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It's one thing to have a skunkworks operating system project, Midori, that could conceivably replace Windows. It's another to actually have plans on how to switch users from Windows to Midori. Guess what? Microsoft actually does have such plans.

Another week has past and it's time to laugh heartily before it all ends in tears ;) This week, I stumbled upon Two sites that had me working overtime trying not to laugh out loud at my desk. Nonsense humor isn't for everyone, but I find it the most enjoyable kind. It's goofy, it's random and once something gets me going I sound like I'm having a massive asthma attack while I'm trying to force myself to not laugh.

The Senate and House have voted to reauthorize the Higher Education Act and approved controversial new provisions that will require universities to provide students with access to commercial music downloading services and implement traffic filtering technologies in order to deter peer-to-peer filesharing. The bill now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a wrapper around a set of technologies that enables developers to build rich Internet applications that deploy on the desktop. Applications are created using a mixture of JavaScript, HTML, and Flash. The resulting application is delivered to end users in a single package and rendered using the WebKit HTML engine.

Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable-television provider, was ordered by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to stop blocking its customers from sharing videos and other files online. The FCC levied no fine in the 3-2 ruling that asserts federal power over how telephone and cable-TV companies manage their customers' access to the Internet. The agency made the decision in response to a complaint filed nine months ago by public-interest groups. They accused Comcast of slowing traffic on its network and stopping users from uploading files.

Plat'Home, Linux pioneers in Japan and creators of the diminutive OpenMicroServer, are running a contest called "Will Linux Work?" They are basically asking people to submit crazy/extreme environments or ideas using their Linux servers and see if they work. Whoever has the best idea will get 5 of their OpenMicroServers shipped to them for free and be able to test their idea -- you can find all the details here.

Sun Microsystems continues to struggle. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based server maker reported that earnings in the quarter ended June 30 fell nearly 74 percent to $88 million, compared with earnings of $329 million during the same period a year ago. Quarterly revenue fell 1.4 percent to $3.78 billion, down from $3.83 billion during the same period in 2007.

Netbook sales will reach 8.02 million units in 2008, and 18.3 million units in 2009, a research report says. Netbooks will also grow physically, gaining 10-inch screens and keyboards approaching full-size, according to the report. "Most" products in the category will use Microsoft's XP operating system, says Market Intelligence Center (MIC).

Stormy Peters recently became the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, where she is already working to raise public awareness of the GNOME desktop environment and user interface, and to attract new corporate sponsors and developers to the GNOME community. She says it was not as much a move away from her old job at OpenLogic and the for-profit business world as it was a move toward the community she's been part of for years.

For a decade, Microsoft was open source's worst enemy, combating it at every turn. But last week Microsoft joined the Apache open source project as a platinum sponsor, promising to put $100,000 per year into a project that beats its own IIS (Internet Information Services) in the market. Microsoft also made some of their patents available for use in GPL software like Linux without a royalty. Has Redmond given up the fight? Or is this just their latest strategy?

This year has already seen the second release of gNewSense, the completely free distribution endorsed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and the announcement that Ubuntu will have a free software option as part of its installation program. Now, if Alexandre Oliva, a Red Hat employee best-known as a board member of the Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA), has his way, building a 100% free distribution will become easier thanks to his linux-libre project. Unfortunately, the path to freedom, he's finding, is often blocked by politics and a preference for convenience over ideals.

Yahoo! Inc. investors re-elected the Internet company's board, with 85 percent of votes supporting Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang after he fended off a proxy battle with billionaire investor Carl Icahn. Chairman Roy Bostock was re-elected with about 80 percent of the votes, Yahoo said today in a statement after its annual meeting in San Jose, California. Icahn was appointed to the board after the meeting.

Some Ubuntu fans out there may remember Automatix, a tool for Ubuntu that allowed easy access to many popular non-free applications and commonly-used audio and video codecs. It debuted a few years ago, and got negative reviews from Ubuntu developers and experienced users due to the risk of breaking dependencies, but it offered an easy solution for beginners who weren't familiar with the way deb packages worked. Automatix was discontinued in March, when its developers moved on to other projects. Now Ultamatix hopes to continue where Automatix left off.

10 UNIX command-line habits worth picking up -- good habits that help you break the bad habits you've developed over the years.

Do you, by any chance, remember the name Victor Raisys? He was a technology analyst at Soundview Technology Group, who predicted difficulties for Linux when the SCO litigation began in 2003. Guess where he worked *before* the stint at Soundview? At Microsoft, and not only that, his job was to keep an eye on Linux, for Microsoft.

Examining NetApplications’ numbers, it is almost certain that this data is highly dependent on daily user behavior and that any results have to be taken with a grain of salt. But if the numbers are any indication then it is clear that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer market share is trending down, while Mozilla is playing with the 20% range and is successfully jumping over this mark more often in recent days. The average market share for Firefox was 19.27% in June, up from 18.41% in May. The Internet Explorer dropped from 73.75% to 72.95% in the same time frame.

With the GoogleMapAPI project, you can easily add a Google Map to your PHP Web site. GoogleMapAPI is not packaged for Ubuntu, Fedora or openSUSE. For this article I'll use a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine with version 2.5 of GoogleMapAPI. The commands shown below install the main PHP file in a site-accessible directory, with the remainder of the distribution in /usr/local for reference.

So you're looking for medical advice. Would you: a) call your doctor, b) consult a medical journal or c) go to a wiki? Perhaps surprisingly, many people are beginning to go the wiki route. At least, they're starting with wikis, and maybe after that they're calling their doctors, reading journals, or otherwise getting second and third opinions.

Linux is beginning to find its legs as the foundation in many different technologies and in the process is fueling a feedback loop that is helping accelerate the operating system’s popularity. As more and more people contribute from areas such as mobile, data center power management, and real-time technologies, innovations are coming rapid fire and when folded into the Linux kernel provide benefits across a wide spectrum.

This tutorial will walk you through setting up a Linux layer 7 packet classifier on CentOS 5.1, this can easily be adapted to any other Linux distribution out there.