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The boneheaded idea probably sounded great in committee: If you charge unwanted senders a ransom to bypass your spam filters, you turn them from an enforcement headache to a paying customer. Unfortunately for AOL and Yahoo, the concept hasn't had the same resonance with the public. As a result, opponents are signing up thousands of troops, while AOL's recruiting direct email customers, and Yahoo's heading for the hills. The outcome will be great fodder for a Harvard Business School case study.

Enterprise metaprogramming is becoming more common all the time as graphical and textual utilities make programming tasks easier and more descriptive, all because of the continuing formalization process occurring under the Object Management Group's Model Driven Architecture (MDA). This article explores the limits of metaprogramming, describes MDA and the problems it can solve, and presents a short example of a textual system that uses MDA.

One of South Africa's top open source exports, KnowledgeTree, just keeps getting better. The document management system has added new workflow features, integration with Microsoft Office, and can help companies meet legislative and best practice compliance requirements with the release of version 3.0.

Novell's Linux business continues to grow, but overall revenue continues to decline, and Red Hat's Linux business continues to outpace Novell's efforts.

Brett explains what Shale is, how it's different from the Struts framework, and how to install and set it up in your development environment.

There are a couple of ways that you can access a shell remotely on most Linux/Unix systems. One of the older ways is to use the telnet program, which is available on most network capable operating systems. Accessing a shell account through telnet method though poses a danger in that everything that you send or receive over that telnet session is visible in plain text on your local network, and the local network of the machine you are connecting to. So anyone who can "sniff" the connection inbetween can see your username, password, email that you read and commands that you run. For these reasons you need a more sophisticated program to connect to a remote host.

Nokia released the source code for its Python for S60 mobile phone platform a few weeks ago in hopes of open source software developers creating new applications for it, as well as pushing forward those already available on the smartphone platform.

Motorola's newest Linux-based smartphone reached electronics stores and online retailers in Beijing today. The A1200 is a triband GSM/EDGE phone with a stylish, ultra-slim design. It runs MontaVista Linux on an Intel PXA270 (Bulverde) processor, and has been approved by the FCC for US operation.

Opinion: Once in place, Drupal makes an excellent open-source CMS for serious Web sites.

I preside more than 10 Slackware and Debian servers at a small engineering firm, serving 50 in-house and several external employees. Normal IT services are rendered through the use of Apache, MySQL, PHP, BIND, Squid, Netfilter, Courier IMAP, Postfix, VsFTPd, and Samba. Here's a list of my essential tools.

Okay. So you're one of those folks that took the plunge and decided to go anti-Mr. Softee and switch to FireFox. Well there is no doubt that FireFox has left its mark on the browser scene. The statistics are impressive. Looking at our server logs alone, FireFox browsing is making up 30% of our visitor hits! With that much activity it's no wonder that more and more blog designers are trying to make sure their blogs are optimized for FireFox as well as IE (not always an easy task!).

A fabless semiconductor startup focused on "multi-function video processing chips" has adopted Linux and an open-source RISC core. Vivace Semiconductor's roadmap, unveiled at a venture capital event today in San Francisco, includes a VSP200 chip targeting portable video players, and a VSP300 chip targeting high-definition integrated digital TVs (DTVs).

Last time I looked at Ubuntu (that was ‘Breezy Badger’, or 5.10) I noticed a little applet popping up and telling me that there were updates available for the machine.

CentOS 4 is now one year old. Wow, it seems like it has been much longer. The CentOS Project has had some major changes and meet many milestones since that release. Some of those include:

I have to confess that whilst I like all sorts of music, a bit of techno can be just what the doctor ordered. It blows the cobwebs away and gets the blood running. Making one's own can be even more fun. There are three applications that allow for this sort of music creation that I know of for Linux. Freebirth, Reborn and LMMS.

Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu released security advisories this week. Affected packages include BMV, GPdf, Xpdf, pdftohtml, tar, Heimdal, PostgreSQL, and irssi-text. Fedora distributed a kernel update addressing several security vulnerabilities in the kernel. No security advisories were issued by Gentoo.

In 1999, Ethan Galstad was thinking about starting a business with a friend. Among other things on their to-do list was digging up software to monitor their network and flag any problems. They couldn't afford any of the programs on the market, however, so Galstad wrote his own. Almost on a whim, he posted it on an open-source Web site where geeks around the world browse code and download programs for free.

Galstad's original business idea never took off. But his software quickly became a hit. Some 50,000 companies downloaded the open-source project, called Nagios, and rely on it to monitor their networks. Galstad, now 31, works with other coders around the world to keep the software up to date and earns money by consulting. "It has really grown on its own, beyond anything I could have imagined," he says.

South Africans are becoming more mobile, as evidenced by a 36.9% growth in the notebook market in 2005. This comes at a time when the desktop market's growth rate is slowing – due to the shift towards portables and a slowing corporate refresh activity.

Microsoft's budget for political lobbying exceeded that of Enron, the judge residing over the antitrust case has heard.

The software giant's budget for its Political Action Committee (PAC) increased from about $16,000 in 1995 to $1.6 million in 2000, according to Edward Roeder, a self-styled expert on efforts to influence the U.S. government, and founder of Sunshine Press Services, a news agency devoted to investigating money in politics.

[Ed:She's getting ready to hear much, much more from LXer. Soon -tadelste.]

Microsoft Office is facing an organized challenge from an alliance of government bodies and IT vendors that are promoting OpenDocument Format (ODF).