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Magnatune is the Internet record company that rejoices in the slogan "We are not evil." One of the key planks of Magnatune's business model has been its commitment to what it calls "Open Music":

The third and potentially final release candidate of Firefox 1.5 is fast approaching launch, according to Mozilla Europe on Thursday morning.

"Release candidate three will happen very soon — in the next few hours or days," said Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe.

LinuxDevices.com is pleased to publish the proceedings from the Seventh Real-Time Linux Workshop held in Lille, France, November 3-4, 2005, at the University for Science and Technology of Lille (USTL). The papers span a broad range of topics, ranging from fundamental real-time technologies to applications, hardware, and tools.

As usual, the conference was organized by the Real-Time Linux Foundation. The links below will lead you to a summary of each talk, and to a link for downloading the associated paper (PDF file). Enjoy . . . !

Groklaw's akStan found something truly useful. He was looking for a paper on symmetrical-components analysis of three phase electricity, he tells me, but he found a patent course instead, on MIT's Open Courseware web page.

Dr. Robert Rines, who has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, taught the class from his book, Create or Perish, and the book is available, by chapters as PDFs. The course homepage has a graphic showing Thomas Edison's 1879 patent application for an "Improvement in Electric Lights." The final chapter is interesting, because he talks about some of the problems with the patent system, but you know about all that already. What is probably the most valuable chapter for us to read is the one on how patent law works, chapter 3 [PDF]. It explains what can and can't be patented. They keep stretching that line, of course.

The GStreamer technology at the heart of PiTiVi has been in development for six years. It provides a means of stringing together different components to satisfy various multimedia needs. As an example, an application can read in a file, send it through a decoder plugin, run it through an effects plugin, and then display it to the screen or create an encoded file. GStreamer provides a comprehensive means of hooking together these different plugins in an infinite number of combinations. The plugin architecture opens up the development process to allow anyone to make GStreamer plugins for a range of different needs

"We saved seven salaries worth over one year. It was so dramatic they gave me a big raise and I was promoted from system administrator to IT manager. And because of the savings we get more productivity out of old hardware."

IPv6 is not a pipedream. Founder of the IPv6 Forum Latif Ladid took time out from the IPv6 summit in Canberra to talk to Computerworld about why the new Internet Protocol is a pie to be consumed here and now.

Tom's Hardware has reviewed a USB dongle based on a miniature 1-inch hard drive. The Zinside H2 is based on a Cornice 3GB "Storage Element" drive, and comes with a Ubuntu Linux installation CD that the publication used to install the older "Warty Warthog" release, creating a portable but slow Linux desktop.

While there are of course proponents and detractors on both side of the line, many analysts have identified open-source software and nonproprietary formats as building up strong momentum against Redmond. But the open-source movement does have legitimate detractors.

[Ed: This article is well-balanced - partly truth and partly fiction. - dcparris]

If switching operating systems is something you're considering, don't forget to think about how your decision might limit future hardware purchases. There are tons of things that Linux and BSD will run on, but like all other ventures into the untested waters, you can never be certain that everything will work. Perhaps it's beneficial to purchase hardware from a manufacturer that has tested these devices alongside their operating system?

The Eclipse platform allows pluggable components -- plug-ins -- to help create a rich graphical user interface (GUI) application. With Eclipse you can enhance a user's app experience by adding views to the GUI. This article will teach you how Eclipse makes it easy to link views and provides ways to adapt view linking to non-UI scenarios.