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Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files. For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

[Not directly related to open source, but the whole idea of metered broadband would/will have a dramatic effect on everything we do — steve]

If you happened to have read the update on my previous blog, I was contacted by KDE4 developer Aaron J. Seigo. In the following screencast he provided you can see how you can create desktop icons in KDE4 and judge for yourself whether you need to be a rocket scientist or not (as some people have claimed) to get your "Old Skool" desktop back.

With the new Firefox 3 set for release tomorrow (Tuesday June 16), tens of millions of Mozilla Firefox users on Windows will get an update notification directly from Mozilla to upgrade. But what about Linux users? Is there a conspiracy to keep Firefox 3 from them? Most Linux users do not get their Firefox browser directly from Mozilla, but rather get it from their Linux distribution.

This article will try to provide a contrast between ‘the Debian way’ and ‘the Slackware way’ when it comes to distribution management. The idea is to really attempt to illuminate people on why Debian, and many other distributions may not be ideal, and why a classic approach such as Slackware still has merit in this world of modern feature-crazy distributions. I start this article knowing full well that it will offend people, even so, I think this needs to be said.

In breaking the teraflop barrier, Los Alamos National Laboratories relied on Moab Workload Manager and TORQUE Resource Manager* from Cluster Resources when running the milestone LINPACK Benchmark on Roadrunner.

Linux-based guitar effects processors haven't exactly been flourishing recently. Until recently, the guitar FX processors page at linux-sound.org listed twelve projects, of which the most recent maintenance date is 2006. Clearly, not a flourishing domain for Linux audio developers. Not that Linux lacks realtime effects processing capabilities: Pd can be pressed into any audio service imaginable, the JACK Rack can be configured for LADSPA-based effects, but they are not organized and optimized specifically for guitarists. However, a thirteenth entry has joined the collection at linux-sound.org, and this entry is most definitely organized, optimized, and intended for guitarists.

And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd...Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP. Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.

Faced with a slow economy, tight travel budgets and rising energy costs, some open source fans may be forced to choose between OSCON (July 21-25, Portland, Oregon) and LinuxWorld Expo (August 4-7, San Francisco). For Ubuntu Linux fans, both shows are packed with Ubuntu info. So, is it possible to choose between the two, The VAR Guy wonders.

I have been tracking the Debian release goals progress for a while now, through bug-squashing parties and using various iterations of wiki pages. It's time to write down some thoughts. First of all, I think the concept of release goals is a fantastic idea. It may be one of the most important conceptual moves in Debian of late. It allows developers to implement distribution-wide changes without having to negotiate with every package maintainer individually and without having to go through the vicious no-change-without-policy / no-policy-without-established-practice maze.

The Fedora Project is the free community release from enterprise Linux giant Red Hat. It's a testing ground really for a lot of new ideas which usually end up in the company's commercial Red Hat Enterprise products. I've used Fedora in the past on and off but for some reason it's never quite stuck with me. I've often found it buggy and a little too unstable due to it's experimental nature.

SiteBar is a Web browser bookmark synchronization solution. One feature that sets SiteBar apart from many others is the ability to set up your own bookmark server, which keeps the whole system under your control. You can also use SiteBar through a third-party server that offers membership levels ranging from a free, ad-supported "basic" level up to an "admin" level that costs 9.99 Euros (about $15.50) per month. While SiteBar is useful for individuals, it is even more useful for corporate or other groups because it allows you to have many trees of bookmarks and have a project group collectively modify bookmarks for their project. (NOTE: Other bookmark synchronization solutions have been covered recently on linux.com.)

One of the 50 most powerful computers ever built has been assembled by IBM, but thisis an HPC with a difference: it's a dual-booting device which runs Windows HPC Server 2008 as well as Linux.

The use of multimedia content has increased dramatically over the last few years, but people with limited or no vision have not been able to fully enjoy the benefits of these advances. Discover a new multimedia browsing accessibility tool that provides people with visual impairments a level of control more comparable to a sighted person using a mouse.

Linux powers US Navy warships and Soccer playing robots. Who does Red hat choose as an award winner for Open Source Innovations?

An early look at Amarok 2 alpha. New features, interface, screenshots, what is the status of the development and how it behaves.

Phone makers who adopt Google's Android platform may see a 20 percent drop in manufacturing costs just from saving on software costs, according to Android's co-founder. Andy Rubin, who is also Google's director of mobile platforms, told the press Monday that software costs represent about 20 percent of a phone's manufacturing costs, so a manufacturer would theoretically save on that by adopting the free and open source Android platform.

Just why did developers pull the privacy button from the final release of Firefox 3 this late in the game?

The Bordeaux Group announces the release of Bordeaux for Linux 1.0 with support for Microsoft Office 2000, Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Internet Explorer and the Steam gaming platform.

Ryan Bagueros set up North-by-South to link top free software hackers in Latin America with US companies wanting to commission code. In this interview, he talks about how to create and manage distributed development teams, the advantages of using programmers based in Latin America, and why free software is so damned successful in that region.

This document describes how to install the Internet Explorer (different versions) on Ubuntu 8.04 with IEs4Linux. Some users - especially web developers/designers need different versions of the Internet Explorer to test their pages.