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Multimodal technology provides multiple methods of communication between the user and a device. These methods include keypad, touch or tap screen, handwriting recognition, and voice recognition. Add multimodal capability to your applications using the Multimodal Tools Project for Eclipse, an entry-level, lightweight package for Web developers.

Since the Chinese government began supporting domestic open source communities in 2005, hundreds of thousands of young people in the world's most populous country have become a part of the open source world. With the help of the government-supported Leadership of Open Source University Promotion Alliance (LUPA), Zhejiang Technology Institute of Economy (ZJTIE) founded its Linux Training & Examination Center in 2006. The center started out offering a simple 48-hour course; upon completion, students received a Linux operator certificate or a Linux network administrator certificate or both. According to ZJTIE, 1,500 students in the last two years have passed the examination. However, those students who wanted to learn more had to learn by themselves.

Maximum Transmission Unit(MTU), the largest physical packet size, measured in bytes, that a network can transmit. Any messages larger than the MTU are divided into smaller packets before being sent.By optimizing the MTU setting you can gain substantial network performance increases, especially when using dial-up modem connections.

clive is an open source command line tool to extract videos and to bypass the need to use Adobe Flash in order to view user-generated content available on video-sharing websites. Clive supports Youtube, GoogleVideo, Dailymotion, metacafe, Guba, Sevenload, Myvideo. Clive converts the downloaded Flash Video into a MP4 file avoiding the need of having a Flash Video Player.

T-Mobile may be partnering with cell phone handset manufacturer HTC to deliver the first smartphone running Google's Android platform, according to reports. Unnamed sources briefed on T-Mobile's plans have said the carrier could announce the phone as early as September -- and would almost certainly have an offering out in the wild as early as October, in time for the holiday selling season.

Digital video recorders (DVR) are becoming more and more mainstream. TiVo, in fact, has passed the truest test of any popular technology -- having its name transformed into a verb. MythTV, a free and open source application that lets you turn a computer into a DVR, burst on the scene a few years ago, and has found fans among Linux users. However, with a little effort, it's possible to run MythTV front ends on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Xbox, and even an Apple iPod Classic.

Sun has released a new development kit aimed at mobile software developers. The toolkit will allow developers to create user interfaces for Java-based mobile phone applications. The package is being made available for download by the company under the title"Light-Weight UI Toolkit" or LWUIT.

The VAR Guy isn’t making any guarantees, but he hopes Sun Microsystems articulates its MySQL partner strategy next week at the Avnet New Frontiers Conference in Colorado. Here’s why.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people. Torvalds explained his position in an e-mail exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.

I first heard of gOS when it was chosen to power the $199 Wal-Mart gPC. The third iteration of the OS, gOS 3.0 "Gadgets" Beta, was released last week. It's a great Web-focused desktop, but it doesn't offer much to experienced or current Ubuntu users. I downloaded the ISO image of gOS 3.0, burned it to a CD, and installed it on one of my test systems. I used a basic PC with a 1.7GHz AMD Duron processor and 512MB of RAM, to see how well gOS fared on an unimpressive machine.

This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks. The day opened with Kate Alhola from Nokia showing off the Nokia N810. As already reported, the talk was followed by handing out the devices to the audience. Her blog says she hopes to see lots of Qt and KDE applications in Maemo Garage soon.

ISO and IEC have announced the rejection of the four appeals submitted by the National Bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela, as earlier recommended by the Secretaries General of each of the two standards organizations. to their respective management boards not to give the appeals further consideration.

With DrasticGrid, you can easily put a MySQL database table or view on a Web page, complete with editing, sorting, and pagination capabilities, and support for adding and deleting records. DrasticGrid is one of three controls from DrasticData -- the others are a tag cloud and Google Maps controller, both of which also get their data from a MySQL database.

Shooting in RAW format is great for the photography buff. However, when it is time to share with others, post on your photo gallery, or print at the local photo printing shop, you want something more portable. Here we'll look at converting RAW photos (specifically Canon's CRW format) into JPEGs using a batch command-line approach in BASH.

As a computer journalist for the last 25 years, I've received a lot of review copies of software. As something of an obsessive magpie, I've tended to keep most of it, “for reference”. Until yesterday, that is, when I finally threw out all those copies of OS/2, Lotus SmartSuite, and my entire collection of Microsoft software. This included Windows NT 3.5, Windows 2000, Microsoft Office and many, many more. What's makes this little spring-cleaning exercise particularly apt as well as cathartic is that all of us - and not just me - may finally be witnessing the end of the Windows era.

Dell yesterday announced a brand new range of laptops ranging from ultra-portables to high-end desktop replacement machines. The really interesting news for Linux fans, however, was Dell’s new “Latitude ON” system which allows for almost instant-on booting when you want to check an email or something on the Internet without booting the entire operating system.

Our open source expert foresees the future of Linux: By 2012 the OS will have matured into three basic usage models. Web-based apps rule, virtualization is a breeze, and command-line hacking for basic system configuration is a thing of the past.

LXer Feature: 15-Aug-2008

In many ways the virtues that have brought Linux from a Unix look alike pet project to a competitive operating system are the same as the ideals behind DefCon. The community stood on each other's shoulders and developed piece after piece of software to fill in the gaps that were found through use. Programmer's built on the ideas of others creating tighter and tighter code to support an increasingly complex framework. Originally that was the theme of this article when I had begun thinking about writing it. The things that I saw at DefCon were every bit of the ideals I went up there to find and more...

It is common for the open source community to be called upon by vendors--including proprietary vendors--to be beta testers for Linux releases, according to an industry player. Peter Cheng, open source evangelist and founder of an open source services provider company in China, told ZDNet Asia the practice of recruiting Linux testers is common among Web 2.0 companies.

This article explains how you can install and configure apache2-mpm-itk on a Debian Etch server. apache2-mpm-itk is an MPM (Multi-Processing Module) for the Apache 2 web server. mpm-itk allows you to run each of your vhost under a separate UID and GID - in short, the scripts and configuration files for one vhost no longer have to be readable for all the other vhosts. mpm-itk works with mod_php because mpm-itk is based on the traditional prefork MPM, which means it is non-threaded. This means you do not need to use suExec or suPHP anymore to run a website's PHP scripts as a separate user.