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My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his aptly titled Cyber Cynic column on Computer World is always good for a reality check for all things technology, especially Microsoft. This week Vaughan-Nichols takes a look under the hood of the highly-vaunted Windows 7, and he finds nothing more than warmed over Vista stew, the same OS we didn't like much the first time Microsoft served it.

Over time, people tend to accumulate a large number of messages in various email accounts, most of which they never bother with again. The problem is particularly acute for administrator accounts that receive routine notifications of events that are viewed, if at all, no more than once. The archivemail tool lets you easily archive these old messages and thereby free up some disk space and improve your mail client's performance.

Many people think you can tell a lot about a person's subconscious thought by measuring various bodily functions including heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension (think polygraph machines). Whether you believe that biofeedback technology is cutting edge, interesting to ponder, or just a lot of hooey, there are a few biofeedback apps for Linux users who want to explore the concept.

The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the first release candidate of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Lenny.

Advanced Micro Devices is releasing a computer chip that could give it a much-needed boost against bigger rival Intel. On Nov. 13, AMD unveiled a processor, code-named Shanghai, for use in servers, the powerful computers that run corporate networks. Unlike other recent chips from AMD, Shanghai is being released on time, and it will be more versatile than a comparable chip due to be released from Intel in the coming days. AMD says Shanghai will perform 35% better than its previous generation of server chips while decreasing power requirements by 35%, a combination that should help customers reduce operational costs while boosting efficiency.

Canonical has announced that because of increased demand from hardware manufacturers, it will begin supporting ARMv7 processors (used in many smaller and system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices) with an optimized, commercially supported, full version of the Ubuntu desktop.

The advent of outsourcing has greatly impacted the face of IT. As you know, India has taken the leading role in IT outsourcing and China is quickly catching up. In 2007, China’s software industry achieved revenue of RMB 583.43 billion and 21.5% YoY (year on year) growth; approximately 5 times more than half a decade ago, and CAGR was 39.4%. As a result of this explosive growth in IT outsourcing, Chinese software engineers working in this sector are increasingly exposed to technical areas they may be unfamiliar with. One of these areas is LAMP, especially when the P stands for “Perl” and not “PHP.” This presents a unique set of challenges to the Chinese software engineer and to the Perl community. This can also be a problem for companies who wish to outsource their LAMP projects but are coming up against a wall when it comes to finding the skilled resources they need.

This screenshot gallery takes you through the installation process and basic desktop functions of the latest beta version of openSUSE, the community version of Novell's SUSE Linux distribution.

The good, the bad and the confusing of determining cpu properties on various nix systems. Today, in keeping with yesterday's theme of covering a fairly specific topic and trolling it around the seamy underbelly of the world of Unix and Linux, we're going to take a look at how to grab CPU information from your Unix or Linux box. I try to cover the major distros here, but (of course) my resources are limited and (except for the HP-UX example below) I've personally run and verified all of the results of the commands put out in this post today.

Amazon will have XO laptops for sale on Monday, November 17th. The XO laptops at Amazon are sold in the same manner as they were initially at the OLPC site, with a $400 donation securing a laptop for the customer, and a laptop for a child in a developing country. This donation (or at least the portion used to purchase the laptop for the child) is tax deductible.

Over the past few releases, Ubuntu has over promised and under delivered. Have you noticed that that radical new look promised in Ubuntu 8.04 still has not come? This un-delivered promise and others have made people lose confidence in what Ubuntu can do.

Google is tight-lipped about the Linux version of its Chrome browser, but the company's programmers have proved a bit more forthcoming with a brief announcement that they have a crude version of Chrome working on Linux. "Dude, Gmail works in the test shell on Linux!" said programmer Dan Kegel in a note to the Chromium developers mailing list on Tuesday. It is pretty crude, though: the "enter" key does not work, for example.

At the end of my profile of AlgoScore I stated that my one wished-for addition to that program would be support for OpenSound Control (OSC). Well, my wish has been granted, the latest AlgoScore supports OSC, and I'm a happy guy. This article introduces OSC and explains why it makes me a more pleasant fellow.

At the bottom of this article about Microsoft Small Business Server 2008, The VAR Guy openly wonders if Linux advocates will ever effectively brand their software for small business servers.

As our classic Networking 101 series continues, Charlie Schluting guides us through the Border Gateway Protocol, which is the routing protocol of the Internet. BGP itself isnt too complex, but the concepts behind autonomous-system-based routing can be strange to newcomers. In this article we are given a short overview of how BGP works, along with the problems it solves and causes.

Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn't already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult--to say the least. The makers of these 10 tech products--the iPod, BlackBerry, Firefox, Twitter, Windows 7, ThinkPad, Android, Wikipedia, Mac OS X and the "Big Cats," and Red Hat Linux--all have displayed certain amounts marketing savvy, common sense and fun-loving spirit in settling on their products' names. Here are the intriguing, surprising and sometimes predictable accounts of their creation.

The Splashtop instant-on Linux environment is included in the new Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook, marking the product's first appearance in that form factor. That news should come as no surprise, since netbooks' ultra-portability is a natural match for Splashtop's instant-on. The IdeaPad S10e is an Atom-powered, 10.1-inch, education-oriented netbook scheduled to hit shelves this month in a variety of storage and operating system combinations, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

If you are one of the increasing number of Internet users that are paranoid about Big Brother watching your activity online, now you can become anonymous with Incognito. Join me as I review this live CD that you can use to protect your identity online. It has all of the necessary tools set up and ready to go.

Kdenlive is a non-linear video editing suite for KDE. A new version 0.7, released today, is the first release for KDE 4.

Digi International has introduced a Linux-based server packaged within a somewhat elongated RJ-45 connector. The ME 9210 comes with an embedded OS based on a Linux 2.6.26 kernel.