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"At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890. Where will you be at this momentous second?" - from Bell Labs. This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. If you want to find out what time it will be in your local time, try this Perl script courtesy of Matias Palomec: perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"n";' Now if there was any reason to fear Friday the 13th, I think this is it.

A little birthday post, loosely related to Linux and Unix ;)

Nothing could say plainer that Microsoft now fears for the desktop. You don't appoint someone whose job is to lead a "global desktop competitive strategy" that embraces PCs, netbooks and mobile internet devices after years of assuming the desktop was yours forever unless you have a clear and vivid idea that there is a new and real threat in this sector. And you don't have to be a mind-reader to guess that Microsoft is thinking of GNU/Linux here.

At first glance, SugarCRM has launched new programs to train customers on open source CRM (customer relationship management). But take a closer look and you’ll see the continued evolution of SugarCRM’s channel partner program and SaaS (software as a service) initiatives. Here’s the scoop.

Virtualization specialist VMware has released a free Linux client for its VMware View desktop solution.

Camp KDE, the KDE community event of North and South America, has finished. Similar to the European KDE meeting, Akademy, the first two days were based around a series of talks on various topics. After that we moved towards BOF sessions, local discussions and programming. We had a trip to the Appleton Estate, visited Rick's café and had a lot of fun. The following article details some of the things that kept us busy.

The love affair between netbooks and Ubuntu continues, this time with Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba launching new Ubuntu-driven portables. However, not all Ubuntu netbooks are created equally — especially when it comes to the graphical user interfaces. Here’s why.

Facebook is the latest large company to join the OpenID Foundation's board as a sustaining corporate member. In a blog post, Facebook's Mike Schroepfer (formerly of Mozilla), said, "We see great opportunities to increase our contributions across the open stack, and to continue our work with the open source community to evolve existing projects." The current sustaining corporate members are PayPal, Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo.

There are a few very basic things in C that are widely misunderstood by programmers of all caders. This is not because these things are very complex, but because books and teachers do not give them their due importance while teaching beginners and the misconceptions stick even years later.

Has Bill Gates finally gone mad, or is he just after some of the Steve Ballmer media attention? The former Microsoft main man has chucked a bucket full of live mosquitoes over the audience at a tech conference, apparently to make a point about malaria in third world countries. Shame he was never that inventive about marketing Windows huh?

Marketcetera calls its Automated Trading Platform the first open source platform of its kind for traders, hedge fund managers and broker and dealers. Though open source software is gaining wider acceptance in business, getting the Wall Street world to open up to open source presented a "fairly uphill battle," according to CEO Graham Miller.

We all love it when things run on time. There are certain things which need to happen when the clock strikes the hour - buses and trains need to arrive, a cron job on your server needs to spark some script or the other to life, your kids need to be at school.

Opera is set to shake up the way it handles JavaScript claiming that its new engine, Carakan, will be the fastest JavaScript engine available. Carakan (pronounced Tsharakan) is now 2.5 times faster than Futhark, the JavaScript engine in the Opera 10 browser. It could be even faster when ready, the company said. The company plans to release Carakan as soon as possible in an as-yet-undetermined version of the Opera browser.

"You get what you pay for" is a common FUDphrase used to discredit Linux and FOSS, because so much of it is available free of cost. Which scares the purveyors of overpriced crapware, who would rather walk barefoot through broken glass and burning dung than write software that customers actually feel happy paying for. It's hooey and we know it. But there is a related truism that is valid, which is "Whoever pays the piper calls the tune." You could shorten this to "money talks." And that is definitely true.

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, we take to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration.

Novell's open-source .Net clone is alive and well, and it's turning up in surprising, useful places. You may remember Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net platform spearheaded by Miguel de Icaza of Gnome fame. It's been a controversial project since its inception. Detractors among the open-source community have variously described it as a trap, a kludge, or simply a waste of effort.

This tutorial shows how you can mirror your web site from your main web server to a backup server (both running Fedora 10) that can take over if the main server fails. We use the tool rsync for this, and we make it run through a cron job that checks every x minutes if there is something to update on the mirror. Thus your backup server should usually be up to date if it has to take over.

German Wikipedia users now have several print options. They can print pages via the print version option on the Wikipedia page, or they can order a complied document through a new print-on-demand option. The print-on-demand feature is the result of work that started in 2007 between the Wikimedia Foundation and PediaPress. While the print-on-demand (POD) service is currently only available on the German language Wikipedia, English language Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project support is coming in spring 2009

SlashGear caught up with Xfce creator Olivier Fourdan, whose desktop environment has not only been selected by Intel for Moblin but can be found on many existing Linux netbooks, and talked Intel, Moblin, the future for netbooks and what challenges he sees for open-source newcomer Android.

The One Laptop Per Child project has quietly shut the door on small-scale OLPC deployments, preferring to focus on large-scale installations only. The move is a serious blow to many already-existing projects in countries such as South Africa which were built around the programme in order to get OLPCs into schools.