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[Ed: This is a questionable submission that verges on a commercial for products. I'm running it because the products mentioned have value to some of our readers. If you know of free utilities that will do the same jobs, please make a comment. -adelste]

If Sony BMG can screw up your computer with rootkits and other dangerous tricks, so can any other trusted name in music or movies. The latest release of a CD/DVD play-or-clone package from China lets you render the latest DRM schemes harmless by stripping out the bad stuff when you copy or play CDs and DVDs.

IONA Technologies, a provider of high-performance integration solutions for mission-critical IT environments, and ObjectWeb, a well established and respected open source community with a focus on the development of industry-grade distributed middleware, announced that the Celtix open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) project has achieved its third key milestone.

The on-schedule delivery of Celtix Milestone 3 provides the community with additional transport support, broader specification compliance and significantly enhanced usability. Additionally, a multiple licensing approach that supports both LGPL and EPL creates greater opportunities for open source communities such as the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and others to take dependencies on Celtix code for their ESB runtime functionality as part of ongoing open source projects.

Many VRML vendors implemented a different subset of the spec, and it never gained traction. And so 3D on the Web faded away. It turns out that VRML lives on in its XML flavor, X3D, which has grown to encompass VRML's siblings H-Anim (Humanoid Animation) and GeoVRML. This article focuses on a couple of uses that X3D is ready for now, and takes a look at where VRML might go in the future.

The Indian information technology and business process outsourcing industry is poised to grow ten-fold by 2010, according to a report released Tuesday.

While Indian companies will continue to maintain their 46 percent share of the global business processing outsourcing (BPO) market and 65 percent share of the IT outsourcing market through 2010, the combined market is estimated to grow from the current level of $30 billion to $300 billion by 2010.

These two sectors of the Indian economy will earn $60 billion in exports by March 2010, an increase from 3 percent of gross domestic product to about 7 percent, according to a report by the Indian software trade association Nasscom and global consulting firm McKinsey.

Developers of four major Web browsers -- Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer (IE) -- gathered at an informal meeting in Toronto on November 17 to review plans and share progress on security improvements and standards. The intents were making security information more meaningful to users, and balancing security for high-traffic sites (such as banks) and smaller organizations and businesses.

The old silo method of chip development, with hardware and firmware developers barely interacting with each other, won't cut it in today's fast-moving industry. Learn about the development tools and processes that speed system on a chip design and get all your developers working together effectively.

An often neglected aspect of IT management is the performance review. Many IT mangers seem to find preparing and delivering performance reviews an onerous task, and therefore doing reviews often becomes a perfunctory exercise, or they are skipped altogether. Managers who do not take performance reviews seriously, or worse yet, fail to deliver any, are remiss. Here's why it's important.

DataStor Technology, a professional PC peripheral ODM/OEM provider located in Taiwan, has announced a series of storage related Consumer Electronics product lines for the upcoming 2006 CES (Consumer Electronics Show), focusing on the home user market, the solutions varies from networking storage (NAS) to portable media storage gadgets (Hard disk external enclosure with MP3 function).

There can be many methods getting Linux to run on a Windows box. I would always encourage to make the total switch to Linux but there can be good reasons to keep your Windows box intact. An employer may give you a laptop loaded with Windows to use for work. You may really enjoy PC gaming and all of the latest good games still require Windows. Maybe you need to perform data recovery for someone on their Windows PC that will not boot.

The Executable and Linking Format is a standard for object modules, libraries, executables, and core files. Many UNIX and UNIX-like systems use ELF, and the ELF standard has contributed substantially to the development of compiler toolchains and debugging tools for a variety of systems. Peter Seebach looks at the history of the ELF specification and why it's been so useful.

A Christmas message from the Linux Kernel Mailing List, by Linus Torvalds) -- Now, most of you are probably going to be totally bored out of your minds on Christmas day, and here's the perfect distraction. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the stores will be closed, and there's really nothing better to do in between meals.

It seems to be review time for Amarok. The Amarok team is thrilled to see Amarok way ahead of the pack in a recent Grumpy Editor review on LWN.net, in which the author describes the best and worst features of four popular Free Software audio players.

The Mozilla Foundation has initiated phase two of its user-created advertising campaign. When Firefox 1.5 was released last month, the Mozilla Foundation started a contest, promising nifty prizes to the Firefox users that submit the best homemade 30-second Firefox advertisements. In addition to the advertising contest, the Firefox Flicks campaign also promised Amazon.com gift certificates and cool Firefox swag from the Mozilla store to users and developers that submit the most creative testimonial videos. The Mozilla foundation invites enthusiasts to participate:

Quoting: Last year at Spread Firefox we launched community marketing into the mainstream with written testimonials. This year we're taking it "live" with video testimonials and ads. From the casual user to the creative professional, Firefox Flicks is your opportunity to speak out for Firefox and express yourself in front of a worldwide audience.

[ED: I know it's probably a near duplicate, but I always liked ars technica and on a day when even the 24 hour grocery chains are closed the question becomes: "What are you doing here?". In any case, the best to all whatever you are celebrating this time of year - HC]

If digital-music veteran Rob Lord wanted to court controversy with his new open-source start-up, he probably couldn't have done much better than to compare Apple Computer's iTunes software to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.

Lord's new five-person company, the ambitiously named Pioneers of the Inevitable, is building a piece of digital-music software called "Songbird," based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser.

[ED: Personally I am not a fan of mp3 nor of Apple iPods or music offerings. However, I have three kids running around carrying one version or another. Let's see if a bit of real competition makes Jobs compete harder - HC]

Though this has been mentioned several times recently, Nessus 3.0 is out and its closed source.

Tenable's Nessus license flip flop has raised the ire of many in the open source community and has even led to a fork of the project that is backed by an influential community based open source organization, Software in the Public Interest (SPI).

[ED: Here even in the worst case, GPL tops most OSS due to the certainty that if the interest exists the last free version with be the basis of a new product line - HC]

Looking for some Christmas music to put on your iPod or MP3 player? Head over to NORAD Tracks Santa 2005 to download free MP3 music files performed by United States Air Force Academy Band and Naden Band of Maritime Forces Pacific of the Canadian Navy from Esquimalt, British Columbia. Happy Holi(Pod)days!

Your skills as a digital photographer can pay off hours before a holiday event. I've just published five last minute gift ideas on The Digital Story site.

My favorite of the bunch? "Gift Certificate for Family Portrait" -- Here's a sure-fire way to score points with the relatives. Whip up a quick gift certificate for a family portrait taken by you. You can promise a few prints plus the images on CD. If you have an extra 8" x 10" picture frame around, you can mount the certificate in there with a note: Your Family Portrait Here!

On December 5, a mere seventeen days ago, Linux gamers and enthusiasts were greeted by NVIDIA's Rel80 display driver launch for Linux. In the 1.0-8174 release was initial support for NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface (SLI) as well as the new nvidia-xconfig utility, similar to ATI's aticonfig tool they had unveiled months prior.

Linux pundits see that, on the strength of revenues, Red Hat is clearly the leader in North America while SuSE has some strength in Europe. But this competition is not happening in a vacuum. Both are fighting in Asia where there are other competitors such as TurboLinux and Red Flag, which comes from China.

Get to know Ruby before you hop on (or off) the Rails bandwagon

Ruby on Rails is just one facet of what makes Ruby great, just like EJB is only part of the Java enterprise platform. Andrew Glover digs beneath the hype for a look at what Java developers can do with Ruby, all by itself. Ruby's syntax is quite different from that of the Java language, but it's amazingly easy to pick up. Moreover, some things are just plain easier to do in Ruby than they are in the Java language.

[ED: Title seems to be a misnomer, seems mostly positive take on Ruby from my quick scan - HC]