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Just a decade ago, not many people were aware of the revolution coming along their way. Ordinary people were thrilled with the new features that Microsoft Windows 95 provided and Linux was still the choice of geeks. Fast forward 10 years: Even ordinary people carry extraordinary piece of hardware with them.

If you're wondering what has happened to Ethereal, one of the most popular packet sniffing tools on the planet, it's probably because you're visiting Ethereal.com. Though development on Ethereal may be dead, development on its forked successor Wireshark is alive, well and perhaps more focused than ever before.

A friend of mine is the IT manager for a medium-sized wholesale distribution business. One afternoon in early August, a hard disk drive in one of his employer's servers started to show signs that it was dying. That hard drive contained the company's (proprietary) credit card processing software, which was chosen specifically to integrate with the company's (proprietary) inventory control and accounting software package.

Web services have been around for awhile, but the idea has yet to fully take off. Learn how that's about to change, particularly as Web services go private and mobile. Learn how the application builders of tomorrow will use simple, drag-and-drop techniques to build new applications out of existing services.

Real-time Linux and middleware from Concurrent Computer Corp. and Real-Time Innovations Inc. (RTI) are supporting the U.S. Navy's Aegis Open Architecture program, the companies announced Aug. 28. Aegis Open Architecture is the foundation for the modernization of the Navy's Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers, the companies said.

This company had been the focus of a BSA audit four months ago. It seemed that the fellow who had been taking care of his system had used a pirated copy of Windows Server 2005 and Windows XP Professional on most of the desktop units.

Last week we set up a very simple digital receptionist and installed Zgsmplay for reviewing Asterisk's GSM-formatted soundfiles. Today we're going to build a better custom recorder for creating our own custom prompts and greetings.

Philipp H. Poll started the Linux Libertine Open Fonts project in September 2003 because of his dissatisfaction with the fonts shipped with GNU/Linux distributions. "In SUSE 9.x," he recalls, "you had to use a script to download the Microsoft core fonts if you wanted to have good TrueType fonts." To improve the situation, Poll chose to start with the basics with Linux Libertine, an alternative to Time Roman and Times New Roman, the most commonly used typefaces in computing, and to develop it using free software methodologies and tools under the GNU General Public License.

The New Zealand Open Source Society(NZOSS) has claimed a moral victory in the patent office after Microsoft amended its patent on XML schema. NZOSS president Peter Harrison says the changes made to the patent were such that the organisation was no longer concerned about the threat posed by the patent.

Okay, I don't really know how many chances I've given GNOME, but I've tried to switch to GNOME as my default desktop many times. I always ended up switching back to KDE (to be fair, I use other window managers, too, such as Fluxbox, which is one of my favorites). Thanks to the rumors that Xgl/Compiz/cgwd worked best on GNOME, I gave GNOME another shot.

[I know how he feels. - Scott]

Today we're going to learn how to play Asterisk .gsm files with a special audio player, and how to construct a sturdy, reliable digital receptionist to answer and route all incoming calls.

Rising salaries in India will stifle current outsourcing initiatives, but not by a significant amount. Let’s take a look at what can be outsourced, and what employees should focus on in order to remain competitive in the IT world.

have been running various distributions of Linux for about 4 years. I started out with RedHat and later switched to SuSE. I was by and large satisfied with SuSE and used it till OpenSuSE 10.1. However, all the chatter about Ubuntu on the various Linux forums that I visit really piqued my interest and I wanted to try it. The main obstacle for me to try Ubuntu was that it was a Gnome centric distribution and I am used to KDE. Hence, I kept monitoring Kubuntu and as soon as I found out that they had a release based on the latest and greatest Ubuntu I decided that it was time for me to take the plunge.

The Association for Progressive Communications has established a new award to reward organisations or people who make it easier for others to start using free and open source software.

For such sharp rivals, the contests between Google and Microsoft have been laughably lopsided. Even as they jostle for users and software developers, Google has run away with the search traffic market while Microsoft has kept a lock on desktop software--like they're hardly even playing the same game. That's about to change, as Google readies a long-rumored push to assemble its E-mail, word processing, and spreadsheet apps into a Web-based suite that sounds more like Microsoft Office with each addition.

[Included for the general interest in Google's competition with Microsoft - dcparris]

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) has firmly established itself as the lingua franca of the object oriented development world. It offers the right levels of abstraction, independence from programming language implementation to make it pretty much ubiquitous.

Open source software is a given in most enterprise data centers, so it's not surprising to see the ranks of open source companies and projects swell. It's not just Linux anymore - community-developed software is offering alternatives for everything from databases to application servers to network management to disaster preparedness. How do you know which open source approach is right for you? We've pulled out a few start-ups that you might not be familiar with, but we think should be on your radar.

Sun Microsystems has unveiled a portal that will detail its efforts to make its Java programming language available as open source code. After the announcement, Bob Brewin, Sun’s chief technology officer for software, talked to Computerworld about the state of the company’s effort to make Java SE (Standard Edition) code available to the open source community.

Only the very brave can pick winners amongst the current crop of Web 2.0 start-ups, social networks and other sundry services. And whatever the outcome might be, it is safe to say that the popularity of open source database MySQL and programming language PHP will only increase.

LXer Feature: 28-Aug-2006

Neoscopio adheres closely to the principles of Free/Open Source Software by providing customized solutions and services based on available software projects. LXer's Don Parris interviews the Neoscopio team.