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How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there's some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? "Let's Go Crazy" indeed!

There is a big Linux event in NYC today and tomorrow - but I won't be there. The Linux Foundation's End User Collaboration Summit has some big names presenting including Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, Red Hat EVP and an impressive list of financial industry executives from UBS, NYSE, Credit Suisse, CME and AIG. But I won't be there to hear any of them in person. The Linux Foundation has decided to keep the End User Collaboration event as a closed event without press (at least that's what they told me)

OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is being released today, is not the great leap forward in look and feel that version 2.0 represented, but it justifies its label as a major release with dozens of changes, some major, some minor, but in all more than can be easily summarized.

It's one small step for Dell and Consumer Linux. And one giant leap forward for Canonical's Ubuntu distribution. Specifically, Dell has launched advertising for the Mini 9 Netbook running Ubuntu. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Christmas is coming early for webcam users. Support for hundreds of popular webcams, available from Michel Xhaard's GSPCA project, is merged for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.27 kernel. The amount of tweaking required from the user, the distribution, or both, has been cut, and it's likely that a random webcam will now just work out of the box.

Interesting facts, questions and puzzles for every day of the year! This week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script is another chapter in our book "Never ever leaving the CLI ever" ;) Previous entries you may be interested in include our posts on 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.

Sun Microsystems Inc. today boosted the processing capabilities of its most popular Unix server line with the aim of attracting bigger IT workloads, including databases, ERP applications and large server-consolidation projects. The new system, called the Sparc Enterprise T5440, is based on Sun's eight-core UltraSparc T2 Plus processor — a version of the company's T2 chip that was designed to enable two of the devices to share cache and other system resources. The four-socket T5440 expands on the two-socket T5240, which was introduced last spring along with the T2 Plus.

Poverty is a global problem, which is not limited to third world developing countries. Even mature developed nations like United States has ~18% poverty rate. There are many reasons and causes of poverty, which includes but not limited to, natural disasters, war, disease, politics, religion, and over-population and so on and so forth. Some of these causes are beyond our control while others are beyond our means. There is no single factor that can totally eliminate poverty, even the almighty latest Linux Kernel release; but many ideas and anti-poverty initiative can come together to reduce the causes of poverty.

The latest and as they say one of the most ground-breaking versions of Mandriva Linux has been released as scheduled. Mandriva Linux 2009 is jam-packed with exciting new features and innovations that will try to cater everyone’s desktop needs. I had fun with Mandriva 2008, so I was really looking forward to this latest release.

LXer Feature: 12-Oct-2008

In this week's Roundup Linux turns 17, Google releases their Linux repositories, a new Linux Broadcom driver arrives and Sean Michael Kerner asks if .NET on Linux is finally ready or not. Also, an introduction to free music production software, Debian leader Steve McIntyre says Lenny might be late and in what I would consider to be an extremely bad idea, the ISO offers to take over maintenance of the ODF standard from Oasis, stating that they are not dealing with defect reports fast enough.

Warrington School, in Otago, will not get paid funds allocated for Microsoft licences after moving to open source software, simply because the school was never billed, says the Ministry of Education. The school is deploying the GNU/Linux operating system, aiming to have free software across the board by 2010, and the complete switch to Linux has been approved by the MoE, says the school’s principal, Nathan Parker.

Do you remember using old-school IRC chat rooms? Well Michail Blestas does, and he tells us how that has become Chat on the XO in this second OLPC interview by Robert Scoble. He also gives us a good idea of how many XO laptops are connected to the Internet - about half.

The extremely simple guide to installing Ubuntu using Wubi. Many people are put off using Ubuntu because of installation issues. Not that installation is difficult, of course, but for the true non-technical user, it’s equivalent to scaling Mount Everest. This guide is for them. It’s a step-by-step guide to installing Ubuntu for complete and utter beginners. If you have a relative, or friend, who would like to try Ubuntu, but who is frankly scared of the prospect, then send them a link to this posting! It assumes zero prior knowledge.

The KDE Community today launches the new KDE Forum. The new forum uses the bulletin board software MyBB offering users, developers and people interested in KDE a place to help each other, discuss KDE-related topics and exchange ideas. The KDE Forum complements KDE's UserBase, the home for KDE users as a valuable support resource.

Xubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Screenshots Tour. Xubuntu is a complete GNU/Linux based operating system with an Ubuntu base. It is lighter on system requirements and tends to be more efficient than Ubuntu with GNOME or KDE, since it uses the Xfce Desktop environment, which makes it ideal for old or low-end machines, thin-client networks, or for those who would like to get more performance out of their hardware.

The self-signed certificate is a certificate that you can create yourself that will provide SSL encryption but without the verification of your website from an outside source. The outside verification does cost money. In other words, you can get the protection you need, encryption by doing it yourself. One thing to note, if you are taking people's credit card information then you will need to get a signed certificate as a warning appears when you are using self-signed certificates.

Reader Christian Nielsen wrote from Sweden to tell us he and his girlfriend have named their baby Linux, after the operating system, and attached this darling photo. Nielsen says he and his girlfriend Veronica considered a few names during the pregnancy, "but when he finally arrived none of them seemed right. We both thought that he looked like a little Linux as soon as we saw him and decided to go for that name." You might wonder what the grandparents think of their choice, but Nielsen says it hasn't been a problem. "The reaction from family and friends has been positive -- they all like it.

Rishi Patel had an epiphany when he saw"Toy Story" more than a decade ago. The Smyrna, Ga., resident has long been interested in merging science and art -- he graduated with a physics degree from the University of Georgia and enjoyed making clay models as a child -- and the Pixar movie drove the point home.

In this howto we will build a load-balanced and high-availability web cluster on 2 real servers with Xen, hearbeat and ldirectord. The cluster will do http, mail, DNS, MySQL database and will be completely monitored. This is currently used on a production server with a couple of websites. The goal of this tutorial is to achieve load balancing & high availability with as few real servers as possible and of course, with open-source software. More servers means more hardware & hosting cost.

A few annoyances, and I really hope this will be fun. I wrote it last night. Some things which don't work as they are supposed to, or some things which may be annoying - Linux forever, I love it, but sometimes it's not so funny fun as it should be.