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Quaint Tech has a new post by Paul van Iterson that explains the issue around Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Traditionally (from the beginning of the computer era), programming was done by combining conditional statements with GOTO blocks to create a program flow. In the early '70s a Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijksma strongly advocated the use of procedural programming, which means abandoning GOTO statements and creating a sort of chronological program flow in your code (from top to bottom). This style has been widely adapted and for most people is the way they program PHP applications. It is however already a thing of the past.

I have a Mac laptop, which I am very fond of; and on it I use Quicksilver which I find inordinately useful (to the point that I have trouble using other people’s Macs if they don’t have it). There is a project available entitled Gnome Launchbox which claims to be an effort to do a similar thing for Linux, which I’ve been meaning to experiment with for ages.

Earlier this week c,mm,n (website in Dutch), the world's first open-source car, was revealed at AutoRAI, the Amsterdam car show. The initiative and vision behind the c,mm,n (pronounced "common") comes from the "Stichting Natuur en Milieu" (The Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment) and the three technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Enschede.

Novell has maintained that there is nothing in the third draft of the GNU GPLv3 license that would prevent it from distributing GPLv3 code in its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution, despite attempts to outlaw its patent deal with Microsoft.

Irish-based SonikDub, the first open source record label of its kind, will open its doors to unsigned artists next month. Although many open source labels already exist, SonikDub are the only to provide chart ranking. All sales are reported and sent daily to the OCC and Chart Track.

The OpenOffice.org Community announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.2, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. With upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database software, the free software package provides a real alternative to Microsoft's recently-released Office 2007 product - and an easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users.

In this article I'll show you some simple tricks to help you tighten security for your secure shell (SSH) service.

Developers will feature big in SugarCRM's plan to penetrate the enterprise, through greater customization capabilities and scalability for its software.

How can open source software be harnessed to help solve environmental issues? The City of San Francisco is now starting to find that out, by turning to MapGuide Open Source software for use in its "urban forest" initiative.

On March 28, Dell quietly announced that it would start offering a variety of laptops and desktops with pre-installed Linux. Now, Dell has started advertising its Linux desktops on Google ads. While working on my personal blog site, which happens to have Google Adsense ads running on it, I was surprised to find Google ads for Linux-powered Dell desktops showing up. Here's what I saw:

Gumstix has launched the third generation of its gumstick-shaped SBC (single-board computer) line. The tiny, Linux-friendly, PXA270-powered "Verdex" SBC offers 50 percent more processor speed and twice the memory of earlier models, and features an enhanced expansion bus, according to the company.

Fedora 7 Test 3 was released to mirrors this morning for both the Live and Prime editions and both KDE and GNOME versions. There is still a final test release before Fedora 7 final in May, but this test release marks the merge of Fedora Core and Extras, GNOME 2.18.0, the new Echo icon theme, fast user switching, and a 2.6.21-rc5 based kernel. In this article you can find screenshots of Fedora 7 Test 3 Live.

The OpenOffice.org Community on March 29 announced the release of a major upgrade to OpenOffice: version 2.2. The group claims that with upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and database software, the free office suite provides a real alternative to Microsoft's recently-released Office 2007 product.

During the course of the article I will describe the basic design of XenExpress, its installation, installation and use of the Administrator Console client application, creation, monitoring and management of Xen virtual machines... and then I'll try to contrast how XenSource's product line stacks up to Xen as offered by Red Hat and clones.

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel to Spain to meet a focused developer who does not go off at a tangent. Someone with flashes of brilliance you may miss if you Blinken. With plans in abundance, tonight's star of People Behind KDE is KPDF maintainer Albert Astals Cid.

Dell received more than 100,000 responses in its recent survey, and more than 70 percent of the respondents said they would want a Dell PC with Linux for both home and office use. The Dell announcement of plans to pre-install and support Linux could encourage more widespread use of Linux PCs by small businesses as well as consumers.

Red Hat's revenue continued its steady increase for the Linux seller's most recent quarter, but the company's net income dropped 25 percent.

On the one hand, it's a bummer that the new per-song/per-listener royalty rates threaten to put Internet radio out of business. On the other hand, I don't mind paying Radio Paradise $.0019 (that's under 2/10ths of one cent) to hear Joseph Arthur singing "In the Sun" or to pay the same to RadioKAOS for Jo Jo Gunne singing "Run Run Run". (To name two songs I like that are being played right now.) I can afford that. I also like the idea of paying artists and their friends for their work. But not on coercive terms over which I have no control.

I thought it would be worthwhile to collect from the FSF's rationale document the explanations of Section 11 on patents in GPLv3 draft 3. That is the section that addresses the Novell-Microsoft patent agreement, particularly the fourth and fifth paragraphs. I think when you read it, you'll see the Novell trajectory....... The rationale document includes condemnatory language of the patent deal and of Novell's conduct. The company certainly can't any longer after this pretend that the deal has not affected how it is viewed by the FOSS community or that it has not disrespected the GPL, I don't think.

The Open Font Library (OFL) is an offshoot of the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) and Inkscape. Just beginning to get underway, its creation reflects the growing demand for fonts released under a free license, as well as the emergence of a free font community of designers in the last year and a half.