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The organisers of the CanSecWest security conference are talking about giving attendees to this year's event a prize for hacking the two platforms, and another shot at the Mac OS, to "see which one goes first", said Dragos Ruiu, the principal organiser of CanSecWest.

This whole cloud-computer effort makes sense for Google to pursue, if it hasn't already grown its own cloud OS in secret. Google already has server-based versions of Google Docs, which duplicate the functions of Microsoft's Office software. However, the Google Apps aren't always as full-featured or heavy-duty as Microsoft's software.

If Linus Torvalds stepped away from his position as coordinator of the Linux kernel, it is unlikely many people would notice, according to the man himself.

IT research company predicts that in just four short years, more than 3/4 of all software will be open source.

Although KOffice has its admirers, in many people's minds, it runs a poor second to OpenOffice.org. However, some European developers expect that situation to change, and to encourage that change, they have created KOfficeSource, a company incorporated in Germany. The company plans to offer support and training not only for KOffice, but also for Open Document Format, and programming using the Qt toolkit. The company's business plan highlights its founders' hopes that KDE-related technologies will become mainstream, and illustrates the current level of acceptance of free software tools in business.

This is aimed at beginners - or at least, at non-developers. Every so often, we forget to mention the “easy” stuff like this, and people get confused, or - like in this case - downright frightened by warnings like these: ... (continues with screenshots & explanations)

Maverick programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham is challenging all comers to beat him after finally releasing a working version of his Lisp update – called Arc. Best known for his pioneering early 1990s work on web development and spam filters, Graham announced in 2001 he was working on an economic version of Lisp, one of the oldest languages still in regular use for production systems - with Cobol and Fortran - that’s used in artificial intelligence programming and considered something for “serious” developers.

Subtitles may not mean much for the English-speaking part of the world, but for the rest of us, they are the difference between truly enjoying a movie or just watching the screen, trying to decipher the events. While Windows has a nice variety of tools to manipulate subtitles, Linux applications too can accomplish such tasks. From editing to ripping to converting, here is a list of some useful tools.

I contacted the Hotmail support staff (and for the first time since 1997, I actually got an answer) about the matter. Me: Why, exactly, is “Full” disabled if one masks “Win” as the OS in the User Agent string, considering that Firefox doesn’t use any Windows subsystem other than the TCP/IP stack and GDI? On Windows XP, hiding the fact that I’m using Windows in the UA string disables “Full”, while masquerading as Firefox for Windows under Linux X86-64 (and a 64-bit build of Firefox) “Full” works very well. This is their short answer: Hotmail Staff : Mitch, after reviewing the information you provided, I determined that Microsoft Product Support Services Team could best address your issue. They are tasked to provide all the information you need to be able to configure correctly your Windows Live Hotmail through Outlook Express. Yes, you’ve read that correctly: since Hotmail Full won’t work under Firefox for Linux, configure Outlook Express to access your account.

If you've dabbled even a little bit with security matters, you know that giving root rights or the root password to a common user is a bad idea. But what do you do if a user has a valid need to do something that absolutely requires root rights? The answer is simple: use sudo to grant the user the needed permissions without letting him have the root password, and limit access to a minimum.

This document describes how to set up the Mandriva Directory Server (MDS) on Debian Etch. The resulting system provides a full-featured office server for small and medium companies - easy to administer via the web-based Mandriva Management Console (MMC).

Krita isn't really going to kill anything or anyone. What it will do is meet most of the needs of users who want a modern, sophisticated native paint and image-editing application for Linux. It was designed from the ground up for graphics professionals.

Not every proprietary program can drive a person crazy, right? Some, like Norton Ghost, are superb tools for anyone to use. But, the fact that these tools are proprietary can drive open source fanatics up a wall. It’s not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it’s a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it’s the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keeps the user experience confined to…well, being the user. That’s enough to drive any developer crazy.

In the wake of Sun's planned purchase of MySQL, the open source systems management company Hyperic must be high on most people's list of potential acquisitions in the future. Co-founder and CEO Javier Soltero talks about Hyperic's origins, the importance of its community, and what the future holds.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution now includes virtualisation software Parallels in its partner repository. The move by Canonical, commercial sponsors of Ubuntu Linux, is a first for Ubuntu as Parallels is a commercial package and not free to use. However, by including Parallels in the partner repository Ubuntu users are able to easily install it should they want to use it. Installing Parallels using the Ubuntu package management tools will make it much simpler for users to install the software rather than installing from the command line.

Every now and then, someone suggests that Debian GNU/Linux should be more commercial. To further this goal, some create derivative distros like Linspire, Ubuntu, or Xandros, or organizations like the stillborn DCC Alliance.

Linux Expo kicks off three days of seminars and a weekend full of expo floor activities

Storing backups on optical media such as DVD-R discs suffers from two major drawbacks: DVD discs are easy to scratch, and the media itself degrades after a while. You can deal with the scratching issue by careful handing of the media, but even expensive media becomes unreadable over time. Dvdisaster aims to help you recover the information off scratched and aged media.

"Work continues to progress well but I've hit a few snags," noted Matthew Dillon, referring to the ongoing development of his HAMMER filesystem. He began by highlighting a number of problems with the current design, then adding, "everything else now works, and works well, including and most especially the historical access features."

This is just a reminder that the Demonstrating Opensource Health Care Solutions Conference (DOHCS) '08 conference will be taking place this Friday February 8th at the Westin LAX Los Angeles. This event brings together many of the brightest minds in Open Source health care to discuss and evangelize the latest and greatest happenings with case studies, technical looks and more. This years event features both a business and technical track.You can find out more information by visiting http://www.dohcs.org . LinuxMedNews readers can pre-register (select Purchase Tickets) to attend the event for free by using the coupon code (not promocode) "OPENHEALTH" at checkout. Hope to see you there!