the Obama administration on how open source technologies are the key to a more secure, more efficient government.

The program for the first two days at the Camp KDE meeting in Jamaica provided the attendants with a series of talks. In time, these will be available in video from but for now we have these short summaries of the talks. Read on for details.

Waldo's in there somewhere. Can you find him in the pi? I thought I'd finish off this miserable week (lots of work; little sleep) with a puzzle for everyone, like we do from time to time, if you ever want to check out older posts on seemingly random numbers and the M I U puzzle. There are even more that you can find by just searching the index of the blog.

In the first article in this series, I was forced to resort to Javascript code to match the central column heights that were too disparate to allow a single minimum height setting to cover all instances. Nonetheless, I used a simplification where on my site I knew the center column would outgrow the side columns. Hence, I could use simpler code. Now the footer columns in the menu template are not quite as well structured, however, the differences in heights are minimal in comparison to the range in the central columns. Therefore, setting the minimum heights in the cascading style sheet was the simplest most effective method to reach the goal for this site.

The old plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition. The new plan: Keep using Linux for the rest of the year, giving periodic updates on my experiences!

The Apache HTTP open source web server (I usually just call it Apache, but Apache is more than just web servers these days..) gained over a million new sites for the month of January 09, according to the latest stats from Netcraft.

OpenSource World -- the successor to LinuxWorld -- is soliciting presentations for its Mobile Open Source sub-conference. The conference will take place Aug. 10-13, 2009 in San Francisco. The Mobile Open Source segment of OpenSource World will be organized as two tracks: Mobile Platforms, and Mobile Applications.

We've all seen them: on comes a commercial with a young, casually dressed,if somewhat unkempt, young man, and an older, portly man in a very middle-management-esque suit. The younger man announces "I'm a Mac" while the older responds "And I'm a PC," and the two go on to lament some critical design failure facing the PC to which the Mac is impervious. As Linux users, we know the basic premise of the commercial — that "I'm a PC" means "I run Windows" — is a fallacy, and what is really needed is a third cast member declaring "I'm Linux." If such a thought has ever crossed your mind, then fire up your camera, because the time to act is now.

A good offsite backup strategy is not sending boxes of unencrypted tapes home with your party-hearty college intern. Carla Schroder reviews the Spideroak online backup service to see if they offer something better, more secure, and more convenient.

Linus Torvalds is a regular visitor to Australia in January. He comes out for some sunshine and to attend the annual linux.conf.au organised by Linux Australia. He took some time out to speak to Rodney Gedda about a host of topics including point releases, filesystems and what it is like switching to GNOME. He also puts Windows 7 in perspective.

Ten applications to install after a clean Ubuntu or Kubuntu 8.10 installation: Amarok, SMPlayer, KTorrent, XChat, BasKet, Wesnoth, K3b, Emacs, Yakuake, TVTime.

A few days ago, Kristin wrote about Marketcetera's first full production release of its open source automated trading platform. Aimed at hedge fund managers, traders, brokers and dealers, the system is standardized, open, scalable and modular. Ars Technica also points out that over 20 financial institutions have already adopted Marketcetera. The question is: Why doesn't the financial community at large wake up to this kind of opportunity to reduce costs and customize trading through an open source offering?

Getting started with Linux can be an intimidating task, particularly for people who have never tried any operating system besides Windows. In truth, however, very little about Linux is actually difficult to use. It's simply a different OS, with its own approach to doing things. Once you learn your way around a Linux desktop, you're likely to find that it's no more challenging to work with than Windows or Mac OS.