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A duo of open-source experts from Europe will give separate workshops in a conference next week organized by advocacy group Institute of Popular Democracy.

If you listen to music on CD much, you'll notice that some CDs sound much louder than others, and I'm not talking about Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste versus Sarah McLachlan's Touch. Two CDs of the same genre, when played on the same CD player, at the same volume, can have drastically different playback volume. This difference carries over when you rip the CD to MP3, and can be really annoying when you're going from song to song on your MP3 playlists on your computer or portable music player. One way to iron out the differences is to use MP3Gain to adjust your MP3s to have the the same volume.

Runtime Revolution revives the simple development model that Bill Atkinson pioneered with Hypercard back in 1987. Fresh from his triumph of building MacPaint for the Apple Macintosh, Atkinson brought together the concepts of object-based, event-driven programming and hypermedia to create a highly popular tool for rapid application development. Atkinson insisted that Apple gave it away free with the Macintosh which helped it to spread quickly in the late 1980s. Unfortunately the lack of a decent PC implementation and commercial changes at Apple meant that Hypercard eventually withered away. Further development was stopped in 2000 and, sadly, Apple abandoned it altogether in 2004.

Madan Sheina asks whether data warehouse appliances can really transform the way in which companies analyse their growing volumes of data, without breaking the bank.

Today's networking grab-bag contains iftop, ApacheTop, and sysctl. iftop is a nice realtime bandwidth monitor, ApacheTop is an almost real-time Apache monitor, and sysctl is used to control hundreds of kernel parameters in a most elite fashion. sysctl comes with all Linux distributions, and iftop and ApacheTop are just a Yum install or apt-get install away.

The No. 1 computer maker is reluctant to pick one distribution and alienate users of another distribution.

Dell is warming up to the idea of reintroducing Linux desktops and notebooks, but for now the computer maker plans to remain on the sidelines and wait until there's a clear winner among the various distributions of the open source operating system.

[Finally, a journalist read the announcement - AS]

Independent report from Info2 on Sun Microsystems' open source and middleware strategy says Sun's made solid advances, but must move beyond its low price services debut to demonstrate its potential as a serious, long-term partner for developers and ISVs. Info2 outlines where Sun is leading platform rivals and highlights five areas where Sun remains vulnerable to competitors.

A new UK think tank will analyse how open-source software can be used in government and the private sector. The National Open Centre, based in Birmingham, will be composed of working groups that will study issues around open source such as the use of standards and procurement guidelines, said Ed Downs, of the National Computing Centre, a professional IT membership organisation.

The Xara LX vector graphics editor took a big step forward last week. After months of gridlock between open source contributors to the project and its corporate owners, one of the contributors published his own fork of the code base -- and the company approved, offering to host it in the official Subversion repository.

Welcome to our issue number 78 of Fedora Weekly News.

African telcos have been forced to drop their international call rates by as much as 75 percent over the past year as VoIP operators start to bite into their market share, says a new report released this week.

The Faces of KDE takes a look at some of the developers working on KDE 4. "In this stage of development it’s a lot of pain for very little glory, re-designing the next generation KDE from the ground up. It’s a task that separates the core developers from the hangers on, and the architects of the new desktop are a pretty dedicated group. There are far too many developers currently active in KDE for me to introduce them all, but here’s a quick glance at what a small handful of them are working on for the next major version of KDE."

KnowledgeTree on Monday announced the release of version 3.4 of the KnowledgeTree Document Management System. This new version includes various Web 2.0 collaboration features such as tagging, tag Clouds and Really Simple Syndication.

Not sure of the line between free software and proprietary software? Then ask Richard Stallman. A virtual Richard Stallman that is, which runs on a Linux system and alerts users to software they are using that doesn't meet the strict GPL line.

The El Dorado of programming languages. As a Java programmer, if you spend some time with Lisp -- this lost city of gold -- you'll discover many techniques that will change the way you code, for the better.

At the Communications Ecosystem Conference today The Linux Foundation, the new organization formed last month from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, today announced availability of its Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 Specification. In existence since 2002 and now in its fourth version, the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) Specification consists of over 250 individual requirements that cover seven categories of Performance, Hardware, Standards, Serviceability, Availability, Security and Clustering. The primary changes to the new CGL 4.0 Specification are alignment with the SCOPE Alliance's Carrier Grade Profile and tighter requirements around compliance.

Sharif Farsi Web Company published here Sunday the Farsi Linux for Children & Young Adults. Sharif Farsi Linux for Children and Young Adults is designed for primary school and intermediate high school student.

The NZ chapter of Linuxchix has just been set up for all New Zealand women interested in Linux and Free Software.

We have a website: http://linuxchix.org.nz, a mailing list: http://lists.catalyst.net.nz/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nz-lin... a planet: http://planet.linuxchix.org.nz

And we're planning an install fest, as well as monthly meetups to talk about free software and eat chocolate.

In what they claim is the largest-ever open source deal, collaboration developer Open-Xchange and web hosting company 1&1 Internet have announced a partnership to deliver over one million hosted business email and collaboration accounts using Open-Xchange's Smart Collaboration technology.

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew 5.2% year over year to $15.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006, marking the third consecutive quarter of positive growth. Worldwide server unit shipment growth was flat in 4Q06 when compared with the year-ago period. For the full year 2006, worldwide server revenue grew 2.0% to $52.3 billion, while worldwide unit shipments grew 5.9% to 7.5 million units. This represents the highest annual server revenue since the market peaked in 2000.