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We are coming down to the last week for JTC1 to decide on whether to hear the four NB appeals concerning various claimed errors in the processing of DIS 29500 (OOXML), or whether summarily to dismiss these appeals without hearing them. The decision lies with two committees, the Technical Management Board (TMB) in ISO and the Standards Management Board (SMB) in the IEC.

I am on the DrWeil.com newsletter listâ??and it isn't because he looks like me. It actually has some useful information. But, like most newsletters, it has ads. Sometimes the ads are useful as well. Today's ad was for a non-medical device that will lower blood pressure. I have friends with high blood pressure so I decided it was worth a look. It was as it convinced me that a Linux geek needs to build an Open Source product for those that don't have expensive medical insurance that will pay for overpriced gadgets.

Books, CDs, flashcards, classes -- there are a lot of tools to help you learn a foreign language. If you spend much of your time near a computer, software may be one of the better options. Ian McIntosh's Amigo is a friendly language utility for the Linux user, notable for how well it integrates into the desktop. There are several flashcard-like vocabulary training applications for Linux, both for KDE and for GNOME. They are undeniably useful, but they also require a dedicated study session. Where Amigo differs is that it runs in the background while you do other things.

A Silicon Valley startup called CherryPal announced a two-Watt, $250 ultra-mini PC that runs Debian Linux. Based on a 400MHz PowerPC-based system-on-chip (SoC) from Freescale, the solid-state CherryPal C100 Desktop offers managed "cloud" computing paid for by advertising rather than a monthly fee.

Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, next week plans a major update to its massive code hosting and project management platform Launchpad. Version 2.0 will introduce improved support for third-party application lifecycle tools used to find, report and fix bugs in Ubuntu - plus the applications and 6,000 projects in the ecosystem around it. Canonical has been talking up the new service at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

Mississauga, Ontario-based Koolu Inc. has agreed to distribute OpenMoko's Linux-based Neo FreeRunner in the Americas, the U.K., and the European Union. Koolu is distributing the FreeRunner under the name W.E. Phone, and is bundling it with Google Apps.

The first two days of O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) are dominated by technical tutorials, but there are sessions that buck the trend. Monday's most interesting event was Participate 08, a panel discussion sponsored by Microsoft. Panelists debated the meaning of the buzzword "openness" as it applies to source code, services, data, and business models.

Contributing to open source typically conjures images of working on a project's code. But offering bandwidth is another critical way the movement can benefit. That's the approach taken by NTT America, a Tier 1 carrier and a division of Japan-based NTT Communications, which is now helping open source by donating IPv6 transit (define) to the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC).

Microsoft is probably standing at its most important crossroads ever, just when Bill Gates is waving goodbye. Well, actually, Microsoft has been missing Gates for a long time. Something happened after the 2004 antitrust ruling, both to the company and to its longtime visionary -- call it a loss of focus. You have to wonder now whether Microsoft can get back to its old confident ways without its founder's guidance.

Life would be a lot easier if we could live in a Linux-only world and if applications never required data from other sources. However, the need to get data from Windows, MS-DOS, or old Macintosh systems is all too common. This kind of import process requires some conversions to solve file format differences; otherwise, it would be impossible to share data, or file contents would be imported incorrectly. The easiest way to transfer data between systems is by using plain text files or common formats like comma-separated value (CSV) files. However, converting such files from Windows or Mac OS results in formatting differences for the newline characters and character encoding. This article explains why we have these problems and shows ways to solve them.

Web 2.0 technologies are empowering enterprises in ways we could only have imagined a few years ago. They have evolved beyond consumer-grade blogs and wikis into enterprise-class solutions driving collaboration, productivity, sales and cost savings. But despite the business value they deliver, are enterprises ready to fully embrace Web 2.0 technologies?

Debian, arguably the most important Linux distribution, is readying to celebrate its 15th birthday on August 16. While a respected and widely-used Linux distribution in its own right, Debian has, over the 15 years, also been widely used as the base for numerous other Linux distributions, including the popular Ubuntu distribution created by South African entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth.

New adopters often see virtualization as the Holy Grail of enterprise computing. It enables consolidation of separate servers and databases to provide more economic operations. Running consolidated computers from one virtualized machine also eliminates the electrical waste spent to keep idling servers and data-processing machines running.

ZK is an AJAX toolkit designed to make creating user interfaces that run in a Web browser as simple as creating event-driven interfaces for desktop applications. The interfaces created with ZK use an XML markup language to define the user interface and Java code to implement the Web application's functionality. ZK includes support for data-bound controls so that you do not have to worry about updating the user interface forms when you change your Java objects.

This tutorial shows how to install and use mod_python on various distributions (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/CentOS, Mandriva, OpenSUSE) with Apache2. mod_python is an Apache module that embeds the Python interpreter within the server. It allows you to write web-based applications in Python that will run many times faster than traditional CGI and will have access to advanced features such as ability to retain database connections and other data between hits and access to Apache internals.

Linux loadable kernel modules are on of the most important innovations in the Linux kernel. They provide a kernel that is both scalable and dynamic. Discover loadable kernels, the ideas behind them, and learn how these independent objects dynamically become part of the Linux kernel.

Channel Intelligence, a company based in Florida, filed a lawsuit for patent infringement in Delaware on Tuesday against a long list of startups and other companies and individuals who have one thing in common - they offer wish lists for products people may want others to buy for them. Notable in their absence is Amazon, Ebay and most other large etailers, all of which maintain wish lists for users.

One of the development process advantages brought by git (and by BitKeeper before it) is the ability to see the up-to-the-second, bleeding-edge status of Linus's tree. So any developer who wants to know where the front edge of development lies can grab that tree and make patches fit into it. But the value of the mainline repository for development would appear to be less than it once was. The mainline is no longer where the action is.

"Hurrah! 2.0 has been released!" said Matthew Dillon, announcing the eighth major release of DragonFly BSD. This release is the first to include HAMMER, a new clustering filesystem that already boasts an impressive list of features, including: "crash recovery on-mount, no fsck; fine-grained snapshots, snapshot management, snapshot-support for filesystem-wide data integrity checks; historically accessible by default; mirroring: queueless incremental mirroring, master to multi-slave; undo and rollback; reblocking; multi-volume, maximum storage capacity of 1-Exabyte."

It's a sure thing that you can sit for a range of Microsoft certifications at almost any event where two or more 'Softies are gathered together in Bill's name. Now Intel is leveraging its own developer muscle by organising Linux certification exams for attendees of the Intel Developer Forum held late August in San Francisco.