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RTTS tests and monitors mission-critical applications to help companies prevent failures that could shut down operations. To do that, it combines open source tools with its own custom-developed interface and offers a software-as-a-service solution that proves the adage "necessity is the mother of invention." Bill Hayduk, founder and CEO of RTTS, says of open source software, "In the late '90s, a lot of the stuff out there was kind of clunky and not mature." By the turn of the century, though, "as it became more mature and adaptable, we started adopting a significant amount of it.

It was recently pointed out that most of the x86 architecture patches had been merged into the mainline 2.6.25 kernel, except for the kgdb patches. Linus Torvalds replied, "I won't even consider pulling it unless it's offered as a separate tree, not mixed up with other things. At that point I can give a look."

In the past we have examined OggConvert and Thoggen, two GUI tools for simple encoding or transcoding video into free Ogg formats. But if you are interested in codecs other than Theora and Dirac, you have a lot more options to choose from. Let's consider two utilities that advertise both ease-of-use and quality: RippedWire targets DVD ripping and conversion specifically, and WinFF, which can convert DVD content and other video sources.

February 11th, 2008 will see the Florida Linux Show (www.floridalinuxshow.com), a one-day event aimed at business people and systems administrators who are trying to learn about the latest in Free and Open Source trends. The event will be held at the University of North Florida, University Center at Jacksonville, and the admission charge is ten dollars.

Terra Soft today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 for Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5, and IBM System p. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a popular derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), YDL v6.0 offers enterprise quality for the home user. .

Domainkeys is "a method of e-mail authentication. Unlike some other methods, it offers almost end-to-end integrity from a signing to a verifying Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). In most cases the signing MTA acts on behalf of the sender, and the verifying MTA on behalf of the receiver. DomainKeys is specified in Historic RFC 4870, which is obsoleted by Standards Track RFC 4871, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures." according to the wikipedia. So why a how to on it when there is DKIM? Well domainkeys is still actively being used and is more widely deployed than DKIM, the developer Yahoo still uses it to sign and verify mail although they are contributers to the DKIM standard.

Last Friday 4Front Technologies had released the binaries and source-code to OSS 4.0 Build 1013. This new build of the Open Sound System brings two major changes, which include the full source code now being available for the M-Audio Revolution and Delta sound card drivers, and a beta driver for the Sound Blast X-Fi series from Creative Labs. While earlier Sound Blaster generations have worked quite well with ALSA and OSS, the Creative X-Fi series is a black sheep under Linux. The X-Fi support that Creative Labs has provided to the Linux community has been abominable and support via ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) has yet to go anywhere while support for the complete X-Fi series via OSS is just starting to emerge. Interestingly though, Creative had provided the register documentation and other code to 4Front Technologies for this new "sbxfi" driver.

Apple's much-touted new operating system, OS X Leopard, is in some ways worse than Windows Vista, says the founder of the Linux open source project, Linus Torvalds.

The atool package is a collection of Perl scripts that allows you to handle many different archive formats and compression schemes using a single command-line interface. Atool uses other tools behind the scenes to perform the heavy lifting. With atool, you can handle any archive without having to remember what command-line tool to use to expand it and which options that particular tool expects.

Sunbird is a calendar application built by the people at the Mozilla Foundation. It s entirely standalone: it doesn't require the bulk of another application to manage all of your appointments and events.

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.

The LiMo Foundation has announced the first release of its mobile Linux platform. The foundation is one of several industry consortia seeking to create a standardized approach to Linux-based handsets. Its main rival at the moment is the Linux Phone Standards Forum, which is focused on creating shared, open specifications. The members of LiMo, by contrast, have taken the approach of creating a shared, open platform upon which they can build proprietary applications. The Lips Forum released its first set of specifications in December of last year.

The U.S. Army will eventually be switching entirely over to Linux. Once the Government and its institutions embrace Linux, how long until the people embrace it as well?

What if Yahoo's main value isn't its search engine or its advertising business, but the openness that makes it more Net-native and hacker-friendly than Microsoft? Does Microsoft understand the role this same openness is in large part to credit for Google's success as well?

Learn to “shred" XML documents into relational tables through annotated XML schema decomposition or XMLTABLE Decomposition. This article reviews the two methods of decomposing XML data including, how to use the XMLTABLE function for decomposition.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz recently after it was announced that OpenOffice 3 was due in September. It seems, however, most people still aren’t aware of what’s in store.

On January 17 of this year the first beta release of Renoise 1.9.1 was announced. Along with new features and fixes for its Windows and OSX versions, this release includes the first version of Renoise for Linux. This is rather significant news: Renoise is a popular program, with an active community of developers and users in the Win/Mac music worlds, and a native Linux release has been a community priority. The wait is over, so let's see (and hear) what Renoise brings to the Linux audio software party.

If all goes according to plan then MySpace will finally open its platform to developers on Tuesday, in keeping with plans announced last October. Details are vague but the youf social networking arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire has at least confirmed the platform will support Google's OpenSocial interface. The timing couldn't be worse. Besides lagging pimply faced rival Facebook's decision to open up its platform to developers in May 2007, the move comes at a time of apparent declining interest in social networking. A bit like the Citizen's Band (CB) radio fad in the 1980s, the novelty appears to be wearing off now people have discovered its limited usefulness.

The Southern California Linux Expo continues to prepare and to add activities for this weekend's event.

[I can't wait to go! - Scott]

Like many VoIP telephony companies, Junction Networks uses Asterisk and other open source software to provide its customers with highly customizable VoIP service. Junction has been able to migrate its business model from a conference bridge service provider to a full-fledged telephone services company largely because of the flexibility and lower capital requirements of open source. "We're a completely bootstrapped company," says Mike Oeth, founder and CEO. "We were never locked into a business plan that was sold to investors." He says Junction is successful because it has been able to follow its customers' desires with open source.