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The next version of the Linux distro will be available on fewer platforms to ensure a 'more limber' release process

Professional Services Firm Expands Presence in Midwest Markets Through Acquisition of Leading Cincinnati Systems Integrator

In the first part of this series, the problem of determining what the path to rc scripts on a per platform basis was shown within the prototype version of a service utility. Part two of the series discusses some ways to auto-magically take care of that problem and the particular method used.

After a lot of hacking behind the scenes, a new initiative to improve KDE's interaction with network and hardware devices has been launched. Solid will provide a robust basis for the dynamic modern desktop in KDE, which needs to be aware of available hardware and networks, paving the way for innovative functionality. Users should see KDE applications taking advantage of Solid in KDE 4, from the most basic Plasma applets and complex applications to desktop-wide awareness. Developers will be able to take advantage of a robust, flexible and portable API and will be integrated into the Plasma engine. It will make use of existing technologies like HAL. Solid will also include a knowledge base providing a way for users to easily provide feedback on incorrect behaviour.

Build managers allow developers to better coordinate their coding efforts by providing an automatically generated current and working snapshot of an application, including a binary file for immediate testing. Build managers are the next logical step to source code repositories. Urbancode's Anthill build management server for Java applications provides build automation, unit tests, build tracking, and support for a number of version control systems.

Joins 200 World Class Organizations Certified Under the Support Center Practices (SCP) Certification Program

It’s not even out yet and this Firefox extension has bloggers around the world talking. AllPeers adds P2P capabilities to FireFox and is due out “soon”. According to the U.K.-based company’s site, AllPeers is “a free extension which combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse.”

IT staff at Swansea Council have been transferred to Capgemini as part of a controversial £83m e-government outsourcing project designed to modernise the way the council provides its public services.

As part of the first phase, Capgemini intends to overhaul the council's existing IT systems and working practices as part of an "integrated programme of business process re-engineering and technology transformation".

For many in the computer industry, the UserFriendly comic strip is the first Web page they open in the morning. However, only its most loyal readers are aware that, over the past five years, the company behind the cartoon has wandered into the public equity market, only to return to the status of a private company. Recently, I talked about this journey with JD Frazer, the creator of the strip, and David Barton, vice president of UserFriendly.org. Their account is a practical lesson in the difficulties involved in such business maneuvers -- to say nothing of a testimony to their collective ability to keep their business, ethics, and audience intact.

PHONE GIANT Motorola has dumped Apple’s iTunes, and a lot of its technical problems, from its ROKR E2 phone. Its predecessor the E1 was touted as the easiest-to-use music phone ever, thanks to its "seamless integration" with Apple's iTunes jukebox.

Advanced Interoperability and Functionality Technology Now Available for Mainstream Consumer Electronics Equipment

If you use Linux, or another free operating system, and need optical character recognition (OCR) software, be prepared for a challenge. OCR is a tricky problem on any computing platform -- both because it is conceptually hard, and because the task does not lend itself to simple, easy-to-use interfaces.

As with most tasks, OOo offers several options for searching and replacing text or strings in your documents. Doing a little research beforehand can save time and frustration later on.

Nice set of images for easy to follow instructions with some depth on structured searches.

Calm down not quite as dire as the headline. It's just that SCO is filing for permission to revise its claims against Novell and that's where the attack against SuSE arose. It seems to have been reborn as part of a generalized counter attack against Novell and its version of Linux due to the latter's dismemberment of the formers original claims. Ah, the practice of corporate law is almost as good as minting your own money, provided there is a sufficient supply of dumb, rich clients.

Found on lwn.net listing.

I wrote the following as a letter to the Globe and Mail editor in response to End of the free Napster clones?

This article quotes Eric Garland as saying that "The open-source community will continue to build new, uncensored versions,"

This falsely suggests that the Open Source community is deliberately building tools to break the law. What we are doing is building tools to put the owners of computers (rather than third parties) in control of their own computers, protecting the property, privacy and other rights of those owners. Peer to Peer technology is quite legitimate, and is used by our community to legally share our own software and the works of the large number of copyright holders who authorize their works to be shared. While it is possible to abuse these tools to infringe copyright, we must remember that the "software manufacturing" competitors to Open Source do not hold the moral high ground.

GNU developers have released a telephony stack, an open source alternative to competing proprietary VoIP solutions. The GNU telephony stack provides a sacalable environment for building and deploying enterprise level VoIP solutions compatible with current standards and hardware. With an emphasis on modularity and extensible functionality, the GNU telephony stack can be integrated with other systems and services like web servers and databases.

Mirus Bets on Linspire Linux for New Line of "Koobox" Desktop Computers

[Ed: Not to knock the Koobox, but who the heck is Mirus? How are they major? They have a one-page website with zilch for information, other than to say that Mirus recommends Windows. That said, at least Linspire is the exclusive OS, not just an option. - dcparris]

The halls of investing are littered with companies that had great businesses, but eventually stagnating growth, which inevitably gave their management the urge to do something in order to prove the growth story was still alive. Peter Lynch referred to this phenomenon as diworsification.

Diworsification pretty much sums up how I have felt about Motley Fool Stock Advisor selection eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and its acquisition of Skype, which lets users chat via voice and video over the Internet. Internet telephony isn't all that unique; offerings from Apple Computer's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iChat service, Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) AOL TotalTalk service, and a number of free software packages such as Gizmo allow you to do the same.

Before Linux, asset performance management provider Datastream ran its enterprise on proprietary Sun hardware and the Solaris operating system. But Jim Plourde, vice president of hosted solutions at Datastream, says he wasn't happy with the performance or the price of Sun hardware with its mission-critical database operations. In 2002, a move to lower-priced Intel servers was on the horizon, but Plourde still had operating system choices to make.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges on Tuesday and agreed to help U.S. prosecutors in a corruption probe that could involve several top Republican lawmakers, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud and tax evasion before a federal judge in Washington. He also will plead guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud in a separate case in Miami on Wednesday, his lawyer there said.

[Ed: This story ties in with recent articles by LXer Editor-in-Chief, Tom Adelstein, "Following the Microsoft Money Trail". Abramoff figures prominently in Adelstein's articles. - dcparris]