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I admit it, before hearing his name in connection with OLPC's G1G1 campaign and looking it up on Wikipedia I had no idea who that Tom Brady fellow was. But I now understand he's some kind of soccer American football player or something. ;-)

I have just finished a new book about free software. Excerpt: Given the technology that's already available, we should have cars that drive us around, in absolute safety, while we lounge in the back and sip champagne. All we need is a video camera on the roof, plugged into a PC, right? We have all the necessary hardware, and have had it for years, but don't yet have robot-driven cars because we don't have the software. This book explains how we can build better software and all get our own high-tech chauffeur.

I must say Linux Mint seems to always impress me with every new release. In this release Linux Mint has brought to us a new software manager called MintInstall, which allows you to browse the Mint Software portal offline, see screenshots that are available per package, and much more. Linux Mint has also brought you MintNanny, which allows you to control what domains are blocked.

The FreeBSD jail mechanism is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization that allows administrators to partition a FreeBSD-based computer system into several independent mini-systems called jails. FreeBSD jails offer security, ease of delegation and os level virtualization. This article explains how to upgrade FreeBSD jails using 'make world'.

Failure to virt-install F10 PV DomU and repeated issue with CentOS 5.2 in stub domain after same port via http://gitco.de ( upgrading only hypervisor to keep virt-install alive at Dom0 ) brought me to idea just go through traditional “hg” cloning mercurial repository at http://bits.xensource.com and build local Xen with 2.6.18.8-xen kernel

One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of “toy” operating system – fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on. Sadly, that narrative has been rather undermined by the independent Top500 supercomputing sites ranking. Five years ago, the GNU/Linux family ran 36.80% of the top 500 supercomputers; worse, Windows ran on precisely one supercomputer.

For Linux desktop users interested in a mid-range discrete graphics card there are more choices than ever before with NVIDIA continuing to release new stable Linux drivers as they have done for many years while AMD this year has been making evolutionary leaps compared to their earlier state. AMD is now providing same-day support with all new products, CrossFire on Linux, OverDrive, and many other recently introduced features. NVIDIA and AMD are nearly at a feature parity and even in the past two months they both released new video APIs for Linux (PureVideo / VDPAU and X-Video Bitstream Acceleration, respectively) and they are now battling it out on Linux over performance. We recently looked at AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 4830 mid-range graphics card, but in this article we are comparing it to the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT, courtesy of Micro-Star International.

Probably biggest edUbuntu deployment in an educational system with around 100,000 workstations suffers from lack of relevant e-content, so the students--beneficiaries of Computer for Every Child Project--wander around the internet for stuff to read in class.

What gives you a firewall, load-balancing, QoS, 3G support, RADIUS, wireless access point, HTTP proxy, VPN, VLAN, PPPoE, captive portal, and a host of other useful security, authentication, and network applications, all in a hundred megabytes? Zeroshell, the built-from-scratch Linux network appliance.

In a report on enterprise open source usage released this week, Gartner research director Laurie Wurster stated in rather strong language that companies could face a big intellectual property issue because they are using the software without understanding the IP implications of the licensing language. But is she exaggerating the danger and is there less complexity with open source licenses than with proprietary ones?

C Cod is a front end to your C, C++, or Objective-C compiler that lets you treat C more like a scripting language. C Cod comes with C Server Pages, which provides support for CGI so you can write Web applications in C or C++ and have them automatically compiled on demand.

If you thought the RIAA had cornered the market on heavy-handed, misguided lawsuits, think again. TorrentFreak reports that the Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) plan on pursuing a lawsuit against three US-based companies that develop P2P applications. Vuze, Limewire, and Shareaza are the applications targeted in the lawsuit. There is a fourth company named that's not a developer, or a P2P site -- it's a repository.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to set up ProFTPd with TLS on an Ubuntu 8.10 server.

It might be time to invest in a better umbrella, as over the last few days it seems as though pigs might be taking flight. It's not so much that Adobe is releasing a 64-bit Linux alpha version of Flash, it's that Adobe is releasing the Flash alpha for Linux before it releases versions for any other operating system.

The Dell IdeaStorm site was an inspired move by the company, providing a way for the market to tell a major supplier what to do, rather than the reverse, which has been the default for the whole Industrial Age. When the site first went up, it sustained what we might call an Insistence on Service Attack by Linux and open-source geeks. Since then, however, the pressure hasn't let up. At the time of this writing (on September 10, 2008 for the print magazine), the same kind of demand is there.

When I wrote the first addendum it was with a sense of disappointment, because I had to inform the readers that my assumptions were in error. That is, it was not possible to activate the update notifier for an unprivileged users [1.]. However, I had promised to pursue the issue on Canonical's Launchpad site by reporting my problems. Surprisingly, I am here now to report the success of that approach.

Alex Brown, in ODF – OASIS and JTC 1 Get It Together, refers to those like me, who have been vocal in our disapproval of ISO’s handling of office-document standards, as the “tinfoil brigade” with a “crazed oppositional narrative”. He even provides an illustration of the use of a shiny silver fashion statement. Is this fair? It should be noted that Alex is not alone. Back in July, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, one of the most balanced and thorough thinkers I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, noted with displeasure that some factions in the OOXML argument took positions that were not only passionately emotional but veered into the ad hominem.

In an exclusive interview, Stallman discusses his views on free versus proprietary and open source software, social networking sites and privacy issues.

Linux and Active Directory? It doesn't have to be a bad thing but tread carefully into that dark realm.

Yes, this sounds every bit as ridiculous to me as it probably does you. The Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France, or SPPF -- France's analogue to the RIAA -- is preparing to file suit not only against the makers of various P2P sharing apps, but SourceForge.net, which provides code hosting for many such projects. All together, now, in your best Stupefied Bill Maher Voice: What!?