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Linux was selected for a NASA experiment aimed at proving the feasibility of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware and software for scientific space missions. A key requirement was for application development and runtime environments familiar to scientists, to facilitate porting applications from the lab to the spacecraft.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)'s software technology magazine, "DoD Software Tech News", has posted a whole issue devoted to open source software issues. It includes essays by David A. Wheeler, Terry Bollinger, John M. Weathersby, Mark Lucas (on Geospatial OSS), Peter Gallagher, Matt Asay (Alfresco), and Andrew Gordon. Free registration required.

I have written a short guide to software licensing in medicine: Sharing medical software: FOSS licensing in medicine. This covers the problems of license proliferation, the issue of proprietarization and several other key licensing related issues. This is a work in progress. Please help me make this a valuable resource, by providing your comments and feedback. -Trotter

In the past, I have always found it comical when companies have found themselves buying into the need to protect their content with DRM because of the pressure from the music and movie industries. Well, it seems that Netflix is no different, but I have to ask: is the DRM protection really needed in their case for online movie viewing? Personally, I think there is another way to protect the content and do so without traditional DRM headaches as well.

Computers can make your life easier, but you may not think so if you use more than one and like to keep your workspace the same across them. For instance, if you browse the Web, switching to another computer is a hassle. Where are your bookmarks? What was your password again? What was that URL you were looking at yesterday? Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that can help.

So, now I had my server, deploying the trailbalzer and even my application without any problems, but as there's already stated that Hypersonic isn't suited for production purposes and as I discovered that my tables were gone when restarting the server (only after some more hours I understood it wasn't Hypersonic's fault, but a xml config file's)

These are short and easy things to do which can make your Linux desktop even more convenient than it currently is. Trying Ubuntu out without changing your distribution or creating a new drive partition or installing it on another HD, setting up OpenOffice so ability to read/write Windows Office 2007 word processor documents are what you'll learn how to do today.

My company today launched our 19", Damn Small Linux-based digital photo frame Kit.

Mindquarry 1.1 is the latest release of this open source collaboration and project management tool backed by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.

I've been using OpenWrt on my Linksys router for a year or so. I take it for granted -- I ignore it because it just works. But back at X-Wrt.org, which is a related project, not a competitor to OpenWrt, developers have been busy creating a new user interface that both extends OpenWrt and makes it easier to use.

Microsoft going around threatening customers with patent litigation does not make good business sense, says Red Hat's David Postel, who was speaking in Johannesburg last week.

Could it be because the move actually makes sense for both the Linux companies and Microsoft?

It's wild, but for a company that has continuously pointed out their lack of interest in getting into the desktop market, Google sure has been pushing the application side of things awfully hard lately.

Russell Southwood caught up last week with Antoine Van Gelder, who is part of OLPC's South African developer programme, to get a better idea of what's being done to get the machine into use in Africa, including a pilot programme in the Eastern Cape.

These days, virtualization options are a dime a dozen. VMware, Parallels, Win4Lin and so on. But what about running applications natively on a different platform from what they were originally designed for? Ah, now there is the real question: is their enough demand for this?

An open, XML-based standard for displaying and storing data files (text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) offers a new and promising approach to data storage and document exchange among office applications. A comparison of the two XML-based formats–OpenDocument Format ("ODF") and Office Open XML ("OOXML")–across widely accepted "openness" criteria has revealed substantial differences, including the following:

[Note: Excellent review about the differences between ODF & MS OOXML. -Abe]

A brief introduction to the various methods of running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit Debian GNU/Linux system.

Eager to hop onto the 3G network, James Archibald had to first bang his head against a few hardware compatibility issues. After longer than he would like to admit and many dead ends, he brings these handy pearls of wisdom for anyone in a similar situation.

Sometimes it can be handy to set up your own repository to prevent from downloading the remote repository over and over again. This tutorial shows how to create a CentOS mirror for your local network. If you have to install multiple systems in your local network then all needed packages can be downloaded over the fast LAN connection, thus saving your internet bandwidth.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on engine configurability, data management, a packaging system for Plasmoids and themes, and new refinements in desktop icon interaction in Plasma.