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While many people have been working on the technical challenges of providing low cost computing to emerging communities, a couple of months back I had proposed a different and related challenge to my immediate friends and free software professionals from several organizations.

LXer Feature: 27-May-06

Recently, Mr. Steven Titch wrote an article about Open Document which contained Microsoft-style disinformation. At that moment, some of our readers suggested Heartland or Mr. Titch might have been funded by Microsoft. While I couldn't find any direct ties, there are lot of indirect ties between the Heartland Institute and Microsoft, and at a certain point in my research, even the name of Mr. Abramoff showed up. A summary of the things I found.

Leading regional IT and communications solutions provider Fujitsu India Ltd today unveiled the PRIMEQUEST™ 420 midrange server for Intel® Itanium® 2-based systems running Linux or Windows Server 2003 platforms.

If you think YouTube is a great idea but its proprietary Flash implementation sucks, and if you think that the "alternatives" using Windows Media or Quicktime always leave out one platform - your favourite platform - just hear what the Blip.TV guys have in store.

Begun at the start of this year, the OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee has just completed its first assigned task: an accessibility evaluation of the ~700 page ODF 1.0 specification. Producing this evaluation was the formal statement of purpose of this subcommittee...

Majordomo Mailing Lists Configuration

DistroWatch reports - An updated version of PC-BSD, now based on FreeBSD 6.1, has been released: PC-BSD 1.1 was released today, along with a PBI update file for users running 1.0, who wish to update to 1.1. This release brings the core operating system up to the latest version of FreeBSD 6.1, adds better driver support to the kernel, and improves the speed on many systems. OSDir has some fresh screenies of PC-BSD in the PC-BSD 1.1 Screenshot Tour.

You don't need to be a super-geek to start diagnosing hardware problems. Diagnostics is an art. Specifically, it's the art of determining the source of a problem and troubleshooting a solution. No matter how good you are at diagnostics, the right tools in your hardware bag can make you better.

Elephant's Dream, an 11 minute animation which premiered on the Internet earlier this month, describes itself as an 'open movie'.

BRANCHBURG, N.J., May 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Congoo(TM), the Web's first free premium information network, today announced that its NetPass downloadable toolbar is now available in beta version for users of the Mozilla Firefox® web browser. The development enables millions of Firefox users to locate huge amounts of otherwise unavailable, subscription-only Web content -- and to access that content free of charge.

So far, a programming lawyer seeking a patent for what appears to be a database-driven software application has been denied three times by UK patent officials and judiciary. The third rebuff instructively dissects both traditional and evolving UK Patent Law concerning software patents, before dismissing the supplicant's appeal.

ITTIA, developers of a new lightweight database for embedded systems and mobile devices, announced today the official launch of version one of its FUEL DB cross-platform product.

"When I came in, my assessment was that we had run out of gas in a variety of fashions," Helle said. "We were having system failures, machines would crash, SQL Server would crash, the application would crash, and it was a production-critical application so it had a lot of impact on our revenues if the crash was significant."

Swiki is a wiki written in the Squeak SmallTalk dialect. It's easy to install, easy to maintain, and a great tool for maintaining documentation.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a nonprofit organization, today announced it is strengthening its activities in Asia.

DistroWatch reports - The Elive project has released the first beta build of the upcoming Elive 0.5 Enlightenment live CD. What's new? New live CD system - Elive has moved from Morphix to DSS; new kernel 2.6.15 with a lot more hardware support, also for wireless networking, make a look to the list of new drivers added; new installer features; Elive has new system of elive-skel, you can select 'night look' or 'elive look' in the boot of the live CD system; introductory tutorial to Enlightenment hot keys on E16... OSDir has some sweet shots of this Elive beta in the Elive 0.5 Beta Screenshot Tour.

Flow control is usually straightforward: sequence, selection, iteration. And many programmers, having been raised on these primary control structures, have a difficult time seeing what other kinds of flow control might be necessary. This article introduces continuations and teaches you to think about flow control in radically new ways.

As anyone who has used Linux systems for production systems knows all too well, there's an art to arriving at a stable configuration with all dependencies met. Linux distributors do an excellent job of delivering systems that meet this criteria, and keeping them there through their update processes as functionality updates, bug fixes, and security updates get laid on top of the out-of-the-box system. The amount of work and the success that they have in delivering both the base distribution and the stream of updates that follow is widely unappreciated.

FreeNAS, an open source NAS server, can convert a PC into a network-attached storage server. The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media.

Though the obvious benefits of OSS over proprietary software in terms of cost and usability are well documented and widely discussed among software engineers, the use in office and home environment remains low even in an IT-savvy country like India.