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From ZDNet's GreenTech Pastures blog comes news of Linux-based computers from SiCortex that offer between 72 and 5,832 processors per box, with each CPU drawing less than a watt of power. In other words, it's a green supercomputer. Prices go from $25,000 to $1 million, and according to the ZDNet post, the company has moved 54 boxes to entities that include big research universities and the Department of Defense.

Last year was the one of the most active years for legal developments in the history of free and open source (“FOSS”). http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=27 This year, 2008, has seen a continuation of important legal developments for FOSS. My list of the top ten FOSS legal developments in 2008 follows:

The perception by the majority of search users that they gain high quality results is the core value in Google's crown jewel, i.e. its search engine. Should Google persist in seeking the lowest cost solution to its being gamed, via software algorithms, while at the same time scrounging more user data gratis, it risks alienating a significant fraction of its user base. Its financial model depends upon its search engine retaining its high perceived value. Google's current counter attacks are insufficient, ineffective and sometimes misdirected. Therefore, I think Google is putting its financial model in jeopardy.

The end of the year tends to be a time of reflection and retrospective for many people. So I too thought about writing up my thoughts on the most important events in 2008. There's plenty to talk about with OLPC's (largely just perceived) move to Windows XP, Walter Bender leaving OLPC and subsequently founding Sugar Labs, olpcnews announcing the "post-1CC era", the announcement of the XO-2 design, the release of Sugar 8.2, the return of G1G1 at the end of the year, etc.

With the number of netbooks on the market continuing to increase each month and more of these mobile devices switching to solid-state drives for their reliability, extended battery life, and faster performance, SSDs are becoming quite common and finding themselves meeting many Linux hosts. How though does the real-world performance differ between hard disk drives and solid-state drives on Linux? We have run several tests atop Ubuntu on a Samsung netbook with a HDD and SSD. In addition, we have also looked at the encryption performance using both types of drives.

It's 2009 and I'm sure the powers that be at Microsoft are hoping it's going to be a good one without any tears, but even as the old year closed, the news kept getting worse for the software giant.

Last November, Openbravo, an open-source software (OSS) company in business for less than three years, celebrated the one-millionth combined download of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point-of-sale applications. While the number of actual deployments is far less, given that developers often download the software as part of a tire-kicking exercise, the high interest in an open-source application as sophisticated as ERP reflects the increasing traction that OSS is gaining in the corporate world.

Analysis – Last month, Microsoft’s market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. Initial data sets provided by Net Applications suggest that the Internet Explorer will drop once again significantly in December to below 69% and Mozilla will climb above 21%. IE8 is just around the corner, but current market share data suggests that Microsoft has no effective tool to stop the bleeding at this time - and Mozilla can pick up two out of every three users Microsoft surrenders.

Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and... freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them (Not a Linux story, but it certainly falls in the "neener neener" category)

CES rollouts will run the gamut from MSI's Wind "hybrid" netbook -- with a mix of SSD and HDD drives in a single machine -- to a high-end notebook with a secondary display. And Windows 7 could be closer than anyone thinks

This year at Phoronix we published 333 full-length original articles/reviews and wrote 691 news pieces -- with nearly all of them being about Linux or computer hardware in some form. Our total number of articles written at Phoronix since its inception in 2004 is over 1,300 articles and then about 2,000 news postings in the past two years. Below are our most popular articles this year. Mac OS X 10.5 vs...

If you're going to commit to something big, do it now when no one expects you to follow through ;)

In tight economic times when I was growing up, my family generally had “homemade” Christmases, where all the gifts were handicrafts they had made. It takes a lot of time, but it does save money, and in all honesty, those were some of the best I can remember. This year, I’m following much the same pattern, though my skills are different (I couldn’t knit a sock to save my life, and while I can sew, I’m not exactly good at it): this year I’m giving my kids (refurbished) computers. To find out what Terry Hancock did to refurbish old computers for his children read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

On the one hand, who hasn't heard of Facebook? On the other hand, if you don't use it, how do you know what it is? For the Facebook faithful, maybe this book seems unnecessary, but for the rest of us, perhaps it is. Certainly for the parents of all the kids who use Facebook, this book should be required reading.

In my last post I had made some comments about the Microsoft Windows not being capable of enterprise high performance computing. In the comments (upon request) I had posted some details on the SCSI subsystem of the Operating System, talking of the scatter gather lists when sequential SCSI commands are being coalesced just prior to being sent to the SCSI-based media. I wanted to continue on that topic and focus specifically on the NTFS file system and why it too is not intended for enterprise class usage.

In this article, we cover setting up an Active Directory server for use, connecting to it, searching for information, adding, modifying entries, and removing entries. We also examine how to deal with LDAP errors, and get finer control of the results from a search operation. This is followed up by a class definition that encompasses all this functionality into a simple package.

LinuxPlanet Classics: Getting the fingerprint reader working hasn't advanced much since this article was first run, so here we go again, with some updated references. Please note that fingerprint readers, like all biometric devices, are easy to foil and do not provide strong security; but they are convenient.

KWordQuiz, KVocTrain, and other KDE-based programs use the KVTML file format for their data files. The format is just a fairly simple XML format but, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything available to convert a text file to this format. So, once again, AWK to the rescue.

Rather than announcing a road-map for 2009 or sharing all of the accomplishments this year that were made within the Compiz development community, Kristian Lyngstol has shared some grave concerns for this project that brought "desktop bling" to Linux. Kristian has outlined a few areas that that he believes need to be addressed otherwise it could mean the death of Compiz. Compiz in fact is just losing developers at this point and with the different forks taking place there is much stagnation occurring within Compiz.

Over the past few years, scheduled releases of open source projects have become the norm. Projects tend to release new versions according to a regular schedule as opposed to releasing when the developers consider all the work proposed, has been completed. Releasing "When it's done" is based upon the simple proposition that if you only release when you think the software is complete and usable, then that release will be of higher quality. How a project makes that decision of completeness would be up to the project; an active benevolent dictator's project could be simply decreed complete, while a larger community project may use voting or other feedback, to create an aggregate decision. Whichever way though, there will always be the possibility of issues missed, or downgraded without the community noticing and therefore holding up the release while those issues are fixed.