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No matter whether you are working on an article, an academic paper, or a novel, research is a crucial part of the writing process. And as with any research, you need a place to save your notes, ideas, relevant links, and text snippets. While there are tools like Basket Note Pads and the Zotero Firefox extension, wouldn't it be nice if you could store and manage your stuff directly from within OpenOffice.org? This is not only doable, but also easy to implement using just a Base database and a macro.

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher suggested in his article, WGA failure highlights major flaw in Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy, that Microsoft needs a new "anti-piracy" strategy. I not only agree that they need a new strategy, I'll even go so far as to help them craft it.

Right after the Court of First Instance announced its verdict Monday upholding the EU Commission's finding that Microsoft abused its monopoly, our own Sean Daly did an interview with the following: Georg Greve of FSFE, Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba, and Carlo Piana, their lawyer of record in the case. It's a delight. Here's the audio [Ogg and MP3], and we have a transcript too, thanks to the tireless Ciaran O'Riordan, who did three-quarters of it, and Sean, who did the rest.

Linux users in the United Kingdom could face a greater threat from Microsoft than previously thought, but experts agree that British open source users are in far less danger than US users from Microsoft's claim that open source software infringes its patents.

When I talk to organization X (fill in your favorite health care entity, government or medical society) they never fail to utter the dreaded statement:"We are vendor neutral." followed by a dramatic long pause.

At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner. In his opening keynote at the third annual Gartner Open Source Summit here Sept. 19, titled "The Gartner Open Source Scenario for 2007: The risks and rewards for mainstream IT," Driver said the research firm believes "open source is defined by the license, period. Almost all of our customers are scrambling to create an open-source policy, as almost none of them have one as yet."

Congratulations to the successful students and their FreeBSD Project mentors for participating in another productive Google Summer of Code. This program encourages students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break with generous funding from Google. We have had a total of over 50 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program in 2005, 2006, and 2007. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, filesystems work, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We have gained many new FreeBSD committers from previous summer of code projects already, and more are in the process.

I've played around with GIMP for awhile now but it was basically just playing around. I didn't really have a lot of time to try and "trial-and-error" my way through actually learning it so I stuck with what I already knew and did the best I could. Then Michael Hammel's book was delivered to my door. Wow! Move over PhotoShop. The GIMP has entered the building.

Folks, I thought that I had a lot to report last time. The week since then leads me to believe that I won't need any more sleep before the 'fest. This week has been THAT exciting. Allow me to share my excitement.

It's a new issue tracker for multiple workgroups, designed in PHP and PostgreSQL, and has far less dependencies and installation steps than other comparable products.

Here's the press release. They still call themselves "a leading provider of UNIX® software technology and mobile services". That isn't what they just told the bankruptcy court, but who's counting? So they say they got a delisting letter saying they'll be delisted as of September 27.

This year, Amarok had two summer of code projects under the KDE umbrella. Both of these projects have finished while remaining in continued development and were extremely successful. Read on to learn about two innovative additions to the Amarok project.

It's been a good week for anyone praying for the demise of Microsoft Office. Google unveiled its long-awaited, web-based PowerPoint competitor. IBM took the wraps off the free Lotus Symphony, a complete suite of MS-battling tools. And now we have a new version OpenOffice.org. Version 2.3 popped up on the OpenOffice website while no one was looking.

"Ahoy me laddies (and beauties)," Linux creator Linus Torvalds began,announcing the seventh release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel,"time for the traditional'Talk Like a Pirate Day' kernel release!" He noted,"now, last year we had a full release (2.6.18 was immortalized on TLAP-2006), but this year I'm chickening out, and we're just doing what is hopefully going to be the last -rc release for the 2.6.23 series." Full source changes can be viewed via thegitweb interface. Linus also offered a brief summary of the changes:"I'm not including the diffstat, because it got blown up by the resurrection of the sk98lin driver - because skge that is supposed to supplant it doesn't handle some of the hardware. Oh well."Apart from that, we had some mips, powerpc and xtense updates, and various driver tweaks. Things like the USB autosuspend revert should make people happier, and some more clockevents fixes should help suspend/restore on i386."read more |rsync.net - Secure Offsite Data

Paypal decided not to protect me against online Fraud when I sold Linux Laptops. I need legal help.

BinHost, a Web hosting and Internet services company, launched in 2000, "a time when discussion and email lists were not particularly easy to find a home for," says Justin Newman, BinHost's founder. Even back then, Newman built all of his infrastructure and services on open source software. As Newman has expanded his venture into telephony services, he still believes that open source saves business owners time, energy, and money.

The August print edition of Advance for Health Information Executives has a tour-de-force article by Bruce Wilder, MD, MPH, JD page 49 entitled 'Getting Beyond Economics' that is simply pure champagne. In addition to espousing the virtues of FOSS and WorldVistA EHR it contains such gems as: 'The move toward a universal EHR is much more than the introduction of a new technology in medical care. Universal implementation of proprietary EHR systems has the potential to wrest control of the doctor-patient relationship from doctors and their patients. Unfortunately, most doctors and their patients don't have a clue that this could happen -- and already is happening -- right under their noses. And, they will be paying for it!

Atmel Corporation and TimeSys announced today a free Linux Board Support Package (BSP) for Atmel's ARM9-based AT91SAM9 Microcontrollers.

Foresight Linux is a Linux distribution for your desktop that features a rolling release schedule that always keeps your desktop up to date; a revolutionary package manager, Conary; the latest GNOME desktop environment and an innovative set of excellent, up to date packages. Foresight is proud to be the first distribution to ship with GNOME 2.20 and be the basis for the GNOME Live Media available at http://torrents.gnome.org.

Mozilla, on Sept. 19, ditched the ability to run arbitrary script from the Firefox command line, a quick fix for a year-old QuickTime bug that could be used to take over user systems. Security researcher Petko D. Petkov on Sept. 12 posted proof-of-concept code showing that the low-risk, year-old QuickTime bug could easily be turned into a high-risk attack on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Skype and other programs.