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The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have given the green light to publish the Microsoft-backed Office Open XML (OOXML) specification after organization leaders rejected appeals from four countries to protest the vote that approved OOXML as a standard.

The way he has gone about establishing Ubuntu as the desktop Linux distribution most in demand by enthusiasts is remarkable. And he is now quietly beginning to muscle in on the enterprise market. One trait has stood him in good stead and will continue to help him and his company, Canonical, make headway - patience. He has always shown himself willing and able to wait for the right moment to do something. Time appears to be of little importance to him; he has a goal and he intends to attain it.

This is the eighth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms [part I | part II | part III | part IV | part V | part VI | part VII]. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part VIII, we focus on the tab.

Hello boys and girls — That's me in the Debian T-shirt above. Ilene got it for me from AboutDebian.com. I don't think I need to tell any of you that I'm proud to be a Debian user. Sure I've had (and have) my problems getting Debian to do exactly what I want on every machine on which I have it installed, but I'd call Debian ultra-reliable, easily fixable and extremely useful. I've never mistakenly hosed a Debian installation, and I've never seen a machine on which Debian won't run — and run pretty well.

Are you a sysop? Or a fan of rap? Something here to amuse both of you ;)

A guide to the kernel development process aims to encourage participation by new programmers by explaining what's involved. Some developers and businesses attempting to submit changes to the Linux kernel find themselves tangled up with the processes used, according to the guide, which was written by Jonathan Corbet, executive editor of lwn.net and himself a Linux developer. "A developer who does not understand the kernel community's ways (or, worse, who tries to flout or circumvent them) will have a frustrating experience in store," Corbet warned.

Ever since I read Jeremy Allison’s blog post about why we need to hear criticisms from people who dislikes Linux, I have been thinking a lot about what he said and how it hits very close to my own philosophy about life: In order to improve, you need to be open to criticisms; even from your enemies. One of the (many) things that most people dislike about Microsoft is that they don’t have any real communication between the developers and the users; so when you discover a bug or have opinions about a feature that can be improved or added, there is no real easy way to directly (or indirectly) communicate with a developer. However, recently they have showed some improvement by opening up blogs for IE8 beta and Windows 7, where product developers actively communicate with users. So why should we turn a blind eye towards Linux critics?

Most Linux Distribution websites have been redesigned to sport a Web 2.0 look. To give credit to their talented web designers/developers, I’ll pick 10 Linux Distribution websites that I think stand out from the rest. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you don’t have to agree with me. Anyway, you can always comment later on and share your views.

John Washburn takes public records seriously. Recently, the 45-year-old computer software tester from Wisconsin decided to take on Texas Gov. Rick Perry over his e-mail retention program -- or lack of one. Perry's office automatically deletes virtually all its e-mails every seven days, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Like all teenagers it can be temperamental, and always capable of annoying the middle-aged mainstream. As Debian turns 15 today, iTWire says HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

We have written about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project many times, but we have yet to explain how to get started with it as a contributor. Since it is the vacation high season in the Northern Hemisphere and many more people will be hitting the maps, this is the perfect time. You can contribute a lot to the project even if you don't own a Global Positioning System (GPS) device -- or even a compass. This is not meant to be an authoritative guide to the project; OSM maintains a detailed wiki with extensive documentation for newbies and experts alike, in multiple languages.

Networking is a must-have on all levels of computing. Be it home or corporate, networking is the one aspect of computing that is, without a shadow of a doubt, a deal breaker. And with some help, the Linux operating system can be the king of networking, in both ease of use and security. But that doesn’t mean the average (and sometimes even the above-average) user can’t use some help. These tips should help make Linux networking go a little more smoothly.

Kernel wireless maintainer John Linville outlined the past, present, and future of the Linux wireless stack on the first day of this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium. In his presentation, he ranged from early efforts, which were "a sore spot for Linux" to the future where it is likely that Linux will have support for some features before "that other OS". Along the way, he looked at various issues that wireless support in Linux faces, including vendor participation, suspend and resume, and regulatory issues.

Great video, and actual website, of another BOFH :) This weekend's comedic gold is quite a bit older than I would have thought. I feel like I've missed out, although I'm glad that someone finally mailed this link to me :) This is a simple (although a bit long at around 10 minutes) video that is absolutely hilarious. If you've ever done any kind of computer administration (and maybe if you've been on the other end of this debacle) it's entertaining stuff. The voices have been "chipmunked," but not to protect the innocent/guilty, since there's a cast list during the credits at the end. I'm thinking this thing was probably twice as long and the distorted voices are from a speedup of the entire video. No matter how it plays, this is a killer humor :)

Earlier this year prior to the release of GNOME 2.22 we had shared eight interesting improvements in GNOME 2.22. Some of these improvements included Epiphany with the WebKit back-end (if built with the proper argument), Evince Document Viewing improvements, Cheese web-camera software, Mousetweaks, the Vinagre VNC client, and Totem enhancements. Now with the official GNOME 2.24 release due out next month, this time around we're sharing a few of the interesting highlights for this GNOME update.

It's not every day that the New York Times writes articles about the Domain Name System, but then again this DNS bug is anything but normal. It's been over five weeks now since Dan Kaminsky first announced the major flaw that he found in the DNS protocol. Although most of the details of the bug have been public for a few weeks now, it wasn't until last week at the Black Hat and Defcon conferences in Las Vegas that Kaminsky explained the depth of the issue. As I listened to him describe the ways this bug can be exploited my heart dropped down into my stomach and I felt a little sick. My friend was only half joking when he whispered to me "I'm thinking about transferring to accounting."

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.