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The ultimate goal of the Unicode Consortium is to define all human languages for use with computers. That goal is still some ways off, but, with the release of version 5.0 of the Unicode standard after nearly three years of work, the consortium has taken a step toward it, according to Mark Davis, president of the Unicode council and one of the founders of the standard. With the publication due shortly, Davis recently took the time to explain Unicode, how it is developing, and some of the challenges it faces.

Debian-based live CD distribution Knoppix is widely known as a distro with excellent hardware detection. The latest 5.0.1 version, released in June, builds upon its legacy and continues to improve.

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

Earlier this week, Microsoft teamed with Zend Technologies. It is the latest in a series of partnerships with open source vendors that began in September 2005 with JBoss.

While the capabilities of operating systems have improved over the last years, the improvements have largely focused on under the hood changes. New functionality is reaching the user via additional applications which allow her to write a DVD, connect to her mp3 player, download streaming video locally and other tasks which were not present before. But the graphical interface of the computer itself is keeping the same concepts introduced with its appearance.

Research giant Gartner has come out strongly in favour of Oracle’s cut-price support for Red Hat Linux by urging Red Hat customers to renegotiate contracts.

So now that you've got your shiny new dual-core processor, you think you have the most power a single processor can offer. Well Intel today has changed the rules again with the first quad-core desktop processor. The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 brings server-level processor performance to the desktop for all of your compiling, gaming, and encoding needs. What's new with this processor and how did Intel pull off this leap? Read on for all the details.

The second KDE 4 developers snapshot is now available. This 3.80.2 release includes source from all the KDE modules.

UserScape, creators of HelpSpot, have launched opensourcehelpdesklist.com. The directory is a strategic marketing move that addresses an informational gap by promoting open source help desk software.

Includes continuous backups; also offers 10x data compression allowing administrators to store 10 complete disk images.

In his latest blog entry, Open Source activist Harald Welte provides an overview of the work he has done to date as the operator of the gpl-violations.org initiative, which prosecutes breaches of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Legally, he believes that his efforts have been a success and have the potential to help prevent future violations of the GPL, especially as the software industry comes to understand the license better.

Juggling files between Windows FAT filesystem and Linux's EXT2 filesystem was especially time consuming as Windows failed to recognize my Linux partitions. That's when I discovered Explore2fs (http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs), a little utility that enables one to easily locate and transfer files from an EXT2/3 partition into Windows. In a chat with Packt Columnist, Mayank Sharma, John Newbigin shares the status of Explore2fs and his other hacks, talks about his involvement with the CentOS project, and gives some good advice to budding FLOSS hackers.

Richard Stallman talks about the GPLv3 and why Free Software and Open Source don't always have the same goals:
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Some of the topics discussed are DRM, leverage with hardware vendors and dealing with a Linux kernel released under GPLv2.

Dell may be ready to broaden the line of processing platforms it uses in its desktops and notebooks, but it isn't ready to do the same with operating software platforms. On the Dell corporate web log, Matt Domsch, Dell Linux software architect, said the company remains ready to back up its hardware warranties for those who buy PCs and load Linux on them but it won't go a lot further..

Datapro subsidiary BizCall plugs VoIP and open source software for government call centres. Now we've just got to get decision makers to understand what open source is.

Google's open source chief talks about the joys of Linux, the cost of Windows and his concerns about the new version of the GPL

Mark Shuttleworth yesterday urged the South African government to decide on an ICT strategy for the country and deliver on it. For anyone who has heard him speak in the last year this is not exactly a new line of argument. Lets hope this time that someone is listening.

APC director slams the anti-piracy campaign during the Internet Governance Forum in Athens. Spend money on fighting real crimes, not prosecuting software pirates, she says.

In its most tacit acknowledgment yet of the power of open source, Microsoft is distributing complete kernel sources to all recipients of its Windows CE 6.0 SDK, released today. Developers need only acknowledge Microsoft's "shared source" license, using Microsoft's IDE (integrated development tool), after which requested sourcecode components are installed, according to an article at WindowsForDevices

In this article see how HAL 9000, the computer in the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie could predict equipment failure, answer personal questions, learn to sing "Bicycle built for Two," and go insane, based on IBM Build to Manage Toolkit components. Also, see how autonomic computing can be implemented today; determine if there is such a thing as a Hofstadter-Moebius loop in programming; and discover the meaning of HAL.