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Earlier today we shared that NVIDIA is bringing PureVideo features to Linux through a major update in their binary display driver. The NVIDIA 180.06 driver adds VDPAU support on Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD operating systems, with VDPAU being a set of APIs designed by NVIDIA to accelerate video decoding, provide post-processing capabilities, timstamp-based presentation of video frames, and compositing of sub-picture elements. We have now had the time to benchmark the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix and have seen the benefits of PureVideo features finally arriving on alternative platforms.

I spend a fair bit of time being baffled by humanity. You'd think that for as many years as I've been creaking around on this planet I'd have become accustomed to the depths to which some people so readily sink. Indeed, even dive into enthusiastically. But a lot of things still have shaking my head in wonderment. The biggest one is the tech industry's enthusiastic glee for Peeping Tom-ery. It's like a perversion, an insatiable, pathological need to snoop and pry where, according to ordinary courtesy and respect, they have no business going.

Beleaguered server and software maker Sun Microsystems said Friday that it will lay off as many as 6,000 employees, or 18 percent of its worldwide workforce, over the next year. Sun's announcement appears to confirm fears that the economic turmoil that has overtaken the financial services and manufacturing sector has now spread to the technology sector.

Angela Byron is one of the lead developers and a community manager for the open source content management system Drupal, which OStatic is based on (along with sites such as The Onion and Fast Company). Few people have more influence on and knowledge of Drupal than she does, including working directly with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal. We caught up with Angie and she weighed in on the future for Drupal, and what the open source movement needs.

“They order, said I, this matter better in France.” So wrote Laurence Sterne in his 1768 book A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Alas, things have changed much since then, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. In the light of recent events, now he would we have to say: they order this matter worse in France. Even more unfortunately, France's bad habits are spreading, and could have serious consequences for free software. These started going downhill with the “three strikes and you're out” idea:

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, November 14, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. In today's news, the economy just keeps on getting worse, proprietary software is really bad, making copyright into copywrong, Ubuntu gets ARMed, and the Sun goes down on a lot of jobs.

Isn't anything safe from hackers? Now they've apparently found a way to hack into systems through a media stream, threatening users with denial of service attacks that can bring down servers and desktops alike. The vulnerability was reported yesterday by VoIPshield Laboratories, a security tools maker in Canada.

Is it reasonable to expect users to understand the differences between WEP and WAP, IMAP and SMTP, how to figure out the ins and outs of encryption? Kenneth van Wyk believes that the security community simply forgot about the users, and as a result created more problems than solutions.

Slowly but surely, open source media center applications have evolved into rich applications that anyone can get a lot of enjoyment out of. There are now many players in this space, and the applications show a lot of range. In this post, you'll find introductions to three of the most interesting projects out there, including a media center that can transform and energize a home theater PC, an open source way to get TiVo-like DVR functions, and an innovative mashup of social networking features and slick media center capabilities. Any of these can make for a great weekend project.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to cut as many as 6,000 jobs as the company tries to cope with plunging sales of server computers to financial firms, market-share losses to bigger competitors and a spiraling stock price. The reduction, which will eliminate as much as 18 percent of the staff, will shave $700 million to $800 million from annual expenses, Sun said today in an e-mailed statement. The moves will cost as much as $600 million in the next 12 months.

Most of the new breed of open source hardware centers on specific products. Bug Labs is taking a different approach. Instead of developing particular devices, Bug Labs' goal is to provide a Lego-like collection of open source hardware and software that customers can use to build their own devices. According to CEO Peter Semmelhack, the result should be not only a higher degree of innovation, but also a forerunner of the hardware business of the future.

In the last few weeks and months, there have been some very interesting articles and discussions on iTWire about Linux, Windows and Mac OS and their relative merits. Here's my take on why I think that Linux will ultimately succeed, though don't be afraid the timeline is still pretty long!

Over the course of the past few months we have been saying that the NVIDIA 180 Linux driver to be released in the fourth quarter of 2008 would hold in store a few interesting features. Well, today that closed-source driver has been released in beta form. This driver adds a new VDPAU API, which provides PureVideo-like features on Linux, adds in CUDA 2.1 support, new workstation performance optimizations, X Render improvements, and other improvements.

m0n0wall is a popular, specialized implementation of FreeBSD + ipfilter designed for routers and firewalls. This Tip introduces us to its friendly natural-language ipfilter rules syntax, which has all the power and flexibility of iptables, but is much easier to understand.

Hi All, Here's my third tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to enable logging via syslog or syslog-ng for your directory server"..

Ever wonder how people are creating all these cool Linux Appliances that you hear about? Now, you can know too--and create your own.

Mantis is that rare bug-tracking program for small projects that is neither too bloated nor too featureless. It's an excellent choice for developers who need a bug tracker that the average computer user can use. Its clean interface and numerous features make bug tracking fast and easy.

An Estonian embedded design house has developed a data-collection barcode scanner and PDA with an OLED display. Billed as the first OLED-equipped mobile terminal device, Artec's Triskan TS8 Professional Mobile Terminal runs embedded Linux on an ARM processor, and includes Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS, with optional WiFi.

Before attempting to convert Friend to Linux, there are some major tweaks you need to do. If you already done these tweaks and living by them then good for you, if not then doing this is a MUST: First of all you need to have a Friend first to convert before attempting to convert. And in order to have a Friend you need to have a Life right? Let me try to make it simpler for you my fellow geek: Now you have a package named whatever-3.42.tar.gz, what will you do? Untar it, then configure, make, make install right? But you will need a compiler first right? Now think of Life as your compiler, all of us have Life, but we need to recompile Life first using the -lessgeek and -moreoutgoing flags in order to create Life suitable for Friend.

A title like that is bound to get your attention, now that I have it, I would like to say something to all of the Linux enthusiasts out there. Now I ask you, how many times have you talked to a Windows user about Linux this year? Was there any result from your enthusiastic pitch: i.e. did anyone install Linux? Often we don't know. The problem is, without giving someone a tangible item to remember your conversation and or to take action with, we may have wasted time and energy.