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A rising rival to Microsoft's Office suite gets a major overhaul. Also: Marc Andreessen sees a bright future for PHP.

Listen at your leisure to The advantages of SOA podcast, an informative interview with Matthew Oberlin, who is an expert in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation. He will discuss SOA being evolutionary, not revolutionary - it's really about business activities being reusable, building SOA components for the SOA programming model and the main elements of the SOA environment. The podcast provides insight into the fundamental principles behind the SOA programming model.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer was on good form during a Q&A session with an audience at a Gartner Symposium in Florida yesterday, having the audience in stitches on more than one occasion, as well as coming out with the kind of marketing speak wont to baffle and enlighten in equal measure.

Asked for his thoughts on the fact that when it comes to platform migrations, more people are moving from Unix to Linux than from Unix to Windows, he conceded that: "We're not winning more than we're losing." Which is a roundabout way of conceding that it's losing to Linux more often than winning.

Now this is very special, the T.sonic 310 from Transcend is a radically distinctive hybrid that combines all the advantages of a hi-speed USB 2.0 flash drive with a high quality MP3 player, but that’s not all. Transcend has managed to integrate a unique feature into the T.sonic 310’s innovative cubist design, a TouchPad controller. The T.sonic 310’s easy to use futuristic TouchPad, responds to your fingertip control and allows you to raise or lower the volume, replay/skip tracks and fast forward/rewind music during playback.

The T.sonic 310 supports Linux Kernel 2.4 or later.

Advantage: open source.

What about stability? You've spent a lot of time, effort and money building sophisticated business intelligence systems. So what happens when your vendor decides it's time for an upgrade? This is a good idea if that piece of software never worked right, or if you need a new feature provided by the upgrade.

Part of what makes open source software thrive is code sharing and reuse. The Create initiative at freedesktop.org targets this issue by bringing together developers from Inkscape, Scribus, Krita, the Open Clip Art Library, and the GIMP, among others, along with interested individuals. Together they are collaborating on a set of specifications they believe will simplify work for developers and distributions, and usability for end users.

Achieve a level of high reliability in a microprocessor system by adding a second identical processor to a system to monitor and verify the system processor operation -- also known as the lockstep processor technique. This tip demonstrates the integrated lockstep facility (LSF) in the PowerPC 750GX processor.

Chubby Puppy Linux "fills out" the regular Puppy Linux release with the addition of the OpenOffice.org suite of applications. It's a full figured Linux version in a fast, lightweight liveCD package. It will put a little bite into that shaggy old retired desktop. Rob Reilly reviews.

... You can also use DD theme party printer to print out the pictures that you have captured. We are providing Linux driver also for the Linux users. ...

NewsForge.com regrets to report that our freelance contributor Michael M. Murphree, 41, died Monday, October 17, as a result of a heart attack. Michael worked as a system administrator and held Level 2 certification from the Linux Professional Institute. A devoted family man, he also enjoyed writing children's fiction, woodworking, and building computer systems for the less fortunate.

This year's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), being held in Boston next month, is different from past years in that there is now a track for CIOs. Why? According to Matt Asay, conference director and director of Novell's Linux Business Office and Open Source Review Board, it's because open source has arrived -- in the executive suites.

.. Ballmer knows he's got a long roe to hoe. 'The day I come in front of the Gartner audience and say we have a better Unix than Linux, that'll be a good day.'"

When Goodwill first selected Liferay, Bergman admitted he was the one who had the most reservations about going with an open source software (OSS) product.

"I was the person who was the most concerned, and it was my IT team that really tried to allay some of those fears," Bergman said.

SAN DIEGO — The Norwegian who became a hacker hero at age 15 will have to adjust to warmer winters.

Jon Lech Johansen, also known as "DVD Jon" for his work with software to crack copy-protection in DVDs, began work in San Diego this week at MP3tunes, the digital music service started in February by Michael Robertson, an iconoclast in his own right.

Dave Rosenberg writes about Monday's National Association of State CIOs’ (NASCIO) annual conference writes: At what point does Microsoft's PR team stop Alan Yates from speaking publicly? Yates, GM, information worker business strategy is hell-bent on making disparaging remarks about open source without facts or statistics to back them up.

"Clearly, it's changing the landscape of the technology industry for better and worse,"

Some groups want to remove intellectual property completely, but Yates said commercial companies such as Linspire produce operating systems based on Linux, the most widely used example of open-source programs. He said such companies stand by their products and provide a balance between the open-source and proprietary sides, a middle ground of sorts

But Yates said government agencies and organizations need to understand the benefits of using open source and balance that against implementation costs. He said they need to understand licensing privileges, indemnification issues and an ecosystem of service providers, among other considerations.

After a series of acquisitions and mergers, auction house Bonhams needed to reconcile four different business management systems. To achieve this, it selected an IBM eServer xSeries solution running Linux, offering reduced administration and maintenance activities and a scalable architecture.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years.

Note: Downloads available below -Ed.

http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.0/index.html

A vulnerability has been identified in VERITAS NetBackup servers and clients, which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands. This flaw is due to a format string error in the Java authentication service "bpjava-msvc" that does not properly handle a specially crafted "COMMAND_LOGON_TO_MSERVER" command (port 13722), which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root/SYSTEM privileges.

The Apple Power Mac G5 Quad features two 2.5GHz, dual-core PowerPC G5 processors to increase the power at the top of its business range

Last week the OpenOffice.org project turned five. Today the team release the long-awaited OpenOffice.org 2.0 office. For South African users the good news is that this release is immediately available in seven of the country's official 11 languages with the remaining four planned for November.