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Security is a wide ranging topic which operates on many levels and covers many technologies. The technologies involved include networks, operating systems, database systems, and application servers as well as manual procedures. Application level security in the context of Java EE applications is provided by web and EJB containers.

While I am not always a fan of Microsoft's actions around technology in education, I do have to give them credit for hiring my friends Vital Wave Consulting to do a 5 year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study on introducing computers into Indian schools that focused on multiple different configurations, platforms, and even operating systems.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of so much buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

With the Atom-based ASUS Eee PC 901 we have already delivered disk encryption benchmarks and a Linux distribution comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. This Intel 1.6GHz Diamondville processor isn't the fastest, but it's performing quite well for a netbook. With netbooks and their users often on the go though, for those not using the suspend and resume mode the boot time can be equally important as the in-desktop performance. To look at this we are delivering boot performance benchmarks for the Eee PC 901 from Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10, and Mandriva 2009.

When I typed on Google “Do I really need a firewall?” 695,000 results came across. And I'm pretty sure they must be saying “Hell yeah!”. In my opinion, no one would ever recommend anyone to sit naked on the internet keeping in mind the insecurity internet carries these days, unless you really know what you are doing.

The gender inequality among developers and supporters of free software is stunning. Less than 2% of us are women, according to studies conducted for the European Commission. Why? The evidence says we’re driving them away. There are even some pretty good published guidelines on how not to drive them away. What’s missing is a practical implementation strategy: here I present ten relatively simple changes in how you run your project, to make it more attractive to would-be contributors—especially women.

SRWare, a German company, has released Iron, based on Google's Chromium code. The big difference, according to the authors on their German language-only web site, is that the features which have caused people to question the privacy of Google's browser are all disabled.

You don't need a dedicated computing cluster to perform big processing jobs - you can turn your LAN into a part-time cluster with Condor. In part two of her look at this distributed computing framework, Juliet Kemp shows how to submit jobs to your running installation.

The world of computers has changed. Sub-notebooks are becoming immensely popular, mobile phones based on Google’s Android software are about to come out (T-Mobile have just announced their G1 will launch on October 22), and computers are looking increasingly like small devices that fit in our pockets. The end of 2008 might see the dawn of a new revolution in the computer industry and in people’s lives. Maybe 2009 will be remembered as the year when the “world went mobile”. What does this mean for the (free and non-free) software industry? Where will we be, technologically and (more importantly) culturally? Where will the market (and the money) be?

The GNOME project has released a major upgrade of its desktop environment that adds an instant messaging (IM) client. GNOME 2.24 also features a new task manager, screen resolution tools, and enhanced conferencing support, and spins off a new GNOME Mobile version for embedded devices.

This week the GNOME Desktop team officially released GNOME version 2.24. This release incorporates numerous bugfixes and impressive new features, including the first release of the GNOME Mobile Platform.

Terry Hancock seemed to raise a few hackles when he presented case recently that “copyleft has no impact on project activity?!)”. I’m not certain why, because it seemed he was just asking a question really (you’ll note the question mark). In that piece he mentions the reasons developers choose a copyleft licence. As a — somewhat small-time — developer of free software this topic interests me. Terry made a few statements about why developers choose a copyleft licence as did Tony Mobily in his editorial for issue 20. So let me tell you why this developer chose (and continues to choose) a copyleft licence? Ryan Cartwright explains his reasons for using a copyleft licence.

As Downloadsquad is reporting, the Chromium source code for Google's Chrome open source browser has already been fashioned into a new version of the browser: Iron. Apparently German company SRWare developed its knock-off of Chrome for users who are concerned about Google's policies for collecting private information--a constant Achilles heel for the company. SRWare's home page is in German, but the folks at the Incomplete News Project have published a translation with details on what SRWare's version does.

KDE's Konqueror is as multifunctional as a Swiss Army knife. It works as both a file manager and a Web browser, and you can enhance it even further by adding new commands to its repertoire by means of service menus. The new commands appear in Konqueror's context menu when you right-click a file. Here's how to create service menus, and some specific commands that you might want to use in them.

In my last article I talked about how interest leads people to program. Then life rose up behind me like a giant Doberman pincer and bit me on my backside; so, I didn’t think of programming for over four months. However, just this week something happened that made me want to program again. I was preparing to teach some students how to use dichotomous keys to identify organisms. Suddenly, while I was staring at a simple teaching key for identifying fruit, my eyes glazed over and I had a moment of clarity. I realized that I was looking at the basis of a very simple program. It was a list of rules. Simple statements that said, “If this go here, if not go there.” In the back of my mind I could see the “either/or” options and the “goto” statements of my coding past, and I knew in my heart that I must make this key into a program!

Learn how to use Perl and the Imager module to enhance mapping applications by extracting and applying height information based on color. The end result is a third dimension of data, showing more information in the same space and opening up new methods of visualization for your map users.

The KOffice team is proud to announce the first beta of KOffice 2.0. The goal of this release is to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow us to release a usable 2.0 release, demonstrating our vision for the future of the digital office to a larger audience and attract new contributions both in terms of code and ideas for improvements. Read on for more information or see the announcement and download it from the release notes.

This post comes hard on the heels of an important piece of news... at least two Open Source companies have become part of the Becta's official list of suppliers to the education sector. The new procurement frame work under the aegis of the OGC relaunches the supply of ICT to education. The emphasis is clear: deliver value for money to UK schools.

In today’s world the Palm does not produce the same level of excitement in developers that it used to. One of most important reasons for this is that the Palm OS itself has too many limitations, and, frankly, Windows Mobile is not exciting. Palm, the company, has been aware of this fact for years and has been promising a new Linux based OS for just as long. However, the mythical Linux based Palm has never come ... But, now there is Android.

You can monitor your computers in a wide variety of ways. Large proprietary applications make sense for large installations that can afford the expense of both the software and consultants who fine-tune the systems. Open source monitoring solutions like Nagios or OpenNMS cost nothing to acquire but still require planning and tweaking. When you need to address smaller problems with process data on a system, the process monitoring tool ps-watcher comes in handy.