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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is likely to consider a plan this month to auction public airwaves with a mandate that the winning bidder set aside some for free Internet nationwide, a proposal staunchly opposed by the cell phone industry.

A UK company says its switch from Linux to Windows will save it £1 million (almost $A2.3 million). How does that work? According to a case study published by Microsoft, British tool and equipment hire specialist Speedy Hire has junked the Linux and OpenOffice based systems running in its depots in favour of Windows and Microsoft Office. Why? Because the company expects to save £1 million over five years. Saving £200,000 a year doesn't sound quite so impressive, but we'll let that pass.

The packaged version of Dropbox is available only for a handful of distros. You can compile Dropbox on your system using the provided source code package, but there is an easier way to make the software work with your particular distro.

Everyone knows and loves rsync, the command that lets you clone a directory tree to another disk or system with the ability to keep the clone fresh in an incremental and bandwidth-efficient manner. Sometimes, however, you want to sync in the reverse direction. With bidirectional filesystem syncing tools, there is no primary filesystem -- you just tell the tool to make sure both target directories, or clones, are identical. Here's a hands-on look at two tools designed to accomplish that task: DirSync Pro and Unison.

If you have multiple soundcards in your system and have to switch between them regularly you would definitely be under-whelmed by the less-than-stellar performance of ubuntu in switching between the sound cards.

Since forming in 2007, the vendor-neutral nonprofit consortium Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has been working toward raising the awareness of open source in enterprise through a combination of education and marketing. As the group prepares to enter the new year, the OSA announced today that a new leadership team is poised to take over. Anthony Gold, vice president and general manager of open source business at Unisys, will replace former OSA president Dominic Sartorio as president of the organization.

Microsoft veteran Keith Curtis proclaims in his new book that the future belongs to open source.

The new Automated Shopper, announced today by Google, is supposed to pick out who to give gifts to, how much to spend on each person, and what to get them.

Web scraping is the set of techniques used the to get some information, structured only for presentation purposes, from a website automatically instead of copying it manually. This article by Javier Collado will show how this could be done using python in the steps that require some development.

All good things must come to end. Over and over and over again ;) To most users of Linux and/or Unix (or pretty much any other OS with networking capabilities), the most basic concepts of the TCP and UDP protocols are, at least, somewhat familiar.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of the term “intellectual property”, and that I prefer the more technically correct term “intellectual monopolies”. Despite that, I strongly recommend a new book from someone who not only approves of the term “intellectual property”, but of its fundamental ideas. I do so, however, because this avowed fan also has serious reservations:

The Eclipse Foundation has published a roadmap putting a strong emphasis on Web 2.0, cloud computing, and rivalry with Windows — particularly Vista. New projects must be consistent with the roadmap, Eclipse said. "This does not mean that every new project must be explicitly envisaged by the roadmap," it said, but "It does mean that new projects cannot be inconsistent with the stated directions of Eclipse."

The market share of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer dropped under the 70% mark last month for the first time since Web metrics vendor Net Applications Inc. started keeping tabs on browsers, the company said today. IE slipped to a 69.8% share, down from October's 71.3% and off 7.6 percentage points in the past year. Rival browsers from Mozilla Corp., Apple Inc. and Google Inc., meanwhile, cashed in on IE's slide and posted gains for the month, according to Net Applications' data, which is culled from visitors to the thousands of Web sites the company monitors for clients. Mozilla's Firefox, which briefly popped above the 20% share bar during October, solidified that surge in November to end the month at 20.8%, an increase of 0.8 percentage points, the largest one-month increase since March 2007.

Mobile phone operating systems and a reheated web browser war: that's how we'll recall the year 2008 when it comes to software. From brand new to revamped browsers and mobile platforms and apps, 2008's been good to technophiles who like their data in the cloud and accessible wherever they are. Let's take a look back at this year in software, and some of the best new and improved applications, web services, and mobile platforms that were born in 2008. Looking back at the last 12 months, these are the apps that get a gold foil-wrapped chocolate coin from us this year.

Corporate austerity is reaching one of the most extravagant spenders of the boom years. Google Inc. has begun to tighten its belt. For much of its 10-year history, Google spent money at a pace that was the marvel of Silicon Valley. It hired by the thousands and dished out generous perks, including three free meals a day, free doctors, ski trips and laundry facilities, and subsidized personal trainers. It let engineers spend 20% of their time pursuing pet projects. The company's goal was to develop new products that would reduce its nearly total reliance on selling ads connected to Internet searches.

One of the most exciting aspects of the PlayStation 3 Latest News about PlayStation 3 is that it allows users to install an alternative operating system. You can't overwrite Sony's (NYSE: SNE) Latest News about Sony GameOS or access privileged resources, but you can run your own applications on the new Cell Broadband Engine processor (called the "CBE processor" or the "Cell" for short). The Cell is the mighty brain of the PlayStation 3, and this article explains how to access it by installing Linux Linux MPS Pro.

Database maker Oracle and host bus adapter maker Emulex today announced that they have contributed code to eliminate silent data corruption to the open source Linux operating system. The two also said this code has been accepted in the 2.6.27 kernel, which is the latest stable release. Back in April 2007, Oracle, Emulex, disk maker Seagate, and disk array maker LSI Logic announced that they would be extending a standard called T10 Data Integrity Field (DIF) so it would reach from software applications through storage arrays and their related file systems down to the disk drive. The data integrity effort, says Oracle, is about making sure that data does not become corrupted as it moves from the application servers to the database and then from the Linux operating system into the disk storage attached to it.

Nanchang, the capital of China's eastern Jiangxi province, has required Internet cafe operators to replace pirated server software with licensed versions. Cafes that don't will lose their license to operate, but some are grumbling about the cost of installing legitimate software. "What has the world come to, when no leaders will come forward to speak out on behalf of Internet owners like us," wrote one user on a Jiangxi discussion forum (in Chinese). "When you talk to officials from the Culture Department, they tell you, 'If you're willing to pay, pay; if not, you have the option not to pay.' Hearing words like that turns your heart cold. We really can't make a living," the user said.

Linux game programmer Ryan "Icculus" Gordon has released a native Linux client for Prey, a two-year-old first-person shooter (FPS) game from Human Head Studios. The client requires users to purchase a copy of the title for Windows PCs. Gordon first posted a "demo" of his Prey client for Linux back in October, inviting users to send feedback. Then, last week, he announced an initial release on his website, here. He appears to have subsequently released an updated installer said to fix "all known issues."

UNIX is being attacked by Linux from the top and bottom ends of the market. The signs are that it is losing the battle on both fronts. A couple of weeks back I wrote that Linux is becoming increasingly capable of doing the less-demanding tasks that UNIX has historically been asked to do, so there is less and less need for UNIX. That explains its falling share of the server market.