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What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers. That statement may surprise you, since most people interested in computers have strong feelings about Microsoft. Businessmen and their tame politicians admire its success in building an empire over so many computer users.

They did it -- Mozilla now holds the world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, according to Jamie Panas, press and marketing assistant at Guinness World Records. Download Day 2008, designated by the Mozilla Foundation on June 17 in celebration of its 10th anniversary, saw the release of Firefox 3, the free Web browser for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. An intensive marketing campaign to set the first Guinness World Record of its kind, for the most software downloaded in one day, resulted in more than 8 million copies downloaded in one day, according to Mozilla.

Review of several KDE applications for listening and manipulating audio files, including Kid3, Amarok, soundKonverter.

After reading last three PolishLinux articles we are already familiar with DOS, and its emulator DOSBox. The time has come to make DOSBox communicate in a more user-friendly way. Here comes the GEM!

I found some evidence Google tried hard to protect user confidentiality, in some letters to the judge in the court docket of Viacom v. YouTube. After the Order [PDF; text here] issued, Google didn't give up, but is continuing even now by asking the court in a letter to reconsider the decision and let them redact personally identifiable data. They fought hard against Viacom's motion to compel [PDF]. And the evidence indicates to me that what happened was a kind of SCO-like maneuver on Viacom's part.

Looking at creation and display/monitoring commands for LVM on AIX. Part 1 of a 2 part post.

The Australian Federal Government is currently caught in a bind over an election promise to supply public schools with one computer per secondary school child, with the cost of deployment now looking to be much beyond what was budgeted. Both software and running costs, mainly electricity bills, are to blame. At least one state, New South Wales, is seeking more money from the Federal Government to deploy the PCs. Another state, Victoria, has accepted that these additional costs will have to be borne from state funds.

Sidux is a new Debian derivative that's still just a baby, born in January 2007. Sidux announced a brand-new release on June 26, Sidux 2008-02, so we're going to kick the tires and take it for a drive, and see what sets it apart from other children of Debian. Currently it offers a choice of the KDE or Fluxbox desktop, and it supports both 32-bit i686 and AMD64. There is also an XFCE variant. Before trying it out for yourself, be sure to read the Quick Start section in the excellent and exceptionally helpful Sidux manual before burning it to a CD.

It's time to get ornery again with the FCC. Fortunately, they're asking for it, by soliciting comment on this FCC rulemaking proposal for "Service Rules for Advanced Wireless Services in the 1915-1920 MHz, 1995-2000 MHz, 2020-2025 MHz and 2175-2180 MHz Bands. It's a chocolate-covered spider. The chocolate is cost. The rulemaking proposes making Internet access over that spectrum "free" — in the free-as-in-beer sense. Not the free-as-in-freedom sense. Especially not in the free-as-in-speech sense. And least of all in the free-as-in-markets sense.

"When in the Course of geeky events it becomes necessary for one project to fork..." beings the geek version of the Declaration of Independence.

This book came just in time...for my daughter, that is. She's a Graphic Arts major at a university in the Northwest and for some time, I've been trying to convince her to try working on a Mac. Please keep in mind, I'm not a Mac person. I do very well on my Ubuntu PCs, both at home and on the job, but I know that Macs are more or less the standard platform for the graphic design world. Fortunately for Jamie (my daughter), one of her uncles was willing to be generous and "donate" his MacBook to the cause (he was upgrading).

You may have seen some screenshots of the first alpha of Intrepid Ibex, but have you seen all the new features? Everything from a better Flash experience to encryption is part of the plan.

This is just a rant (hopefully it will be regarded as pertinent and non-'laming') on why Windows users try Linux and return frustrated to Windows after several hours or days. I won't praise Linux and the way it works, I won't even compare and say 'here Linux is easier because ...', instead I have a few questions for all of you who blame Linux for not being and behaving like Windows.

And Please...don't respond by mentioning in any way, shape or form how the "Linux Community" is going to rise to the challenge. There is no "Linux Community". Those who believe there is...go ahead. Leave that tooth under your pillow one more night. The Tooth Fairy probably just got behind in her rounds.

We've talked all too often about AtomBIOS and there being two different open-source drivers that support the same ATI Radeon hardware with the key architectural difference between the two just being the use of this video BIOS abstraction layer. From the beginning, AMD was planning to have their Novell partners use AtomBIOS when writing this new (at the time, R500/600) driver, but the developers ultimately declined. These developers have expressed their opinions on AtomBIOS, which range from it being an unbearable mess to this design being nothing more than writing open-source code to power someone else's closed-source work. However, under pressure by AMD, the developers are now preparing to use AtomBIOS to a much greater extent within the xf86-video-radeonhd driver. In this article we'll tell you more about what's gone on and where you can checkout this AtomBIOS-bearing RadeonHD driver.

Technology Review interviewed Mitchell Baker, chairman of Mozilla, about plans for a mobile version of Firefox, which might be available later this year.

Apricot is the newest project from the Blender Institute with the goal to build an open-source game instead of a Blender video this time. The characters used in the game are from the Big Buck Bunny movie, the last free movie developed using Blender under the name Project Peach.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. has touted its "green computing" image following a recent independent test that ranked Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5's power efficiency over Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on three different hardware platforms. The server tests rated power consumption on IBM, Dell and HP machines in three conditions: active mode optimized for power savings, active mode optimized for performance and quiet mode.

If you're in the EU, please write to your MEP. There's an important vote on some amendments to telecommunications legislation that threaten to sneak in a number of measures that could be catastrophic for the Internet: allowing media companies to snoop through your traffic, take control of your computer, and generally play cop, prosecutor and judge.

Acer’s Aspire One is finally on sale in Australia and represents Acer’s first true foray into territory already claimed by computers such as the Asus Eee PC, the HP MiniNote 2133 and the MSI Wind. Other manufacturers such as Pioneer Computers also have similar devices, and Dell’s upcoming “E” subnotebook will also be a challenger. But the Aspire One, at AUD $599 for the Linux version, with a $99 cashback via redemption through Acer making it only AUD $500, and AUD $699 for the Windows XP version, also with a $99 cash back, making it $600, puts additional pressure on the Asus Eee PC.