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Mailboxes are going the way of phone booths. More of us are paying our bills online and using the Internet to send our correspondence, so the U.S. Postal Service has decided it needs fewer mailboxes. (WTOP) The first question that jumped to my mind is how does the USPS expect me to mail a letter when I cannot find a mail box? The second question is, will there be any letters twenty years from now? Or less? This is not as trivial a concern as you might expect.

I've long been a sucker for small-footprint Linux distributions. So naturally, I thought it would be interesting to explore the latest version of "Ubuntulite." From what I've seen so far, I'm impressed!

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference& Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

[Hilarious, Editor for over a year and he is just now 'switching' Linux. - Scott]

ReadyTechs provides network support services for companies that don't want the expense of hiring and caring for their own employees. Now CEO Gerry Libertelli says the company is using Linux virtualization to open a new income stream based on cloud computing. Libertelli say he catches his existing customers at the end-of-life stage in hardware maintenance to offer them more than just virtual server administration. "We intervene in the hardware stream and say, 'How about a virtual network?' And that is starting to ramp up."

KMess is a MSN Messenger client for KDE Users in Linux. It enables Linux users to chat with friends online who are using MSN Messenger in Windows or Mac OS or Linux. The strength of KMess is it’s integration with the KDE desktop environment, focus on MSN Messenger specific features and an easy-to-use interface.

Firebug is popular because it solves the long-standing problem of debugging Web pages. Before Firebug, the two main methods for debugging Web applications were the server's error log (to which all error-related data was sent) and the HTML source code (making the debugging output visible to all users via the "view source" function). But with JavaScript becoming an increasingly important player in the creation of dynamic Web sites, and with CSS (cascading stylesheets) determining the formatting, the combination of error logs and "view source" was getting painfully difficult.

Dan Kaminsky spoke to a packed house at Black Hat on 6 August to outline the fundamental flaw he found in the Domain Name System (DNS). Contrary to his hopes, though, the flaw was discovered and publicized before his presentation. The vulnerability is interesting in its own right, but the implications of what can be done with it are staggering. In addition, the "fix" has well understood shortcomings that can still potentially be exploited to poison DNS caches. We reported on the vulnerability in early July, including Kaminsky's request that security folks not publicly speculate about the flaw. As one might guess, that request was largely ignored. When security researcher Halvar Flake published his speculation, another researcher, who was known to have the details of the flaw, publicly confirmed it, but just as quickly removed the confirmation. While it sounds a bit like a security community soap opera, it was fairly clearly caused by the attempt to contain the vulnerability information.

SYS 0.23 - A linux distro what installs full-automatically and what comes with plenty software - 18 GB - excellent for beginners and for specialists

If you follow technology trends, you have probably heard of the semantic desktop -- a data layer for annotating and sharing the information in your computer. But what you may not be aware of is that the semantic desktop is not a distant goal, but scheduled to arrive at the end of 2008. And, when it does, the idea will probably be implemented through the work done by the Nepomuk project, and, most likely, by KDE first.

A major problem with the officially distributed version of Perl on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has led to a firestorm of complaints among developers. The problem, which also manifests itself on some versions of the Fedora and CentOS Linux distributions, means that some programs will take more than 100 (yes, one hundred) times longer to execute under Red Hat than other distributions. A Red Hat engineer has indicated that it will fix the problem in its next release (i.e., Red Hat Enterprise 5.3), but has not said when that update will arrive.

Initially, The VAR Guy was upbeat about Google Android. But the more he hears about the mobile open source environment, the more he worries that Google is starting to resemble Microsoft. Here’s why.

If like first-person shooters, you'll love Sauerbraten. This open source game might not have the visual finesse of other FPSes, but what it lacks in the graphics department, Sauerbraten more than makes up for with its various single and multiplayer modes, including an experimental role-playing game mode, and a unique WYSIWYG in-game map editor. Sauerbraten blends the best of FPSes like Quake and Max Payne to give you a unique gaming experience.

Web applications are set for a speed boost, but it's nothing to do with their developers. The TraceMonkey project is hard at work on a new and much faster implementation of JavaScript for the Firefox browser. While TraceMonkey is still in its early stages, the target is to make it a part of Firefox 3.1, which is expected in late 2008 or early 2009. TraceMonkey already performs various benchmarks in 4.5 percent to 55 percent of the time taken by Firefox 3, and useful further improvements are thought possible.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.10, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.5.10 sports changes in Kicker, the KDE3 panel and KPDF, the PDF viewer. The KDE community has finalized yet another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release in terms of features, 3.5.10 brings a couple of nice bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5.

You probably know intuitively that applications have limited powers in Intel x86 computers and that only operating system code can perform certain tasks, but do you know how this really works? This post takes a look at x86 privilege levels, the mechanism whereby the OS and CPU conspire to restrict what user-mode programs can do.

Photosynth is one of the most exciting programs I've seen in a long time. It takes a group of photos, typically of a single geographical location, but possibly taken at different times by different people, analyses them for similarities, and then stitches then together into a smooth-flowing, pseudo-3D panorama. It's really great. Just two problems. One: it won't run on GNU/Linux; and two: it's from Microsoft, and so is unlikely ever to do so. My question is this: Why didn't the free software community come up with Photosynth first?

While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as"clients." They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with lighttpd on a Mandriva 2008.1 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the lighttpd server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

This article, which is titled “Microfraud?”, provides a testimony from a Microsoft insider who claims financial fraud. Interestingly enough (but not so surprisingly), Microsoft paid him a fortune to go away, keep quiet, and for the terms of the settlement not to be disclosed (recall Iowa and Caldera for similar examples).

In August 2008 a small OLPC XO deployment project was started in Russia. A group of Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogic University professors has taught 32 students from Nizhny Novgorod how to use XOs in a summer camp environment. The project was launched in a field facility of Nizhny Novgorod State University in Staraya Pustyn village in Nizhny Novgorod region.