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There has been much discussion of the Vital Wave Consulting total cost of ownership model showing a $2,700 5 Year TCO This report models the cost for a secondary school to install a computer laboratory to support a course in computer literacy (often called ICT). This course consists of classroom lectures based on textbooks with hands-on computer access during scheduled laboratory periods ('students are not permitted in the computer lab without a teacher present').

The head of virtualisation kingpin VMware believes that the current climate - both economic and physical - will force enterprises to put the desktops of employees on USB sticks. While this might not spell good news for the purveyors of fat clients like Dell, HP and Acer, VMware CEO Paul Maritz is adamant that it's a key way to cut costs and save the climate.

The Linux Foundation has released the first public beta of its solution to enable developers to more easily build applications that run on different Linux distributions. The foundation, on Oct. 14, announced the availability of the first beta of Linux Standard Base (LSB) 4.0, which introduces a new application checker, a new shell script checker, and a new multi-version software development kit (SDK) that will enable developers to build applications to earlier LSB specifications without changing SDKs, said Brian Proffitt, community manager for the Linux Foundation.

The good news: Wikipedia seems to be standardizing its servers on Ubuntu. The bad news: Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, doesn't seem to be profiting from the Wikipedia deployment. Details at Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

It is hard to imagine something more expensive, condescending, inaccurate, frustrating and enraging - nor something better calculated to restrict knowledge and broadcast ignorance. It's almost as if the parties involved actively want to prevent people learning. It certainly feels that way. British Library, are you listening?

The third full OpenOffice suite is out in the wild and attracting plenty of attention. OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released Monday -- and already, demand has been high enough to overwhelm the download servers and cause them to crash. The software suite, designed as an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, offers everything from word processing and spreadsheet creation to presentation and databasing tools.

Ubuntu 8.04 is available in more than 150 translations. How does that compare to Windows? The numbers may surprise you. Details from Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

flimp is a generic graphical frontend to the many excellent command line image manipulation tools available. It allows you to create pipelines of commands that read from standard input and write to standard output. One can view and compare the result of each stage of the pipeline. flimp leaves the input image file untouched; the pipeline is saved in a text file.

The final version of OpenOffice 3 is out today, and if you're looking to save yourself plenty of money, download it instead of buying Microsoft Office --- you could save yourself hundreds of dollars, and not lose out on many features. I put the Windows version through its paces, and am about to download the Linux version as well. The suite has six full-blown applications: the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentations program, Base database program, Math equation editor, and Draw graphics program.

Sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation, Hadoop is a software framework able to take advantage of huge clusters of computers to produce fast results for queries and more by breaking them into parts. Yahoo makes extensive use of Haddop for its search features. Now, as Valleywag is reporting, a veteran of Bear Stearns and Facebook is one of the folks behind Cloudera, a business focusing on supporting Hadoop deployments.

John Dvorak at PC Magazine, a grand old curmudgeon who never pulls any punches created a wish list for Windows 7. It got me thinking about my own wish list...

James M Whitehurst, CEO and president, Red Hat, on his recent visit to India talks to CyberMedia News on many red-hot issues around open source technology and its business colours. Like, how to make money out of something free and open? Like why OOXML won't make a dent enough? Like why India is on a vantage point with OS? Well, his hat fields them all. Enjoy.

Cisco is asking developers to instead think "inside the box" to create applications that will run on the Linux based Cisco AXP module. It's tossing in $100,000 in prize money just to keep it interesting. Linux Application availability alone isn't the only thing Cisco is after. It's making sure the developer ecosystem has a revenue model that will keep Cisco and developers in the black.

Seems like IT consultants and integrators are flocking to Digium Asterisk. In fact, nearly 400 solutions providers are now recommending the open source IP PBX to customers. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

A common charge against free and open source software (FOSS) is that it lacks the ability to innovate. To that charge, the lifelong research of Eric von Hippel, professor and head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, offers a thorough and scholarly refutation. Having studied the sources of innovation for more than three decades, von Hippel has found in FOSS both a confirmation and an elaboration of his ideas.

Linux-based operating systems are built through an open-development model, which can afford organizations an early view of—and an opportunity to influence—the technologies and implementations that will eventually work their way into these companies' infrastructures. What's more, these early looks extend beyond points on a presentation slide deck to comprise runable code that's gathered into fast-moving, community-supported Linux distributions that administrators can begin testing in advance of the long-lived, enterprise-oriented releases to come.

Free Software Magazine recently took a closer look at the "Linux legacy." The "legacy" -- Linux's reputation precedes it, even in the realm of the "average user." This reputation is, of course, that Linux is (pick one of your choice): hard, incompatible with most hardware, command line only -- the list goes on.

I have to admit, I'm very intrigued by INX, a Ubuntu-based Linux live CD designed for desktop use without the X Window system. I first read about it at Linux Haxor, and after seeing the distro's screenshots and information page, and given my own wrangling with life at the command line, I'm ready to try it right now. Right now, INX is a live-CD only distro and isn't meant to be installed, but what it might be able to do is give you some good ideas on how to flesh out your current Linux or BSD system to make life in the console that much better. That's my theory, anyway.

Today, we are announcing that in partnership with Adobe we are building a platform-neutral download client. Using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), we intend to make BBC iPlayer download functionality available on Mac, Linux and Windows for the first time later this year. Whatever platform you use, you'll now be able to download TV programmes from the BBC to watch later - on the train, in the garden, or wherever you like... Given our obligations to rights-holders and the BBC Trust, these programmes are protected with DRM, but in a way that shouldn't affect your enjoyment of our programmes, whatever platform you've chosen.

Theodore Ts'o has renamed the Ext4 filesystem, for which he has been responsible for source and documentation, from extdev to ext4. Linus Torvalds has also incorporated the change into his personal source tree for the upcoming Kernel 2.6.28.