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The New York Times has a great write-up of the continued rapid growth of Red Hat. Despite the looming recession, Red Hat is predicting 30 percent revenue growth in the coming year, to more than half a billion dollars. For a few years, Mike has been talking about how to make money while giving away infinite goods, and Red Hat could probably be the poster child for his argument. Despite the fact that virtually all of its "products" are available for free on the Internet, Red Hat is still convincing companies to pay it hundreds of millions of dollars.

A set of Eclipse plug-ins that allow you to develop Web 2.0 applications in EGL without JavaScript skills.

Summary: I tried to activate Windows XP Home and it didn't work. Thus began a phone saga with Microsoft support, ending in failure. Until I fixed it myself. I'm trying to activate Windows XP Home. I've just performed a clean setup, and Windows now won't let me even login until I activate. The network card has apparently not yet been configured, so I can't activate over the 'net. When I do the phone activation, the "installation ID" I'm supposed to give the Microsoft representative is blank. What do I do? That question wasn't posed by just any reader. This time it was me. And after an hour and a half on the phone, I was no further along. And yet, left to my own devices I had the machine activated in about 10 minutes. This is not good. Not at all. In fact, it's downright depressing.

The Linux kernel is a funny thing. A new kernel should mean increased functionality, but for me and my old-and-getting-older machines, I only seem to lose functionality with upgraded kernels. I hadn't updated Debian Lenny in a while on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450), and when I did it today, I noticed a new kernel being added to the system: 2.6.24-1. I didn't think about the new kernel when I next booted into Lenny, but when I did, I soon discovered that my sound card didn't work anymore. I looked at all the settings, tweaked a bit here and there, but still nothing.

Love it or hate it, anyone who runs Ubuntu has at least heard of Automatix. This program made it possible for any Ubuntu user to easily add a host of new programs and media codices to a desktop. Now, however, Automatix's developers are being pulled away to other projects, so they have announced that they will no longer be working on their popular software installation program.

Sesja Linuksowa (translated as Linux Session) is a cyclical event for Open Source fans, especially GNU/Linux. Its prime aim is to enable enthusiasts of this system knowledge sharing, experience exchange and wide discussion on the newest trends in this field. 5th , jubilee, edition of Sesja Linuksowa will be held in Wrocław on 5-6 of April, 2008. We planned series of lectures, run by undisputed worldwide authorities on the subject. This year, our focus will be on Kernel and servers’ administration matters.

Photo buffs who are fond of open source software would do well to look at blueMarine. Right now, the free, cross-platform application's strength is image management, but it is on its way to becoming a complete workflow tool. Its cataloging features are robust, its architecture is extensible, and it takes some intriguing new approaches. Java consultant Fabrizio Giudici started the project in 2003, but it languished as he grew frustrated with the limitations of the Swing toolkit. In 2006, he rebuilt the code using the newly released NetBeans platform, and hasn't looked back since.

Once again Groovy scripting has proven to be a huge time saver when it comes to putting RESTful APIs in front of valuable services and data. The server-side code in this article can also support any other features that you want to add on.

"Here is a new flash file system developed by Nokia engineers with help from the University of Szeged. The new file-system is called UBIFS, which stands for UBI file system. UBI is the wear-leveling/ bad-block handling/volume management layer which is already in mainline (see drivers/mtd/ubi)," began Artem Bityutskiy. He explained that UBIFS is stable and "very close to being production ready", aiming to offer improved performance and scalability compared to JFFS2 by implementing write-back caching, and storing a file-system index rather than rebuilding it each time the media is mounted. The write-back cache implementation claims to offer around a 100 time improvement in write performance over JFFS2.

There is enormous overlapping jurisdiction between national standardization body responsibilities and those of antitrust regulators. There is a pretty fair argument that JTC 1 should put DIS-29500 on ice until the antitrust proceeding is concluded, in order to avoid the possibility of inconsistent decisions.

Red Hat's profit rose 7 per cent during its fiscal fourth quarter, with a healthy bump in revenue offset by the open source software distributor's increased sales, marketing, and R&D expenses. In Red Hat's first quarter under new CEO James Whitehurst, the company earned $22m, compared to $20.3m in the same period last year.

Earlier this month we took a look at the NVIDIA Quadro FX1700, which is one of NVIDIA's mid-range workstation graphics cards that boasts 512MB of video memory, support for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), OpenGL 2.1, and the power consumption for this PCI Express graphics card is less than 50 Watts. In the tests that followed, the FX1700 had performed quite well at the workstation-oriented SPECViewPerf benchmark and we had compared its Ubuntu Linux performance to Solaris Express and Microsoft Windows Vista. The NVIDIA Linux driver with the FX1700 had the best performance and it ended up being a nice graphics card for around $500 USD.

Adobe today changed everything again with the launch of Photoshop Express, a new Web-based application that allows you to edit photos in a Web-browser. The application was launched in beta form yesterday and is heavily dependent on Adobe’s flash technology.

"It's not over until it's over," is a classic aphorism that Yogi Berra is reputed to have coined. He couldn't have been more right when it comes to Microsoft's quest to transform its Office 2007 file formats into a broadly recognized international standard. With less than 24 hours to go before the cut off for nations to change their votes in the great contest to see if the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will grant Office Open XML (OOXML) standards status, the playing field is shifting like the bases on a sandlot baseball diamond.

Red Hat, the Linux software company, gave a nice welcome present Thursday to its new chief executive, James Whitehurst. The company, which distributes Linux and other open-source software, reported that its quarterly sales grew 27 percent and earnings slightly surpassed analysts’ consensus estimate. The company also presented an upbeat outlook for its just-started fiscal year, predicting growth of another 30 percent. In after-hours trading, Red Hat shares rose nearly 5 percent.

Ploticus is a throwback to the days when Unix programs did one thing, and did it well, using a minimum of system resources. Its SourceForge.net page hints at this orientation by describing Ploticus as "non-interactive" software for "just-in-time graph generation." How useful it is depends on what you want to do, whether you use the settings that come with the program or define your own, and your willingness to master a lengthy -- if well-documented -- set of options.

For a year now Intel has been flaunting its 45nm "Penryn" processor core with its SSE4 instruction set, High-K metal gate transistors, and 6MB of L2 cache. Most of the Penryn media attention has been focused upon the desktop Core 2 processors, but in January at the 2008 Consumer Electronic Show Intel had rolled out sixteen new products and a dozen of them were mobile oriented. Among these Intel innovations were the first mobile Penryn processors. These mobile Intel 45nm CPUs accompanied the Penryn desktop line-up that first began in November of 2007 with Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and then continued with several new Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo models. On the server front, the Penryn equivalent is Harpertown and those quad-core Xeon processors have been shipping for the same length of time.

In a few days the fate of Microsoft's Office Open XML will be known - whether it will be accepted as a second ISO standard for documents. Two years ago, the Open Document Format was ratified as a standard. Plenty of politicking has gone on over the past month or so and it makes for some interesting reading.

"We believe there is tremendous opportunity for Red Hat over the next decade and that we're still in the early stages," Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said during the company's fiscal 2008 year end conference call. "We are pleased with our fiscal 2008 results of surpassing $500 million in revenue and we are now squarely focused on our next goal, to become the first billion dollar revenue open source vendor."

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced the development of a new "Security" exam elective for its LPIC-3 certification program.