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IDC is reporting that Windows server growth hit 6.9 percent in Q4 2007, bringing it to 36.6 percent market share. Linux trounced Windows' growth at 11.6 percent to hit 12.7 percent market share. Microsoft owns the market, but Linux owns the future. Therein lies the rub of the tale behind much of Microsoft's fear and loathing of open source.

In a 2005 report the Government quango Becta showed that schools could effect considerable savings by making use of Free Open Source software such as Open Office. In their study they simply looked at “like for like” software replacement using existing networks and computers. Since this study we have seen the emergence of the new breed of ultra-portable Linux-based computers aimed squarely at the education sector and the inexorable build of Web 2 services such as Google Apps.

Joining the array of low cost Linux offerings such as the Asus Eee PC, the Everex Cloudbook , Elonux announced the Elonux One a sub 200 dollar Linux laptop targeted to go on sale in the UK starting in June. We saw similar announcements in the last couple weeks from Acer, who stated that “”Between the second and third quarters, we will have products that address ultra mobility and low-cost segments.” In addition Dell stated that it will “introduce more low-cost notebooks in Asia.” which will augment its Vostro 1000 notebook for sale in China which runs Red Flag Linux. This is a key direction for the industry as it fills out a market segment not previously addressed, particularly at this price point in the notebook computing world.

Caroline is a 2006 Volkswagen Passat, converted by a team from the Braunschweig University of Technology to be an autonomous vehicle. The car was a finalist in the legendary Darpa Grand Challenge, a US Defence Department-sponsored competition held every year or two in which driverless vehicles battle it out to see which can complete a set course in the fastest time.

Want to see what a non-Windows-based operating system developed by Microsoft looks like? If you are willing and able to sign a non-commercial, academic Shared Source license, look no further. Microsoft on March 4 made the few hundred thousand lines of source code for Singularity Version 1 available for download from its CodePlex site. Microsoft made the announcement at its Microsoft Research TechFest 2008 event in Redmond, Wash.

The Cobra programming language has been made available via open source, according to its author, Charles "Chuck" Esterbrook. Heavily influenced by Python, Cobra runs on .Net, Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris, and is said to combine productivity enhancements from a variety of languages.

I've heard of quite a few people still running Debian Sarge -- the stable version of Debian before Etch went stable in April 2007. As per Debian policy, support for what is referred to as "old stable," in this case Sarge, is slated to last for a year after the next Debian release is declared "stable" (Etch). So now we're bumping up on March 31, 2008, and Debian is telling users about the end of updates for Sarge.

The European Commission is investigating the process under which a key Microsoft document format could be adopted as an industry standard - a move that would carry significant commercial benefits for the software company. Officials at the European Commission's competition directorate have written to members of the International Organisation for Standardisation, asking how they prepared for votes in September and later this month on acceptance of Microsoft's OOXML document format as a worldwide standard. The ISO process has been widely criticised, however, with some members of national standards' bodies accusing Microsoft and its rivals of attempting to influence the vote.

The KDE community has released another update to its cutting edge KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.2 has, along with the bugfixes some new features in Plasma. The panel can now be configured to sit somewhere else than at the bottom and UI options for changing its size have been added.

Earlier this month at JBossWorld in Orlando, Florida, Linux.com had the chance to sit down with Craig Muzilla, Red Hat's new vice president of middleware, to talk about his job, the middleware marketplace, and the open source community.

Anyone who has thought that, as nice as the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child computers are for the target market of third-world children, they'd also make a lot of sense for U.S. kids too, is in good company. The mayor of Birmingham, Ala., Larry Langford, had the same thought and the result is that the city will be deploying 15,000 OLPCs to its school system.

Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie tried to clarify Microsoft's software plus services internet strategy. And guess what, it involves advertising and Yahoo!. Ozzie opened Microsoft's Mix 08 offering developers the "big picture" on a strategy he promised would culminate with massive software and service launches at Microsoft's mega Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October.

[Still sounds like they need to buy Yahoo more than want to buy Yahoo to me. - Scott]

When you want to customize the look and feel of your Linux desktop environment, you can find many resources for altering window managers and interface widgets, but working with icons has always been more of an issue. Now you can get help with icons from a new program called Tango Generator. The major Linux desktop environments (such as GNOME, KDE, and Xfce) adhere to an icon theme specification from freedesktop.org.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the service that converts hostnames and domain details into the IP addresses required for application to communicate. This article looks at the basics of DNS setup, how servers and requests are distributed, and exchanged and how to set up and keep a DNS environment running smoothly.

Cluster Resources, Inc., the developers of the Moab® family of products, today announced the first annual Moab•Con, a four-day event where industry leaders and experts will join Cluster Resources’ developers for in-depth, interactive presentations and discussions on leveraging maximized performance on their compute infrastructures.

Just when Microsoft thought it was on target with its forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser, the goalposts have moved. The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has released its latest browser standards compliance test - Acid 3 - and every browser that WaSP tested failed. IE 8 is, of course, not available for test yet. But given the abysmal performance of IE 7, Microsoft developers have a lot of work to do.

Ever wonder why The VAR Guy is so happy running Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux? Perhaps it has something to do with the true cost of spyware — an epidemic problem mostly limited to the world of Windows. So, how does spyware impact user productivity? A new report from CompTIA (the Computing Technology Industry Association) provides some clues. Here's a look.

Backing up data stored in a MySQL database is an important issue for anyone running a blog, wiki, or any Web-based application that relies on the popular database engine. Many MySQL management solutions allow you to export database data as an SQL query, but if you are looking for a dedicated MySQL backup tool, phpMyBackupPro (pMBP) is your best bet.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center is involved with a number of open-source Linux projects such as Threading Building Blocks, Moblin, PowerTOP, and the X.Org graphics driver. Intel also has vested interests in numerous other projects such as Xen and KVM. One of Intel's lesser-known projects, however, is the Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit. The Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit is a bootable CD that analyzes the BIOS or EFI on the test system to see how well it's able to work with Linux and what features are supported via the firmware. The primary purpose of this kit is for use by firmware developers, but it's also able to aide end-users in determining what BIOS features on their system will work with Linux.

Vista SP1 isn't the big improvement that Microsoft has been touting it as. Read about why Vista still does not compare to the Linux desktop.