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IBM last week filed a patent application for an offshore outsourcing methodology that is intended to help companies minimize the financial risks associated with sending work overseas. The patent application describes a computer-driven approach for putting values on both the quantitative and qualitative attributes of a "global resource sourcing strategy." For instance, the methodology takes into account the language skills and morale of offshore workers, as well as a list of the hard numbers involved in setting up an offshore operation, including labor rates and currency valuations. In short, IBM is attempting to reduce offshoring considerations to a mathematic model — or, in the words of the application, "a robust and reusable sourcing template" for identifying and analyzing "global resource pools."

I personally hope that the Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido computer worm — that surfaced in October 2008 and targets the Microsoft Windows operating system, that activates on April 1st — shows Windows users just how insecure the Windows operating system is, and how slow Microsoft is to react to it, and “patch” it. ... businesses stop production because of this worm ... become spam websites, displaying advertisements and sending out thousands of spam and denial of service emails. ... GNU/Linux might actually become mainstream, maybe even over night.

Last week marked the release of the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta and this week there is the planned release of the Fedora 11 Beta. Both distributions are similar in the respect they will be upgrading several common packages like GNOME 2.26, but in Fedora 11 are more upstream (and experimental) bits like kernel mode-setting, the EXT4 file-system by default, and various other features. Being the Linux benchmarking fanatics that we are, we set out to run a few performance tests comparing the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to the latest Rawhide packages that will make up today's Fedora 11 Beta release.

When you save a document in your word processor, your work is encoded in a particular file format. You often have a choice of formats that you can use, with names like DOC, DOCX, RTF, WPD or ODT. Your choice of format will influence whether others can easily read your document today, whether you yourself will be able to read your document ten years from now, and whether you will be able to migrate painlessly to another word processor or operating system if and when you choose to do so.

The Linux Foundation welcomed its newest member today, the European-based free and open source standards consulting firm, credativ. This new partnership is a particularly exciting one, thanks to credativ's presence in the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, and its focus on creating and implementing standards. Naturally, credativ's business -- providing consulting and support services to businesses using free and open source software -- means it will take an active role in the Linux Standard Base workgroup. Because credativ is one of Europe's largest employers of Debian developers, the company also plans to participate in the Desktop Linux workgroup.

Egerstad and I had concluded at the time that someone had likely infected computers belonging to embassy workers and human rights groups and was using Tor to anonymously transmit data that was being stolen from the computers. He'd inadvertently scooped up the stolen data as it was transmitting from the infected computers to another location. Threat Level contacted a number of embassy and rights groups in China to notify them at the time that their computers were being spied on, but none of the groups responded. It seems clear now that Egerstad had tapped into data that was being stolen by GhostNet.

This communication provides additional information on the Fedora infrastructure intrusion first reported on August 14, 2008. In part this communication reiterates information provided in previous announcements.

[Includes a fairly detailed timeline of the incident.--gus3]

JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey is leaving Red Hat. Labourey had been at JBoss for the past eight years, nearly three of which were under Red Hat's ownership. Labourey's departure comes over two years after JBoss founder Marc Fleury left Red Hat in 2007. Times are good for Red Hat if its most recent financial results are a good indicator. But it seems as though Labourey is just ready to move on and take life a little slower too.

This is the first time I ever used Puppy Linux and the interface is really impressive. The install was not as simple as I expected it to be. ( But then again, the Ubuntu based Distro's have spoiled me, what can i say??? :) ). Also this is the first time I used JWM ( Java Window manager ). What really grasped me about Puppy Linux was how fast the applications launched. Also Puppy Linux reminded me of Slax on how fast the applications loaded, which is a good thing.

A quick bash script to help measure process cpu usage over time and, possibly, do something about it ;)

This how-to shows you how to use knockd, to open and close a normally closed firewall, so you can go in the server from any IP, without having to let the firewall open for that IP a-priori.

Five hilarious Openoffice.org pranks to play on your coworkers or family including ILoviePonies.com, Rickroll'd, AutoIncorrect, scary splash screen, and the disappearing menu bar.

McObject®, developer of the eXtremeDB™ embedded database product family, and LynuxWorks, a world leader in the embedded software market, today announced a technology alliance in which McObject has ported its eXtremeDB Kernel Mode (KM) embedded database to LynuxWorks’ BlueCat Embedded Linux 5.6 operating system.

Open vs Closed Source, Linux vs Windows, these decisions in the Enterprise boil down to a choice between placing an investment in People or placing an investment in a Vendor such as Microsoft.

Is Ubuntu 9.04 a sleeper or a cure for insomnia?

Cloud-services platform provider OpSource and content-distribution kingpin Akamai today are announcing some details about strategic partnership that’s now a few months old. I wonder if the decision to go public was influenced by Gartner’s March 26 report predicting the cloud services market will top $56 billion this year and hit $150 billion by 2013. If Akamai and OpSource are trying to ride this wave of optimism, they certainly can’t be ridiculed for the decision.

Thanks to Mike Dailey a very interesting discussion has been sparked on Linux and open source in the enterprise. For anybody wanting to follow the entire discussion here's how it goes.

One might well think that, at this point, there has been sufficient discussion of the design decisions built into the ext4 "delayed allocation" feature and the user-space implications of those decisions. And perhaps that is true, but there should be room for a summary of the relevant issues. The key question has little to do with the details of filesystem design, and a lot to do with the kind of API that the Linux kernel should present to its user-space processes.

LXer Feature: 30-Mar-2009

It looks like Google's Chrome browser came out on the winning end of browser hacking contest, so I figured why not back it up with 11 Free Ways to Beef Up Your Web Browser. Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy at a LUG meeting, RMS doesn't want us to fall into "The Javascript Trap" and by the way, your distro sucks.;-)

EU officials warned social networking and search engine sites such as Facebook and Google on Monday to better protect consumer rights amid growing concern that users are being lured to hand over too much personal data.