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The Hans Reiser murder trial resumed here Wednesday with the defendant fumbling on the witness stand. "Are you just making these things up?" Alameda County prosecutor Paul Hora asked at one point. Hans Reiser underwent a second day of grueling cross-examination by Hora who claims the Linux programmer killed his wife, Nina Reiser, amid a bitter divorce and custody battle over their two young children. The defendant had spent nearly five days on the stand under direct examination before it came to an abrupt halt at noon Tuesday.

The new software lets content providers encrypt FLV and F4V audio and video files and then set access policies for them. Basically, DRM technology is now being applied to Flash and broadcasting firms will now be able to enforce access requirements and expiration dates to content, even after it has been distributed, to make sure it isn’t reused or passed on without permission.

Making changes to your existing infrastructure is fraught with decisions. What's the best way to consolidate servers? How can we better manage the resources we have? How will the changes we're planning impact service and performance? Sandbox environments only provide theoretical information. Vendor solutions can number into the dozens, so it's easy to get overwhelmed. The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) understands that, so for more than 30 years it has been amassing a huge database of knowledge so you can learn from the successes -- and failures -- of others.

How do you handle requests from your employer that you ethically disagree with? Mass emails, software piracy, content stealing, etc.

[I figured since he asked for input I would let you all give him some - Scott]

For far longer than any of its developers would care to recall, Wine, the best program to use in Linux to run Windows applications, has been in development. Now, at long last, Wine 1.0 is scheduled to be released.

An experimental new design for Linux's virtual memory system would turn a large amount of system RAM into a fast RAM disk with automatic sync to magnetic media

Dr Stephen Lucey joined Becta in 2000 and is now their Executive Director (Strategic Technologies). Becta is the Government organisation with oversight of all things ICT in UK schools. Apart from being a general advocate for ICT in schools, it is charged with providing strategic leadership, technical direction and advice on obtaining best value.

Given this reality, how is it possible for Linux ever to be substantially less expensive than Windows? (Over the typical corporate time period.) - Anton Phildor (poster on ZDNet)

The security vendor has warned of multiple critical vulnerabilities that affect its products as well as various iterations of Linux-archiving software.

With the final release 167 days away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features: view multiple pages in Writer, notes in the margin, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, Solver in Calc, new visual theme in Calc, native tables in Impress, more columns in Calc, error bars in charts, performance improvements, real native Aqua Mac support, and more.

Tired of all the knee-jerk banter from fanboys about whose operating system is the most secure? So are the organizers of the CanSecWest security conference, which will be held in Vancouver later this month. And with a contest awarding as much as $25,000 worth of prizes, they're likely to breathe fresh life into a stale debate.

There is no shortage of hype around developing for the Apple iPhone. Moving beyond the hype there are also real tools, among them an open source tool from Ajax vendor Aptana. In a standing room–only session at the iPhone Summit segment of the AjaxWorld conference, Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing at Aptana, captivated the audience with his demonstration of how easy it is to develop Ajax applications for the iPhone.

For open source, a choice between Google and Microsoft is a false choice. Yet that’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt is offering, as when he claims a Microsoft-Yahoo combination might “break the Internet” or that the two might act against the openness of the Internet. It’s a false choice, in part, because neither Google nor Microsoft can come to the argument with clean hands. Google’s open source efforts are mainly done under Apache licenses, which don’t require they be shared. It does not support the AGPL.

In this article, the first of a two-part series covering eBay's use of Eclipse, we look at eBay's architecture and how eBay has tailored Eclipse to suit its architecture. The article will focus on eBay, but you can use the lessons here to tailor Eclipse to your system's architecture.

Alcatel-Lucent claims that the evolution toward Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Realtime technology, a major component of the recently announced Red Hat MRG, will enable it to strengthen reliability, scalability, security and stability throughout the lifecycle of its SME portfolio of voice, data, mobility and collaboration products. "Alcatel-Lucent will benefit from Red Hat's hardware certification program on its next-generation hardware platforms, and from Red Hat's extended support cycles including security updates."

The Objective Observer wrote what appeared to be a logical argument from which he drew what he claims is a reasonable comparison... Open Source is like Terrorism. Riiiiight. Well, I decided to respectfully respond to his commentary with some specific examples of how his conclusions are inaccurate. I'm assuming he got hit with a lot of flames but I didn't want to add to it.

Microsoft has broken from its past and is supporting the Eclipse Foundation. In a speech at the EclipseCon 2008 conference here March 19, Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s chief open-source advocate, delivered a morning keynote and said that Microsoft will support two key Eclipse technologies, and he hinted that there may be more to come. Ramji is the director of platform technology strategy at Microsoft.

Since purchasing Suse Linux from its German parent in 2004, Novell has engineered an amazing turn-around in its business model. Prior to 2004, the world expected this proprietary networking company to slowly evolve its flagship NetWare product and equally slowly disappear into the murk of Microsoft’s marketing might.

I get sent a lot of material on OOXML by people around the world, and I presume I’m not the only recipient. A lot of it is, frankly, rather funny, since it assumes that the people reading it won’t ever double check what they’re being told or compare it to methods of past disinformation campaigns. As I’ve said before, the whole OOXML story will probably make several wonderful business school case studies and maybe even one or two from law schools. Anyway, the phrase that caught my eye last night in one of the presentations I was sent was “No IPR problems!”.

For Linux distribution vendors, right now is proving to be an awkward time for them as they decide which ATI driver will ship as the default choice in their spring distribution refresh. The problem used to be whether to ship a binary-only driver in the distribution in order to provide "out of the box" support for all available graphics hardware, but on the ATI/AMD side the software distributors are now facing the challenge of which open-source driver they should call the de facto standard. In this article we are briefly looking at the matter of the xf86-video-ati vs. xf86-video-radeonhd drivers, the highly political issue of AtomBIOS, and what some of the popular Linux distributions are deciding to use this spring.