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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.

LifeType is a full-featured GPL blogging platform designed for use with a MySQL database and PHP. You'll need access to a server in order to properly install and use LifeType, but the installation is easy with LifeType's wizard, which can even create your MySQL database and all the tables you need, automatically. In addition to support for all the "standard" blog features, such as pinging, trackbacks, commenting, mobile blogging, and RSS feeds, LifeType is perfect for site owners who want to administer multiple blogs and users through one back end. Even if you have only one blog and one user, you'll appreciate the features and flexibility of LifeType.

When you think of open source, you probably don't have specialist areas like Business Process Management (BPM) in mind, but Ismael Ghalimi, founder of the open source BPM company Intalio, thinks you should. He talks about Intalio's origins, how it uses open source and what he describes as its “Digg for Product Management" community programme.

Microsoft may be able to brow-beat the world into using Vista on fully functional PCs, but if they walk away from XP on simple, cheap computers and cede the market to Linux, they are a dead man walking.

We've seen the reasons given by the Free Software Law Center as to why Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, or OSP, provides no assurance for FOSS developers. But what about everyone else? Here's an issue that affects everyone, not just FOSS developers, as explained by the Free Software Foundation South America in a long discussion of OOXML and why NBs should not approve it: -- It carries a number of dependencies on earlier Microsoft decisions, not all of which are part of the already-huge specification, and Microsoft's promise covers only fully-compliant implementations. But Microsoft Office isn't fully compliant with the OOXML (Office Open XML) specification, therefore those who seek interoperability with Microsoft's software won't be covered by its promise. ---

"Now that we are (presumably) approaching the next merge window, can I ask what use (if any) will you be making of the linux-next tree? Alternatively, is there any information you want from it?" Stephen Rothwell asked regarding the tree he started maintaining last month for tracking upcoming stable merges.

Red Hat’s annual revenues now top $520 million, according to financial results released today, and the company is charting a course to $1 billion. Sounds wonderful. But there’s a bigger story here: Red Hat’s financial momentum will pave the way for more open source IPOs.

Welcome to the next step in studying for the Linux certification exam 301 or just build your skills on Linux systems administration. In this tutorial you’ll walk though searching your LDAP tree and using the command-line tool, and learn to set up Microsoft Outlook to query your LDAP tree.

OpenOffice.org has released the latest edition of its open source productivity suite, with refinements to further close the gap on Microsoft and enable migration from MS Office. The OpenOffice.org 2.4 database, Base, now supports MS-Access 2007, while capabilities for MySQL, Oracle JDBC and native HSQL databases have been improved.

Not every distro out there is well known. One can even go so far as to declare that some of them have active opposition against them. It is these little guys that do not always have the coverage that they deserve. So starting with this blog post, I will raise awareness of an interesting journey begun by Neowin forum members.