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Though it was still rainy here at the Annahoeve in the Netherlands, the KDE 4 multimedia meeting was definately up to speed. This article will report on the progress the hackers made yesterday, including the "why" and "what" of redesigning and speeding up amaroK, work on the KIO slaves and Phonon.

Barclays is buying every one of its online banking customers anti-virus software in a bid to improve security. The bank has signed a deal with F-Secure for 1.6 million licences of the Finnish firm's anti-virus program.

[This isn't FOSS related but I thought it was worth posting. How can you run Windows and not use at least one Anti-virus program? - Scott]

Until now there have been few automated web hacker-testing tools because, to fully automate hacker testing, you have to get access to browser source code. That's not possible with Microsoft, which holds the family jewels to IE.

But it's quite feasible with Mozilla, which is open source. And based on their work with Mozilla, they can simulate what might happen if the user runs IE.

"Readahead is a technique employed by the kernel in an attempt to improve file reading performance. If the kernel has reason to believe that a particular file is being read sequentially, it will attempt to read blocks from the file into memory before the application requests them. When readahead works, it speeds up the system's throughput, since the reading application does not have to wait for its requests. When readahead fails, instead, it generates useless I/O and occupies memory pages which are needed for some other purpose."

SEATTLE -- The first-ever FreedomHEC started today in Seattle. FreedomHEC is an informal two-day conference discussing hardware issues under Linux; hot on the heels of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), it offers a chance to see the Linux side of things.

The opening of Beta 2 testing at WinHEC for Windows Vista has once again raised serious questions about Microsoft's ability to keep its promises. We have witnessed up until now the inexhaustible reservoir of excuses coming from MS's officials, who have continuously fed us with plenty of reasons for Vista's delay: they're working on security, they're trying to make it more reliable for business, etc. Although it was initially destined to make its public debut way back in 2002, following years haven't shown us more than small bits of what was to become Microsoft's best product in more than 10 years.

A group of South African game developers will meet in Johannesburg tomorrow to hammer out plans for the development of an open source adventure role-playing game that they hope will reinvigorate South Africa's game development industry.

If desktop search tools like Kat and Beagle are overkill for your needs, then try Docco, a little application designed specifically to index documents and search inside them.

A comprehensive guide to finding, creating and using Ruby resources called gems.

FSMLabs and Infineon Technologies have prototyped a Linux mobile phone running FSMLab’s RTLinux real-time Linux operating system on a single ARM9 core.

A not-for-profit company that uses software written by volunteers is proving a challenge to Bill Gates

Yesterday, Bon Echo Alpha 3 was released as scheduled. This latest milestone of the code that will eventually become Mozilla Firefox 2.0 adds new anti-phishing features and includes support for client-side session and persistent storage as specified by the WHATWG.

Whichever BSD you use, the basics of package management are similar. Each member of the BSD family has a slightly different approach in this area, but all share common themes, as David Chisnall discusses in this article.

Daniel Wallace refuses to go gently into that good night. [I guess some people just enjoy embarrassing themselves. - dcparris]

The Word Trojan virus is reported to have infected only two targets - but it received extensive coverage for a week. Given the limited facts to work with, journalists were left to deal mostly with "what ifs."

“It is a certificate program designed to increase the technical knowledge on Linux and Linux-based solutions,” said A. K. Pani, chairperson of the information systems wing of XLRI, and the coordinator for the course.

Microsoft threw an uppercut at The OpenDocument Format (ODF), saying it was too slow. The ODF Alliance says there's really no way to tell because Microsoft's Open XML isn't even supported by any application.

[A document format is too slow. Nope, still can't make sense of that no matter how many times I read it. -- grouch]

Part 3 of a short series looking at the rise of open content - text, graphics, videos and music - and its relationship to open source.

Oil and gas sector contributes significantly to the linux on blade server and IBM has an edge with 50 per cent of that market share. HP is targeting to enter this market

"Linux has long ceased to be a playground for tinkerers; it's a serious alternative on the commercial market," said Michael Nordschild, managing director of the Nuremberg Association for the ICT Sector.
[...]
SuSE plans to conquer the PC next, making Linux a real alternative to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft market-dominating Windows operating system. "Cost savings there are even greater than on servers," Dyroff says. "Ninety percent can be saved in licensing costs alone, without factoring in the costs of Windows security problems."