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Trolling the net some more, I found a whole ton of funny Unix, Linux, mainframe, compiler, VAX, VMS, etc, error messages and I think we have enough material to span two posts here. So, in effect, today's post is also a "live test" of how long a blogspot posting can be. If it overruns, and the bottom gets clipped, you can get the material from its source at TMK.com.

Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife. "I wish to humbly apologize to society for my crime," Reiser said in a statement before his sentence was pronounced. "Every human life is sacred. I took the life of a human being and I'm very sorry for that."

The August 2th "Linux Product Insider" features Memopal Online Backup, gNewSense 2.1, Super Talent Pico D USB Drive, SEH's PS56 WLAN Print Server and the new book Building Embedded Linux Systems.

While the big Linux news revolves around the desktop wars, one of the few remaining Redmond strongholds is the unholy MS Exchange/Outlook duo. For whatever reason, despite their innumerable defects, fragility, expense, cruddy performance, and friendliness to malware, businesses are reluctant to give them up.

Intel has acquired embedded Linux specialists OpenedHand. The London based company, with offices in Paris and Helsinki, offers software development and services in the mobile embedded Linux field. OpenedHand maintains a number of open source projects such as Matchbox, an X Window manager for small devices, and Pimlico, a compact personal information manager. Intel say that it will continue to support these OpenedHand led projects.

In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: "use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default." Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise.

Enterprise organizations are tapping the benefits not only of using open source software, but contributing to it by using the Eclipse model. The Eclipse Swordfish, Tigerstripe, Open Financial Market Platform and Open System Engineering Environment projects are all based on code contributed by end-user enterprises. As an indication that the open source model is beginning to mature and move beyond just independent software vendors (ISVs) and into the enterprise, Eclipse Foundation leaders say a new trend in Eclipse indicates that enterprises are beginning to develop and contribute code to Eclipse projects.

In this tutorial, you learn about cross-compiling, the boot loader, file systems, the root file system, disk images, and the boot process, all with respect to the decisions you make as you're building the system and creating the distribution.

Google is gearing up to launch its Android Market -- the open source phone software's answer to Apple's iPhone App Store. Staying true to the open model, the platform will allow more instant developer access compared to Apple's approval-based system and will also offer a set of tools for developers to track their business progress.

In an interesting post on Lifehacker, the editors ask the readers "Why did you switch to Linux?" The question drew quite a lot of interesting responses, including some very offbeat reasons for why people made the switch. If you're under the impression that people switch solely for rebellious or "fight the man" reasons, here are some of the more interesting responses and trends that they point to.

Teaching and learning have always had a collaborative element, but wiki technology has in recent years made collaboration central to the method of many educators. Since they can be edited by anyone with access to them, education wikis are ever-changing and evolving documents that ideally represent the wisdom of the student crowd.

Juliet Kemp explores the incredibly useful xargs command. It takes in input and executes your chosen command on it. Deceptively simple in concept; extremely powerful in execution. Here we'll look at xargs with find, and then at some other possibilities.

A cellular plan using an EVDO modem can provide a connection with bandwidth of approximately 3Mbps to the client and 1.5Mbps up to the provider (comparable to DSL) for a much lower cost than alternatives such as satellite. For applications requiring high-quality audio transmission from remote locations, such as the radio remotes we do at the radio station where I work, a Linux laptop with an EVDO modem and VoIP software offers an inexpensive and reliable solution. Here's what you need to get started.

My dad has been pestering me for some time to find him an open source tool that he could use to follow the market trends. He's been thinking about investing a little something in the market, but not without due diligence. Grism, written in Ruby, is the tool my dad now uses to easily follow the changing market trends. It allows you to create watchlists and portfolios and offers charts to help you gauge the performance of particular stocks.

Xen.org, which is behind the open source Xen virtualization project, is out with its new Xen 3.3 engine. You can download it now, and grab a PDF datasheet as well. Xen 3.3 is faster and more scalable than previous versions, and has better graphics capabilities. It targets more types of chipsets--from supercomputing to handheld chipsets. Yes that's right, handhelds. The new Xen is smaller than ever. What else is under the hood?

Open source projects and vendors are trying a variety of technical approaches to replacing the expensive but ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange. While none is yet a drop-in replacement, some administrators can get a TCO advantage by switching.

If you're a frequent business traveler who keeps important company files on your laptop, using a centralized management solution to back up files automatically during a fixed time interval won't work. Instead, consider Box Backup, which backs up files from a laptop directly to a backup server over an encrypted link. Box Backup doesn't rely on server-initiated backups. Whenever laptops, or other clients, connect to the backup server, the backup can start immediately. You are assured that the files are secure, because Box Backup uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt data straight to the backup server's disks. In addition to the usual snapshot type of backup, Box Backup also lets you make a continuous backup for every change in files while connected to the server. Best of all, Box Backup is free.

Bordeaux is a commercial User Interface to the Wine software that allows Linux systems to run Windows software. The Bordeaux Technology Group distributes this software and provides professional support to companies and individuals running Windows apps on Linux (and soon FreeBSD). I interviewed Tom Wickline to get some details and find out what they're up to now.

With Mesa 7.1 having been released this week and the open-source R600/770 3D support just around the corner, we've taken this opportunity to see how the open-source Mesa 3D stack compares to AMD's monthly-refined Catalyst Linux Suite with the fglrx driver performs for the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. In this article are Mesa 7.1 and Catalyst 8.8 benchmarks for the Radeon X1300PRO and X1800XL graphics cards.

Elgg, a new open source social networking platform aimed specifically at the education market, provides a safe, open source alternative to the popular blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and Blogger, and the even scarier (at least to educators) Facebook and MySpace.