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In a meeting with financial analysts last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laid out who he thinks are the biggest threats today to Windows on the client side. Surprisingly, Apple wasn't number one. It wasn't number two or three either. Referring to a pie chart at the meeting that gauges threats to Windows, Ballmer said that Windows itself, both licensed and pirated, were the top two threats to Microsoft in the client OS space, followed by Linux, then Apple. Ballmer quipped: "Windows license, number one market share. Number two market share goes to Windows pirated, or unlicensed. That's a competitor that's tough to beat; they've got a good price and a heck of a product, but we're working on it."

Including Dia in this series is just a bit of a stretch, because it is not a conventional “vector graphic editor”. Instead, Dia operates at a somewhat higher level of abstraction. But since that abstraction is very appropriate for dataflow diagrams (such as the one I picked as a comparison project), I think it’s important to note what it can do. Dia is very useful, but it’s sometimes frustrating, because the idea of it suggests expectations well beyond what it can actually do. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

If you've been waiting for someone to lower the cash required for a physical to virtual conversion, your wait is over.

Yesterday afternoon I was speaking with a local administrator of one of the companies that I work for and in the past we had discussed topics such as GNU/Linux among other technical things but certain “concerns” always seem to come back up, not only with him but also other Microsoft using technical individuals that assume open source is bad, against Microsoft and anything good, and/or insecure (”a result of the source being available to everyone”). Where have these false ideas sprouted from?

A security update for cURL, the file transfer utility, and its associated libcurl library has been released to fix a vulnerability which could allow an attacker to examine files on a system, or possibly even write files. The cause of the problem is the cURL (Client for URL) automatic redirection feature.

There are some devs out there that don't like PHP, then there are those that do.

Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver.

Want to know more about cloud and grid computing? Learn how you can use Infrastructure as a Service to get a full computer infrastructure using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). See the similarities, differences, and issues to consider in grid and cloud computing. Explore some of the security issues and choices for Web development in the cloud, and see how you can be environmentally friendly using cloud computing.

Indiana University has released open source software, called Variations, that allows you to create a digital music library system. College and university libraries may digitize audio and musical scores to provide to their users in an interactive, online environment, including streaming audio and scanned score images.

Jeremy White the CEO of CodeWeavers announced the release of CrossOver Games 7.2.0 for Mac and Linux. Below is the message Jeremy sent to their announce mailing list.

With many retail outlets in South Africa now selling notebook and netbook computers with Linux pre-installed, I can’t really say that I am at all excited by the notion and find myself feeling very apprehensive about the way Linux is being introduced to the local market. My reason for feeling this way stems from the belief that most (if not all) people making the decision to buy these notebook or netbook computers do it based on the price tag, and not because the machine runs Fedora-based Linpus Linux. The salesperson selling this product has no comprehension of the Linux operating system or any of the programs available, and therefore is incapable of influencing the buyer to do it for any other reason.

According to Wikipedia, Software Architecture is "the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software components, the externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships between them". Probably, if you need to go to Wikipedia to read the complete definition and background of Software Architecture, you aren't ready to buy this book, but let's see.

The most exciting bit of kit I've played with in ages isn't a cutting edge graphics card, or a multimedia tablet. It's a netbook - a Samsung NC-10 with a bog standard Atom chip, a bit of RAM and an ancient operating system. It isn't just a great bit of kit, though. It's the canary in the coalmine, chirping that the tech industry has completely lost touch with reality - and that it's caught us in its Reality Distortion Field.

Have you ever come across a situation where you wanted to convert a video from one format to another in your Linux machine and you have absolutely no idea how to do it? What about playing DVD on Ubuntu or rip your favorite VCD to mpeg file? Below, I have come up with a great list of software that you can use to handle your video/audio files in Linux. All the software listed are compatible with any of the Linux distros out there. The installation instructions and screenshots are based on Ubuntu, so if you are on a different distro, you will have to change the command accordingly.

Recently I had to input quite a few OID's into Zenoss. This meant I had to create a Data Source for each OID I wanted to monitor as well as one Data Point. Now I knew this was going to be a hassle!!! So I decided to write a custom Python script that uses pysnmp to essentially do a snmpwalk (nextCmd) on a Branch of OID's. This means that I can create one Data Source and Mutiple Data Points. Which drops the amount of time that I have to input into the Zenoss GUI.

A new industry alliance, Genivi, has been launched and aims to bring open source to "In-Vehicle Infotainment". Genivi, a non-profit organisation, has been founded by car makers BMW, General Motors and Peugeot Citroën, component makers Delphi, Magneti Marelli and Visteon, CPU maker Intel and embedded systems developer Wind River. It plans to work on a Linux based, open source reference platform that can be incorporated into vehicles.

In Torture-Testing Phoenix HyperSpace, the Linux-Based Instant-On OS, we learned a bit about Phoenix HyperSpace, the Linux-based "instant on" operating system. We learned that Phoenix is positioning it as a fast, safe, secure, energy-efficient environment for mobile workers that should meet most of their computing needs, making a trip into Windows an occasional foray rather than a daily necessity. I've been spending some quality time with it on a Lenovo S10 IdeaPad, and today you get to hear all about my adventures with it.

Looking for a Web-based content management system that uses Perl instead of PHP? Want to server dynamic and static content with PostrgeSQL, not MySQL? What started out as a hobby project by Hendrik Van Belleghem, based in Bazel, Belgium, has grown into Spine – a Perl Web content system for Apache on Unix systems. With so many LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) content systems available, Spine offers a refreshing alternative with the tried and tested Perl language and is database independent. Open Source Identity interviews Van Belleghem about Spine, a lesser-known alternative to the popular Web CMSs.

A constant pattern in the corporate environment is the gathering of resources, but with the free exchange of information inherent in community-based projects, the pattern of choice is the dispersal of resources. This presents certain design challenges, which manifest themselves in the Unix-style “small sharp tools” specialization approach, “bottom-up design”, and most importantly in easy-to-obtain, shared, free standards for data interchange between programs. When every train car is to be made by a separate builder, it is essential that the rail gauge is constant and known. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

As companies grow, merge and scale up, the systems they use for various enterprise tasks become tangled and mixed. They may also age very poorly. Replacing them with newer, more efficient, better-supported systems is no small task, especially when they're so tightly intertwined. Not doing so, however, can make for a difficult-to-manage, insecure system.