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The white paper definition describes crowdsourcing as a "neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, gives a much better definition and describes crowdsourcing as "the application of Open Source principles applied to fields outside of software." I've been bringing the concept up in more conversations because I've come to believe that it's a very powerful, useful, and cost efficient model that entrepreneurs should know about. However, no matter who I talk to, whether it be a successful businessman or founder of a new tech company, I've had to repeatedly explain what it is. If it isn't already, I predict that crowdsourcing will be one of the new, hot buzzwords in 2009. (We certainly need more, the term "Web 2.0" is beginning to make me puke.)

Linux Mint version 6 Felicia came out on December 15th and I have been running it on my Dell Inspiron 530 Q6600 system for the past week. I ran Hardinfo on the system if you want to see the specifications on the box. It is a quad core with 6 GB of RAM, so I was a little disappointed that the 64 bit version of Linux Mint was not released the same day the 32 bit version came out. Even though they have a 64 bit version of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa available I wanted to try out the latest version. Mint 6 is based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and uses GNOME for it’s desktop environment. For those who prefer a different desktop, community editions of Mint 6 featuring KDE, XFCE and Fluxbox should be out soon.

Journalists are often the bearers of bad news; it simply comes with the territory. And with the economy in the tank, there's no shortage of ugly stories to cover. So I'm always pleased when there's a legitimate bit of good news to write about. And counterintuitively enough, three of my columns this year contained good news about employment for techies, despite the downturn.

You can never be too safe these days. Viruses, spyware, rootkits, remote exploits, you just never know what security issue is going to be your downfall. That’s why it is important as a Linux administrator to have an understanding of some of the best Linux security tools available to you. In this article, you will learn about Top Ten Linux security tools, and resources on how to use them to your advantage.

To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld's "Future of Open Source" roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that's not the real story.

The VAR Guy covers the open source industry closely, but his views on a range of items -- including Google Android and Ubuntu Server Edition -- missed the mark badly in 2008. Time for him to apologize for these five pathetic open source predictions that didn't come true in 2008.

Entrepreneur Dave Rosenberg has a Christmas wish for you. Dave wants to make everyone pay for open source in 2009. Money is the fuel that keeps things going. Entrepreneurs are in business to make money. It is reasonable for entrepreneurs to dream of getting more money out of people. But Dave is missing an essential point. In an open source world, business models must be voluntary.

Shell programming is heavily dependent on string processing. The term string is used generically to refer to any sequence of characters; typical examples of strings might be a line of input or a single argument to a command. Users enter responses to prompts, file names are generated, and commands produce output. Recurring throughout this is the need to determine whether a given string conforms to a given pattern; this process is called pattern matching. The shell has a fair amount of built-in pattern matching functionality.

Today, December 26, is the first day of LinuXmas, the Festival of Distros. This three day, three night uber fest of booting new Linux distributions is a new tradition for geeky boys and girls around the world. Here's how it works

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold. I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.

Subsequent to the introduction of the Graphics Execution Manager earlier this year, Intel had introduced a new acceleration architecture. UXA, or the UMA Acceleration Architecture, was developed as a temporary solution based upon the EXA architecture but with support for the kernel-driven GEM memory management. How though does the UXA performance compare to that of EXA? In this article we have ran some benchmarking looking at the Intel graphics performance.

Here you will find some great apps and tools that will generally improve your experience on your preferred Linux desktop, though it is geared to the Ubuntu user (that’s my current distro) any of the below is available for all distros

By the time you read this, Christmas will be over. Thanks to the staggered posting system we have here, this joke is post-dated. Despite that, however, we here would like to have wished you and yours a Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays.

If you run a lot of terminal tabs or scripts that all need to make OpenSSH connections to the same server, you can speed them all up with multiplexing: making the first one act as the master and letting the others share its TCP connection to the server. If you don't already have a config file in the .ssh directory in your home directory, create it with permissions 600: readable and writeable only by you.

If you haven't found a gift for the Linux Community yet, why not head over to a forum and see how many people you can help out?

I haven't tried ZenWalk in a very long time, but I'm thinking about it. When I first started using Linux in early 2007, ZenWalk was one of the systems I played around with. I had a nice install at one point, and that particular machine would boot and install the old version of ZenWalk at the time but not the new version. As a last-ditch effort/experiment, I tried to upgrade the old system, but since ZenWalk had stopped supporting my old system but kept everything in the same repository, the upgrade bricked the install. Morale of that story: Always put /home on its own partition so you can do a reinstall. Be that as it may, ZenWalk is a super-fast system with excellent hardware detection and less geeky pain than in Slackware, upon which Zenwalk is based.

Subsequent to the introduction of the Graphics Execution Manager earlier this year, Intel had introduced a new acceleration architecture. UXA, or the UMA Acceleration Architecture, was developed as a temporary solution based upon the EXA architecture but with support for the kernel-driven GEM memory management. How though does the UXA performance compare to that of EXA? In this article we have ran some benchmarking looking at the Intel graphics performance.

I realize it's a touchy subject, but some of us prefer unmodified Firefox -- including the standard Firefox icon -- to Debian's Iceweasel alternative. Here's a 3-step way to substitute Firefox for Iceweasel on a fresh Lenny install.

The creation and management of user-space processes in Linux® have many principles in common with UNIX® but also include several unique optimizations specific to Linux. Here, review the life cycle of Linux processes and explore the kernel internals for user process creation, memory management, scheduling, and death.

Wizzard Software, a provider of speech technology applications, has announced the availability of version 4.2 of AT&T Natural Voices Text-to-Speech for Linux. The software includes a new streamlined architecture that is said to make it easier for application and web developers to deploy high-performance speech systems.