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Can I begin with a few disclaimers? I believe that people who create things deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. Which means that I think that stealing entertainment and software is wrong. Actually, come to think of it, if there was a form of copy protection that was never a hassle for paying customers but which effectively prevented piracy, I might enthusiastically support it. (Go ahead, mock me if you must–I’ll wait.) With that out the way, I also believe this: Copy protection (also known in recent years as Digital Rights Management) just stinks. At its best, it creates minor but real inconveniences for the people who pay for stuff; at its worst, it badly screws up their experiences with the products they buy. Let’s just say it–the world would be better off without it.

The 451 Group is reporting that venture capital funding for open source vendors was down 12.2% last quarter, compared to Q3 2007. They say that while this is a larger drop than seen in the overall market, it's not quite as dire as it may seem at first glance.

Ah, cryptographic security: a boon to those who understand the algorithms, but all too often a lost cause to those who don't. The secure HTTPS protocol for Web surfing is widely accepted, but has one fatal flaw: users ignore certificate error warnings. A Firefox extension called Perspectives aims to close that security hole. Firefox pops up a security warning whenever it encounters an SSL certificate that doesn't match the domain name of the site on which it is found, or is self-signed. Both situations are commonplace; gmail.com, for example, uses a certificate issued for mail.google.com, and many non-commercial Web sites use self-signed certificates because they don't want to pay yearly fees to a certificate authority such as VeriSign.

I have now completed the first draft of the patches to add MPX support to Compiz-Fusion. These are only the first draft patches, so there are still tons of bugs to be fixed. After I fix those bugs, I’ll begin work on the Input Redirection patches for the rest of Compiz-Fusion. Below is a video of all the work done so far with IR/MPX.

Envizions has announced an "open source hybrid Linux gaming system" aimed at game developers. The EVO Smart Console is based on a 2.9GHz, 64-bit Athlon, includes its own Linux distro called Mirrors Evolution, and offers game-play, Internet access, VoIP, and HD video playback, Envizions says. Marketed with the 1950's-era tag line of the "System of Tomorrow," the EVO Smart Console will sell for as little as $250 with rebates. It will offer "cloud" based computing applications, Amiga-based games, and an Akimbo-based VOD (video on demand) service with over 10,000 titles, says Alabama-based Envisions Computer Entertainment Corp.

Have you had the need to find a port on a switch that a box is plugged into?? This script will help you do it in a automated fashion.

Wikipedia - When that other online encyclopedia just won't do ;) Previous entries, in backward chronological order, you may be interested in include our posts on accessing the Farmer's Almanac, accessing the International Dictionary, checking out the world's weather, spewing out famous quotations on pretty much any subject, doing encyclopedia lookups, accessing the online Thesaurus, translating between different languages and, of course, using the online dictionary.

Now, to those of you who operate under the assumption that Corporate Linux has any viable interest in the Linux Desktop, I am about to cause you great amounts of disappointment and angst. You in particular need to pay attention to what is said from this point and absorb it to the best of your ability. Your life may need to take a new direction if yours hinges on the Linux Corporate working with the Linux Community At Large. Again...This is what you said to me.

LXer Feature: 19-Oct-2008

Some of the big news this week included OpenOffice.org 3.0 coming out, Dell finally starts advertising their Ubuntu offerings and Cisco and Microsoft step up their courting of Linux developers. Also, Installing DSL on your hard drive, Linux gets a seat on all of Qantas's new Airbus A380's, Wikipedia moves over to Ubuntu servers, Russia's open source revolution and Carla Schroder shows us how to do professional level photography work on Linux without going to jail.

Windows is far from being the only game in town.The Apple Mac's secure and stable OS X operating system has a fiercely loyal band of devotees, and the user-friendliness of Linux distros has persuaded many people to take advantage of a seemingly endless supply of free software. Until now, the problem has been sharing resources between the operating systems, and both Linux and OS X are traditionally seen as isolated from Windows for this reason. However, this is no longer the case. Read on to find out how to configure Linux, OS X and Windows to freely share each other's resources, and in some cases, even log into each other.

On October 22, government and private industry experts will debate the issues and opportunities presented by collaborative software development models at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) Portland, Oregon. The distinguished panelists have direct experience with successful public/private consortiums based on the open source software model in which developers as well as business and technical users collaborate to create new applications while sharing both the costs and the benefits.

Linux is the easy Operating System choice for Cloud Computing environments and the future of Cloud Computing depends on it.

Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux was released on Oct 15, 2008. You can install it by either using their DEB package or by downloading the .tar.gz for Linux compressed file from here. After the download is finished issue these commands to install it for Iceweasel and Konqueror:

Developers would have no access to source code that they depend upon. Not only would they be subjected to risk from unnamed software patents Microsoft holds and might actually use shall a particular project become a threat to its crown jewels; But moreover, all developers would have is some belated and incomplete documentation which is vital.

Jui Tan, a partner for BlueRun Ventures who is based in Beijing, happened to be in Silicon Valley for a meeting a couple of weeks ago when Google finally unveiled the first Android mobile phone. The international mobile market is a main focus for Tan and BlueRun. He shrugged and said:"Coming to Silicon Valley [that] week was the first time I heard about it."

Speaking at a forum here Friday, Whitehurst said the proprietary, "top-down, planned" software development model characteristic of closed source companies is coming to an end--one which is demonstrated by the number of bugs in Vista, he said. Whitehurst claimed that there are "half the number of bugs in Linux per thousand lines" compared to the Microsoft operating system, because of the open source collaborative model.

I must say that I think Opera is doing a great job supporting its browser on Linux. Even though it's closed-source, it's still one of the most powerful web browsers out there, and each release comes with packages for every major distribution out there.

This is our first ScreenShot review of Elive Linux! I just want to say congratulation to the Elive Linux team for making such a sweet desktop OS. I have used Enlightenment in the past but not as much as I have used Gnome. From trying out Enlightenment just a few seconds ago it was amazingly fast and quite east to navigate, with just clicking once on the desktop the Enlightenment menu appears.

This guide shows how you can install the new OpenOffice 3.0.0 office suite on your Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. Your current OpenOffice installation will not be removed unless you uninstall it with Synaptic or on the command line, so you can run both versions in parallel if you like.

Dillo, the famous little browser used in small, lightweight distributions like Damn Small Linux (DSL), reached version 2.0 on October 14, 2008. The last stable Dillo release was 0.8.6, which was around for over two years (April 26, 2006), and this new version brings tons of new improvements, changes and features, the biggest of them being tabbed browsing. Yes, Dillo allows now browsing using tabs, which is a must-have functionality for any desktop browser, no matter how small it is. The changelog is huge. This release is also the first one written in FLTK, as the application was ported from GTK.