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The most intelligent label I ever saw was on a railway station in Woerden. It was upside down. All commuters turned their head to see was was written. It said "This label is upside down," which was completely correct.

When I made my way outside, I saw the same label again. This time it was instantly readable. And then it dawned on me. The label was still correct. Positioned this way, it had lost all its purpose. The only way it had any effect was when people were forced to turn their head. So, whatever its position the label was always correct. I've never seen a label like this again.

Astlinux is a bundled distribution of the Asterisk open source iPBX private branch exchange (PBX) software and a Linux operating system. Originally developed by Mark Spencer at Digium, Asterisk is the leading open source software in the telephony/VoIP space. Asterisk excels at combining traditional TDM telephony capability - provided through hardware from Digium and others - with VOIP services. These include call routing, media gateway, media server and SIP signaling capabilities.

One of the more intriguing capabilities of the BSD operating systems is their ability to run binaries for other Unix-like operating systems. I recently found myself requiring the commercial PGP Command Line for a project. Rather than install a Linux box just for this one piece of software, I jumped through some hoops and made it work perfectly on one of my existing FreeBSD systems. Getting a random piece of commercial Linux software running on a FreeBSD system isn't always as transparent as you might like, but you can do it with a minimum of fuss if you have a few extra troubleshooting skills.

Penguin Computing plans to announce Monday that it has hired Pauline Nist, who long led HP's NonStop server group.

[ED: CEO of Penguin and Nist are both from Tandem that was purchased by HP. Another big Unix to Linux move? - HC]

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a new, albeit temporary, top technology executive. Bethann Pepoli was appointed acting CIO last week, replacing Peter Quinn, who stepped down last month. Quinn drew national attention and stirred controversy within the Massachusetts government and among major IT vendors when his office outlined a plan to move away from proprietary document formats and adopt the XML-based OpenDocument file format for all state records.

Appreciating that not everyone wants to spend a half-hour talking finance, Angela suggests taking a moment to focus on an entirely different type of Web resource--one that saves not your money but your time. For a technology that was supposed to save time, the Web can certainly keep you glued to a chair. Checking and rechecking favorite sites can be a mighty pain, and as for bookmarks--well, Angela's got well over 2000 sites on her list. Who's got the kind of time it would take to check in on all those regularly?

Where is desktop Linux at the moment? Right now we see end-user Linux in fixed function and transactional systems and technical workstations.

[Ed: This article provides excellent insight into the Linux desktop. Don't let the title fool you. The title betrays the content: tadelste]

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Open-source advocates are hoping that effective new provisions for patents and compatibility with other software licenses will be prominent in the first public draft of the GNU GPL 3.0.

The U.S. WIPO delegation is also pushing for an extension of the broadcasters' control to the Web. The European broadcast laws don't cover the Web (although a European Union representative recently endorsed the U.S. proposal), so this is a new threat to the public domain.

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Novell has open-sourced the commercial AppArmor security tool for Linux, first developed by Immunix. The release brings application security features with high transparency and low overhead to the enterprise Linux community.

[ED: Repeat, yes but it's Novell and they are so much better than I expected - HC]

More than 40% of organizations in Ireland will use some form of open-source software in 2006, according to a study by iReach, a research company in Dublin.

[ED: Much less significant than the raw numbers might seem to imply. Within the EU Ireland is a friend of patents and MS goals. Hence, I would bet many of the companies and entities just do not carry the clout of 40% usage should imply due to many being small or not politically well connected. - HC]

Last month VMware released a free product called VMware Player. With the Player and one of the free images that run within it, users can explore new operating systems and environments without going through the inconvenience of formatting or partitioning a hard drive or configuring unfamiliar software. I tested the player by running Ubuntu Linux on a Windows host, and got good results with only a few glitches.

Once upon a time, somewhere in post-war Eastern Europe, there was a great famine in which people jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbors. One day a wandering soldier came into a village and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night.

"There's not a bite to eat in the whole province," he was told. "Better keep moving on."

The 2006 Novell BrainShare session catalog has been posted, and I'm in it.

Longtime HP employee Christine Martino brings a more business and operational focus to the role than did her predecessor.

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Jan. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Performance Technologies (Nasdaq: PTIX), a leading developer of integrated systems, platforms, components and software, today announced the company's NexusWare(TM) Linux-based software suite was named Product of the Year for 2005 by INTERNET TELEPHONY(R) magazine.

China has long been seen as a fertile ground for Linux and other open source software. In a country where more than 90% of software in use is pirated, it seems like a natural fit. Chinese entrepreneurs can use open source as a foundation for a new generation of home grown applications and services. Yet the proliferation of Chinese Linux distributions was a worry. If they weren't compatible with each other, the opportunity could be lost to create a rich open source ecosystem.

Well, that worry seems to have been resolved. On Jan. 13 in Beijing (still the 12th in NYC, where I am), the government and the Free Standards Group--an open-source outfit from San Francisco--announced an initiative to get all Chinese Linux distributions to comply with the Linux Standards Base. That's a core set of common elements that assures that a Linux application will run on multiple versions of Linux.

What would you get if you were to combine good graphic programs such as the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Inkscape, and CinePaint with other open source biggies such as Scribus and Nvu? The answer: Grafpup Linux, a live CD heaven for all graphic designers.

This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include hylafax, hal, poppler, pdftohtml, libpaperl, xpdf, gpdf, and apache2. The distributors include Gentoo and Mandriva.

Best know for its beaches and tourists Durban has been quietly building its Internet and Intranet services using open source tools including Plone and Zope. Now that the project is done developers and managers say it was a challenging task but one well worth the effort.