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Have any of them-- has one single vendor, whether it's Symantec or Trend or McAfee or F-Secure or anyone-- ever said "Quit throwing your money down a rathole-- stop using Windows, or at least don't put it on the Internet"? Wouldn't that little tidbit of honesty be refreshing? But no, they'll never do that. If the same conditions existed in, say, the small home appliances industry people would be getting electrocuted by their toasters and hair dryers every day, and the manufacturers would advise them to learn correct handling of live wires, and a thriving industry of insulated safety garments would prey on the survivors.

A poem about the impact of the process of software compilation over Freedom. Who can affirm that the meal you eat is in correlation with the recipe we said it was made of ? Provocative thought.

[This is the first time we have received an open source poem as a submission. - Scott]

Om Malik calls this "dave winer's best post of the year". I can't recall a better one, but ranking isn't what matters here. What matters is perspective and experience, and Dave has plenty of both. What he says is, "We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology."

Red Hat may not be spending much when it comes to the company holiday party this year, but it certainly is no Scrooge. Rather than splurge on a swanky party for its employees, the Linux distributor will give money and food to charity.

Becoming an accomplished sailor isn’t easy, but a group of European sailing enthusiasts have just made the sport a little more accessible for beginners. The ASV Roboat is a solar-powered, Linux-brained sailboat that can sail anywhere and navigate pre-set race courses with no human intervention.

Your online abode is so difficult to keep secured. It can get hacked, you may install something wrong, a wrong configuration can wreak havoc, the server hard disk might crash, natural calamities, and what not. Your best option to secure yourself against all this is summarized in just one word “BACKUP”.

While I've experimented with FreeBSD (and offshoots DesktopBSD and PC-BSD), NetBSD and OpenBSD (the latter of which I run the most; including right now), I never really paid much attention to DragonFlyBSD. A quick perusal of the DragonFlyBSD Web site offers a lot of information on things like its new HAMMER filesystem as well as the operating system's goal of bringing "native clustering support" into the kernel. It's all a bit over my desktop-using head.

In addition to the information we provide on open source projects, there are many good sites that allow you to further investigate open source projects before you make the decision to download and install. Sure, you're likely to know SourceForge and Eclipse, but where else can you look? Here are six good choices.

Slackware 12.2 RC1 announced.

Virtualized computing environments can take advantage of built-in virtualization support in modern dual-core processors, but when it comes to 3-D acceleration in virtual machines, almost all fall flat on their faces. VMGL is a little-known application written as part of Google's Summer of Code 2006 program that lets OpenGL apps running inside a virtual machine take advantage of the graphics hardware acceleration on the host. It has limitations, but if you want 3-D in VMs, VMGL is your best bet.

Has the time come at last to live a Microsoft-free life? That thought crossed my mind yesterday morning as I read an announcement from IBM that (with Canonical Inc.) it was offering a new Linux-based virtual desktop suite that, at user prices as low as $59, would compete directly with the iconic Microsoft Office.

In this article we will change the look of our Moodle website. Specifically, we will use our resources within Moodle to make our topics more visually appealing. We would include an animated character. We will take a good look at different tips and tricks to make our courses more interesting for students.

Seven months after the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 (a.k.a. Project Indiana) its successor was finally released earlier this week. OpenSolaris 2008.11 was released on Tuesday with many updated packages and new features. To see how this new work has affected the performance of Sun's OpenSolaris operating system, we have benchmarked both releases through some different tests.

With much fanfare Sun announced its new JavaFX platform yesterday, but curiously in a video introducing the platform, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, made the browser the enemy of content owners, and set up JavaFX as the platform to give developers and content owners direct access to users. I'm not sure I agree with his basic premise that the browser is a bad thing.

What do you do when you are 20, passionate about open source and want nothing better during the long summer holidays than to be involved in activities surrounding FOSS? Why, you get involved in helping to organise a national Linux conference - which is what Tasmanian web developer Joshua Hesketh has done. He's not sure about it, but he may well be the youngest of the volunteers on the core organising team.

This short article shows some useful netcat commands. netcat is known as the TCP/IP swiss army knife. From the netcat man page: netcat is a simple unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

The feud between Minix inventor and operating system czar Andrew W. Tanenbaum and Linux Torvalds is legendary in the OS world. Before Linux there was Minix. Torvalds used to be a Minix user who set up his first Linux version in 1991 on Professor Tanenbaum’s operating system. Mr. Tanenbaum has now agreed to write a guest editorial for Linux Magazine. His opinion has not changed over the years: Linux (and Windows) are “unreliable.”

IBM launches a Linux-based, security-rich desktop solution that has been developed along with Virtual Bridges and Canonical. The concept is simple enough: save money by ‘amplifying’ Lotus collaboration software and Ubuntu to a larger user base, and do it using the power of virtualisation.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, December 5, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 34. Today's show is brought to you by the letter O. Stories include a Songbird that's just turned 1, an extreme makeover for OpenOffice.org, more on the faster, slicker version of said OpenOffice.org, IBM reinvents and rediscovers thin clients, as a newcomer to the world of Opera hits a high note.

PC/OS aims to be an easy-to-use Linux distribution right out of the box. Being Ubuntu-based, it has a head start on being user-friendly, but PC/OS goes above and beyond Ubuntu's measures to ensure ease of use by having common third-party non-GPL software included in the install. The PC/OS distribution comes in several different flavors: OpenServer, OpenWorkstation, and OpenDesktop, all of which weigh in at around 700MB and fit on one CD. Included with the server edition are Webmin and other GUI utilities to make various server operations easier. The workstation edition includes multimedia production tools, software development tools, and office tools. I tested the desktop edition, which focuses on everyday use..