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This is part 6 of Ulrich Drepper's "What every programmer should know about memory"; this part contains the second half of section 6, covering the optimization of multi-threaded code. The first half of this section was published in part 5.

The Economist asks,Will Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites transform advertising? Good question, but it's the wrong one. The right question is,Can we equip customers to become independent of sellers and their controlling intentions— Including the unwanted crap that constitutes far too much of the world's advertising? For the good of both sellersand buyers?read more

Another long-time Windows user has reached an inflection point. Mike Perkowski, a 30-year veteran of business and technology journalism, is ready to scrap his Windows PC. The veteran of PC magazine, CMP Media and Ziff Davis Media suffered a Windows meltdown days ago. Now COO of Microcast Communications, Mike's days with Windows appear over. But should he go with Mac OS or perhaps even Linux? Here's his horror story. He welcomes your advice on what to do next.

Nice new things come with Linux in them.

New Ideas Corp. and Nuxified.org have announced a partnership to offer community-level software support for Linux-preloaded PCs from C3PC.

Access Control Lists (ACLs) allow you to provide different levels of access to files and folders for different users.

Many people still question whether Linux will ever make it fully into mainstream computer acceptance. A $199 computer now available on a major superstore's shelves just in time for Christmas might change all that. Anyone who wants a computer to just to send email and instant messages and watch YouTube videos should like the Everex gPC, which is powered by a nifty Linux distribution called gOS.

Let’s lighten things up with a gadget post. You may have seen that Everex launched a $200 computer that runs Linux. It looks like Wal-Mart sold out of them, but not to worry: more are on the way. Why should you be interested? Well, instead of Windows, it comes installed with gOS, which is a version of Ubuntu that is customized to work well with web-based tools from Google, Flickr Facebook, and Skype. When I heard that, I had to order one of these PCs to check it out for myself.

Red Hat plans to begin a private beta test of new open-source messaging software next month, hoping to shake up a section of the server market currently dominated by proprietary rivals and give the Linux seller a new revenue source. Server messaging software's purpose is--bear with me here for a moment--sending messages. That may sound obvious, but doing it reliably and in high volume is essential to large-scale networked business tasks such as trading stocks, where a brokerage that can place buy and sell orders faster than a rival can make real money.

The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new spin, the Everything Spin. Included in this spin are all the packages available at the time Fedora 8 was released.

A bit of a different view -- hardware doesn't matter so much as the choice of what you put on it.

We are excited to make the final preliminary announcement of Freedomware Gamefest 2007, a first international online event featuring a multitude of tournaments as part of a single happening and with games that are only Free Software.

Desktop customization in Linux is very flexible; from the ultra-modern KDE and GNOME window managers to with the likes of Fluxbox and AfterStep, there's a Linux desktop to suit everyone. Jack Wallen covers some of your Linux desktop options.

We are pleased to announce the 10th Anniversary Linux Symposium will be held from July 23 ~ 26, 2008 in Ottawa, Canada. The Symposium will also feature multiple keynote presentations, in depth tutorials, birds of a feather sessions, papers on the most current topics in Linux and Open Source, mini summits open to related Linux and Open Source projects to be held in the day(s) before the Symposium and speakers from outside the industry who will share their experiences with Linux and Open Source and its impact.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I am using an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Supporters of the open access movement (OA), the open-source-inspired community that promotes free access to academic research, are disappointed but not discouraged by the defeat of a bill that would have required research published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States to be available to the public. Instead, they see the bill as an important step in raising awareness about OA among American legislators and the general public. Nor do they rule out the eventual passage of the OA provisions.

Mozilla ruffled some penguin feathers last month when the organization revealed that Firefox 3 would get an extensive visual refresh to maximize integration with Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. After the decision was widely criticized by Linux enthusiasts, Mozilla reversed its position and decided to revisit Linux theming. Work on the new Linux theme has progressed rapidly in the past month, and the earliest pieces are now included in the latest Firefox 3 nightly build. We took a good long look at the new theme—called Gnomestripe—and we like what we see.

There are three well-known open source clients for managing PostgreSQL databases: psql, pgAdmin, and phpPgAdmin. If you use Postgres in a collaborative team, however, you should get to know phpPgAdmin, which is expressly designed for such environments. It lets users and administrators create user accounts, databases, tables, sequences, functions, and triggers. PhpPgAdmin is a Web-based application written in PHP that can manage one or more PostgreSQL databases. It is 100% compatible with PostgreSQL. It performs all the standard Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements. It can back up and restore an entire cluster, and can manage a Slony replication cluster, all in an easy-to-understand interface.

Do you ever get tired of listening to gamers who insist that all the best games are for consoles or Windows, so why bother with GNU/Linux? Do you have colleagues who maintain that GNU/Linux is suitable only for serious work, and that games are frivolous and unimportant? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people go on about how expensive games are to produce, and how they just couldn’t possibly work under a GNU license. My two favorite genres of computer game are graphical adventure games (GAGs) and computer role-playing games (CRPGs). For this article, I’ve chosen to focus on free software CRPGs currently available for GNU/Linux.

Linux has already permanently changed the enterprise desktop landscape, and is set to grow further, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The report, How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System, published this week, predicted that the days of ever more strict standardisation on the Windows platform are effectively over. Linux will only become a stronger force in the enterprise, according to Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray.