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The start of something bigger?

It's official; Zack Rusin, a lead developer of KDE, has stated in his journal that the upcoming KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets much in the same way that Mac OS X 10.4 can. He writes:

Excel Software began shipping QuickUML 2.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. QuickUML is an intuitive UML tool, well suited to agile development methods or extreme programming.

The recent announcement of  the 2.x branch of Linux Netwosix may prompt LinuxWorld readers to ask why there were two releases--1.3 and 2.0-rc1--of this software within a week.  So we contacted its creator, 19-yeard-old Vincenzo Ciaglia of the University of Salerno, Italy to find the answer  to this and other questions. Exclusive Interview with 19-Year-Old Vincenzo Ciaglia.
Linux Netwosix Creator Discusses 2.0 Vision, Future @ LINUXWORLD MAGAZINE

Smart phones are real computers with multimedia capabilities. You can find many open source applications for these devices, covering many different areas, including multimedia, office, calculation, games, Global Positioning System (GPS), and even development languages.

A new Trojan horse is designed to produce forge Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. The Trojan attempts to incorporate its ads in Google AdSense publishers program. Once installed, the Trojan horse downloads itself onto the computer and replaces the original ads with its own ads.

Imagine a world in which carts full of goods are designed to be pulled by a single horse. If the horse slows down, the cart moves more slowly. If the horse dies unexpectedly, the cart comes to an immediate halt and a lot of time and money is expended, pulling all the contents out of the cart for transfer to a second horse-and-cart combo.

[Ed: While Windows as an alternative OS would never cross my mind, I still think the article has value. Find a decent OS, like one of the BSDs or something. Windows? Ya gotta be kidding! - dcparris]

Linux users feel pretty content just running their systems. Some even complain when newswires run stories about Microsoft. The users don't feel threatened, but should they?

Hope you are still enjoying the celebrations of the new year and wish you all the best.

Like many schools, Parkhill Junior School in Essex, UK, was short on space and short on money, but long on the need to keep up with the ever-expanding role of technology in the classroom. Alison Seagrave, the computer curriculum development manager at Parkhill, found a way to provide her students with more computers, Internet access, and a good selection of software, all for under£1,000, using Linux.

[Ed: Excellent case study on GNU/Linux in schools - dcparris]

Revolutionary advancement in media center technology showcased the Linux-based Media Center at the Consumer Electronics Show. It supports Apple iPod and iTunes, Google Video, AOL Optimized 9.0, and more.

Tech roars. There’s too much good stuff coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere for tech buyers to sit on the sidelines. Non-tech companies in 2006 will again tout technology as their chief competitive advantage.

The annual event is an unmatched opportunity for databases developers, DBAs, users, and vendors to come together and share the latest information on MySQL and open source technology. The theme for the 2006 conference is `Discover, Connect, Succeed, Scale Your Business with MySQL'.

If you need to give a presentation, you're going to need slides. If you don't give presentations often, you may spend a lot of time playing hunt-the-feature with a traditional presentation application as you try to bring the slides in your mind's eye to the screen. Pylize, a Python-based command-line tool, lets you use familiar HTML coding techniques to get the job done.

Why is it that Microsoft's products keep mushrooming in size with each new release always requiring significantly more disk space and more processing power than the last time? This is Microsoft's way of rubbing Intel's back so that Intel will give Microsoft preferential treatment when it comes out with new chip specs.

Do you have to spend $80 to $100 on security software with that new computer? No. Pick a Macintosh or Linux computer, and you're pretty well protected from Internet threats such as viruses and spyware.

[Ed: It's more about freeware than free software. Still, it's good they mentioned GNU/Linux and Mac as solid options. - dcparris]

In the coming year, data warehousing trends will be driven by factors obvious and less obvious. Among the obvious drivers are data volumes that continue to grow by leaps and bounds, increasing intolerance for latency in getting answers to business questions and the expanding diversity and complexity of data types.

While I wouldn't use the phrase "evil capitalist", it is important for policy makers and politicians to realize that members of Orwellian double-speak named organizations like the "Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft" (CAAST) are just as (or more) likely to infringe software copyright (and patents) as anyone else. They do not occupy the "moral high ground", any more than Sony-BMG did as they infringed copyright in their XCP "copy protection" software (as well as circumventing the security of computers, and many other immoral acts that they are being taken to court over).

[Ed: While the aticle has nothing whatsoever to do with Link-sys, it is nevertheless an interesting article on the two-faced views of some, where copyright is concerned. - dcparris]

Welcome to this year's very last issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The renewed GNOME versus KDE flame war and Xen virtualisation are the two leading topics in this issue; these are followed by a few interesting links, including a timeline of Perl, which celebrated 18 years of age on Sunday. Has Ubuntu Linux been dumbed down? With omission of some of the vital utilities from the latest release, Robert Storey wonders where this increasingly popular distribution is heading. Also in this issue: an interview with Robert Tolu of the GenieOS project, an update on FreeBSD release schedule for 2006, and a handful of interesting new distributions. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

It is time to get the "True facts out, in contrast to the imagery and illusions that are dispensed ubiquitously by the behemoth of Redmond. If you can identify individuals open to rational argument that are not already bought off by the latter, please feel free to employ any part of the model letter: ideas, text, citations to make your points. This has now become a necessity to get some sort of rational balance between citizen rights and currently overwhelming corporate power.

There is a curious lack in the Linux community -- the number of community-led Linux distributions for commodity mobile phone hardware is zero. There are PDAs for which it is possible to get a GSM/GPRS SD card; there are mobile phones such as the