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Yahoo! subsidiary Zimbra has released beta 3 of Zimbra Desktop, its new email application designed to make it simpler to work with multiple web mail accounts, even when offline. The program also includes calendaring facilities.

Looking for a good job in IT? Sharpen your knowledge of open source development frameworks, languages, and programming. A just-published study of available IT jobs found that 5 percent to 15 percent of the positions now on the market call for open source software skills. Written by consultant and author Bernard Golden in conjunction with O'Reilly Media, the 50-page report attempts to document the spread of open source in the enterprise. Although the study did not quantify the actual percentage of open source products used in the enterprise, the strong growth in available jobs -- in a period when overall IT job growth may be slowing -- points to a surprising breadth of adoption. Indeed, the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has emerged as a popular technology for modern voice communications. Many organizations have replaced their analog or proprietary digital telephone systems with VoIP-based solutions. This allows the consolidation of telephone services into an existing IP infrastructure. In addition, using IP to host voice services lets the organization leverage existing expertise–while retaining all of the network’s management advantages. Though not without its disadvantages, VoIP provides a compelling option to those looking for a telephone solution.

A new survey by KACE, a systems management appliance company, suggests that 60 percent of those surveyed have no plans to deploy Microsoft Windows Vista, a 10 percent rise over a similar survey administered by KACE in November 2007. A full 42 percent of these are actively exploring Vista alternatives, with 11 percent having made the leap to alternative platforms like Mac OS X or Linux.

OpenEMR HQ announced the official launch of their OpenEMR Live fully hosted EMR solution earlier today in a conference call with developers, employees, and clients. The service, according to their website, removes the headache associated with running an in-house application server and the cost of keeping a full-time IT person on staff. It also reduces compliance issues, eases administrative burden, and provides data monitoring, faster response times, and full disaster recovery service should something go wrong.

The market for open source databases is booming due to new workloads such as RFID projects, rich Web applications and small portals, despite the unwillingness of enterprises to replace their Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server systems with open source, according to new figures from Forrester Research.

The Debian project's maintainer, Luk Claes, announced in an email Saturday that he will freeze the "testing" or "Lenny" tree, in preparation for a new stable release of Debian Linux. On Claes's checklist for September 2008: "Release lenny!" The freeze means that open source software developers have only a couple more days to package any applications that they want to be included in the next release of Debian -- and by extension, in the inner sanctum source lists of distributions such as Ubuntu that are based on it. After the freeze starts next week, Debian maintainers will no longer accept new packages, but instead will turn their attention to about 360 release-critical bugs.

The communications and IT giant has already been a member of the Linux Foundation since 2005. According to a Wednesday statement, BT joined FossBazaar because it wants to help "accelerate the adoption of free and open source software in business". Apart from the Linux Foundation, other sponsors of FossBazaar include HP, Novell, Google and SourceForge.

Back to the short-line code. A bit on the lighter side.

For every person who has said, "Let's network these two computers" there are many more asking "Why is the network running so slow?" Yet, the ethereal nature of Ethernet has long made computer networks hard to decipher and many a business or home user has longed to peek into the data stream to see just what is going on. You could pay tens of thousands of dollars for the answer - but we'll do it using freely available tools for Linux.

For the past few days I have been looking for a proper i18n (internationalisation) and l10n (localisation) method for PHP. PHP has quite a few locale aware functions such as strftime and sprintf. In combination with gettext this can work quite well. The major downside is that you need to install all the locales that you want to support on your server. PHP6 is promising to solve that problem with the intl functions. Even better, the intl functions are also available as a PECL extension and works on PHP 5.2.4 and newer. There is no package (yet) for php5-intl in Debian Lenny but building and installing the extension yourself is really easy. Here's a short tutorial.

While the beta testing seems never to end at Google -- Gmail is still in beta well past age 4 -- the world's largest search engine and advertising machine has released to the public a new knowledge base called"Knol." A"knol," according to Google, is a unit of knowledge. More specifically, Google says Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects

Dell is now selling selected systems with Ubuntu 8.0.4, Hardy Heron, pre-installed in the United Kingdom . Ubuntu has been an option some Dell systems in the past, but only in the United States. Dell is pre-installing Ubuntu on the XPS M3110 and Inspiron 1525n laptops and the Inspiron 530n desktop system.

Since 2004, GovTrack.us has housed information about the United States Congress, including 10 years of bills, voting records, and contact information for individual members of Congress. Visitors can also find out who represents them and search the database for committee assignments, legislative statistics, and the Congressional Record, which is the official record of daily proceedings in Congress. All the code that makes GovTrack run is open source, and all the information stored there is freely available to everyone.

Squid is a caching proxy server that can provide enhanced performance for your internal network users.. Squid will cache commonly accessed sites so that it can improve performance by 10-20% for Internet connections. Squid also provides security for the internal network by acting in behalf of the clients on your network.

South Africa’s award-winning multilingual software developer, Translate.org.za, has been awarded a grant by the Mozilla Corporation to extend its translation tools. The US-based Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, co-ordinates the development of popular Internet software projects such as the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client.

A few short weeks since his former employer Microsoft officially released Hyper-V, newly installed VMware Inc. CEO Paul Maritz told investors on a second-quarter earnings call that the next version of ESXi will be available for free, a decrease from its current price of $495 per dual-CPU server. The updated ESXi will be available for download from VMware's website this coming Monday, a VMware spokesperson confirmed.

Mark Shuttleworth said he doubts Microsoft would file suit against a free software developer unless the software giant wants "war." At the end of a session at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, where Shuttleworth discussed the emerging practice of mixing agile development methods in with community development efforts, Shuttleworth responded to a question about the possibility of Microsoft making patent claims against open source code by saying: "I don't believe Microsoft will file suit against free software developers. It would be tantamount to declaring nuclear war... And I can afford it."

Black Duck Software and Intel are the latest vendors to make substantial improvements to their open-source development tools, the latest indicators of the open-source movement's growing presence in the application development field. Black Duck, which offers products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open-source software, announced July 22 the expansion to the volume of open-source software managed in the Koders.com code search engine.

The tenth annual Ottawa Linux Symposium kicked off Wednesday in Canada's capital, just a few blocks from the country's parliament building, in a conference centre in the midst of being torn down. The symposium started with the traditional State of the Kernel address, this year by Matthew Wilcox. Among the dozens of talks and plenaries held the first day was kernel wireless maintainer John Linville's Tux on the Air: the State of Linux Wireless Networking.