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Feel the force, fanboy. That is the message to Linux developers from security guru and Blowfish legend Bruce Schneier in a new interview.

At Tectonic we love Firefox (and so do most of our readers). Over the course of 2007 we reviewed many of the best Firefox extensions available and now, as the year-end closes in, we offer the top-five of these we could simply not live without.

LJ Gadget Guy Shawn Powers managed to keep us busy one-upping each other in the office today -- he wanted to know who got the geekiest gift this holiday season. Of course he proved to be the geekiest of all when he went as far as producing a full video review of his gift.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Trolltech-sponsored development continues on Phonon backends. Support for saving to remote URL's in Gwenview. A "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the train clock bla in Plasma. "Switch Tabs on Hover" can now be disabled, and other refinements in Kickoff for KDE 4.0. Work on a debugger (with a SpeedCrunch-inspired interface) for KHTML. Work to support the most recent release of the Flash (version 9) multimedia plugin in Konqueror...

The Kubuntu team has decided to break from the usual schedule and release Kubuntu 8.04 without long term support, due to the release schedule for KDE 4.

At the end of our ATI Year in Review for 2006, we had stated, "next year will be a very interesting time for ATI/AMD Linux users." Looking back upon that statement, it has certainly turned out to be true, but perhaps an understatement for all of the AMD Linux work that has actually went on this year. The Catalyst Control Center was finally ported to Linux; there is now AIGLX support for use with Compiz, and the most substantial improvement being a brand new code-base for their proprietary Linux driver. Aside from their binary driver, they have developed a strong interest in better enabling the open-source community through releasing GPU documentation to the public (without NDAs!) and collaborating with Novell on the development of the RadeonHD driver. It has been one hell of a year for AMD, and in this article, we are going to look back at their twelve major driver releases from the year as well as re-benchmark all of these different versions.

How long did you think it would take for an Ubuntu-based machine to make it into Walmart, complete with Google applications scattered all over the place? Apparently it was sooner than we had expected. As I type this, I'm attempting to download a copy of the OS now so I can get a feel for just how much Google feel this Ubuntu variant is really offering.

There are a number of newcomers who migrate to Linux and then find themselves at ends with the confusion regarding restricted formats and codecs in the US. The laws regarding usage are confusing and all over the map, thus leaving many Linux distributions forced to mark them as possibly illegal to use in some countries, despite no solid evidence to actually support this outside of MPAA and RIAA rhetoric, which is hardly a court's decision.

If you've been running Linux long enough to have upgraded your system more than once, you probably have several Linux kernels lurking around your system. If you discover that a certain application no longer works for you, you can go back to a previous kernel to try to run your program. GRUB, the boot loader found in most Linux distributions, lets you choose among operating systems and kernels installed on your box. Many people, however, fear that messing with GRUB may ruin their system, because of its many esoteric options, and configuration file text that often contains no help comments. QGRUBEditor can help you view and edit the GRUB boot loader from a graphical user interface.

Find out more about Nipper, an open source network devices security auditing tool, and why companies can benefit from it.

The Asus Eee PC has already sold more than 350,000 units, over 50,000 more than the previous goal of 300,000. These numbers are huge compared to sales of Dell Ubuntu computers.

I'm a little old to believe in Santa Claus, but then again, there are some things I believe in that are even more far-fetched than Saint Nick. We'll get back to that later. It was 2:30 in the morning and I had been working for a friend, delivering some computers and helping those who received them get them set up. It had been a long night and I stopped by my "boss's house to drop off the company van and get into my own truck to go home. I was surprised to see the lights on and knowing that everyone should be in bed, I walked quietly to the front door and slowly turned the knob. It's ok, I almost live there anyway and I have a key. I work pretty close to my "boss".

No, this isn't some esoterical or philosophical musing upon the meaning of Christmas or any other day for that matter. For this instance, you can take ol' helios literally. Just don't get used to it. ;-)

College computer science students often find it difficult to get started in programming languages like C++ and Java, largley due to the disconnect between simple middle-school languages like logo and advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. To help bridge the gap, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed an OOP language to create computer animations using 3-D models, called Alice.

As the open-source movement gains momentum, patent companies are suing.

ARAHUAY, Peru - Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

Many people have created prediction lists for 2008, but I want to know what you want to happen in 2008. I will compile a list at the end of the year with the most popular/interesting suggestions.

In 2005 we started our annual AYiR (A Year in Review) articles for looking at the progress of the proprietary ATI and NVIDIA Linux display drivers over time. Now in our third year of doing this, it's time to see how NVIDIA's binary driver has panned out over the past year. NVIDIA had introduced GeForce 8 support this year as well as a few other features, but nothing major like in past years, and how has the OpenGL performance changed? With benchmarks in hand, we have the scoop for you today.

MEPIS has released SimplyMEPIS 7.0. This release contains a new desktop theme and a detailed user manual, both developed and contributed by the MEPIS community. Screenshots by The Coding Studio.

The release schedule for KDE 4 is now clear, and it will be released during the development cycle of Kubuntu 8.04. Since KDE 4 is a major change to the platform, it is not currently at one of these natural rest points so would not be suitable for long term support. Instead, due to the very high interest, development efforts will be directed towards KDE 4 and releasing Kubuntu 8.04 with the option of using either KDE 3.5 or KDE 4.