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VANCOUVER — In the cyber underworld's never-ending quest for weak spots, home computers are coming under increased attack as businesses tighten their defences, according to the latest Symantec Internet security threat report.

[Mentions Firefox vulnerabilities, but also the fact that MSIE has the greater Window of Vulnerability. Although the article omits it, migrating to GNU/Linux is a great way to mitigate the Windows-based vulnerabilities. - dcparris]

The company's new OpenQuick Suite offering comprises of best practice elements -- OpenPlan, OpenExplore, OpenDash, and Open Pilot -- that hand hold customers through the trickier aspects of data warehouse integration, analytics, and performance management services.

Zuken has announced that Linux will be supported as a new operating system in the next version of CR-5000 in addition to HP-UX, Solaris, and Windows, which are currently supported as standard operating platforms.

To cut down on the time it takes to implement a new server, openQRM Pro simplifies the process through a Web portal that accepts requests for hardware and software, and automates approval, provisioning and monitoring with detailed reporting throughout.

I was interested to read Ian Murphy's story about SQL Anywhere. Despite the availability of embedded databases, it seems to me that the database (in the DBMS sense) hasn't really come to mobile devices like phones yet. This is largely because of resource constraints - they're back in the 1970s mindset before enterprise databases really took off, using clever file systems for data storage (remember VSAM?).

Unix text utilities were designed primarily for programmers and admins, but here's a little secret: the utilities also work well for writers. Instead of using diff to see changes between programs, I often use diff utilities to see what has changed between one version of an article and another. A few weeks ago, I found dwdiff, and found it works even better.

A while back, I made a comment with regard to how great it would be to have a single, collective HCL (hardware compatibility list) for all of the popular Linux distributions. At the time, I felt very strongly that if we had a one single collective database of hardware that was known to work with the latest distributions, life would be a lot easier.

Red Hat is leveraging its JBoss acquisition with its own middleware offering, putting it on par with commercial vendors BEA Systems, IBM, and Oracle. What's more, Red Hat is rapidly securing its already commanding lead as the largest enterprise Linux distributor, with 61% of the market for paid distributions last year.

If you mention the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) to a Windows user, they will probably begin to sigh and groan, and they may even shudder at the very thought of seeing one of these horrific images on their computer monitor. If you haven't experienced a Blue Screen of Death yet, then you're not a true Windows user.

MontaVista has upgraded its Linux-based software platform for mobile phones. Mobilinux 4.1 supports lower-cost hardware, the company says, thanks to footprint improvements aimed at lessening DRAM and flash memory requirements. The OS includes advanced real-time capabilities, and is suitable for use on single-chipset, mass market phones, according to the company.

Last month, thin-client software provider released its 2X TerminalServer for Linux, an open source terminal server that lets Linux desktop users run both Linux and Windows applications over dial-up and LAN (local area network) connections.

Linux users have found their options limited, as iTunes is to this very day still not available on the Linux platform natively. Apple is foolish for ignoring this, but we believe that we have located a better alternative in the video podcast realm than what iTunes was offering anyway - Democracy Player.

A group of important Linux kernel developers have recently published a position statement on GPLv3, as reported by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in a story with a rather alarmist title: "GPLv3 could kill open source, top Linux dev's warn". In truth, the goal is exactly and essentially just the opposite.

TheFamily Guide to Digital Freedom is a website and an accompanying book created by Marco Fioretti, a part-time journalist who writes about free and open source software (FOSS). The site is interesting for its attempt to do things at once: to provide a guide for non-technically inclined computers users to the advantages of open standards and free software, and a critique of the FOSS communities.

Gaël Duval, the founder of the popular MandrakeLinux (later MandrivaLinux) project, was fired from Mandriva last spring in an effort to cut costs. Almost immediately afterward, Duval began work on a new GNU/Linux distribution, Ulteo. As of this writing, Ulteo has not yet released its first beta edition, but it should be available soon. While we're all waiting, I figured I'd ask Mr. Duval some questions about Ulteo, Mandriva, and starting GNU/Linux projects in general. Answers are below.

Omni Technology Solutions and its partner in the UK, Blueloop, have partnered to deliver LinuxWorld London's Internet cafe. The Internet cafe will consist of 12 independent Linux workstations running on two Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz desktops with 2 GB of RAM.

While it has gained the attention of many governments and organisations through its philosophy and OpenDocument file format, OpenOffice.org has not to date enjoyed the same enthusiastic take up that Firefox has. This could be set to change, however, as the next version of the open source office suite will, like its web browsing brother, include plug-in extension support.

Novell recently launched version 10 of SUSE Linux Desktop. eWorld caught up with Revathi Kasturi, managing director, West Asia SUSE Linux, to check out the level of activity amongst users of open source software. Excerpts from the conversation:

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The KDE World Conference, Akademy 2006, kicks off in Dublin. A rewritten version of KTurtle, an educational programming tool, is imported into KDE SVN. ThreadWeaver is moved into kdelibs. Hebrew sounds are added to KLettres to add learning support for the language. Improvements in the OpenDocument format and XML Paper Specification format support in okular...

AMD has taken a leaf out of the open source community’s book and has released the hardware specifications for its Opteron server processor, prompting big changes from players such as IBM.