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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]

Commentary -- There is no question that LUGs -- Linux User Groups -- have been important to the rapid growth and adoption of Linux. In the early years, a typical LUG brought together early adopters from every walk of life who had a missionary zeal for Linux. Today, most members are IT professionals. Given that, I wonder, do LUGs matter any longer?

ABI Research has published a prediction of technologies it says are unlikely to achieve widespread adoption in 2006. Three key mobile technologies you probably won't see next year, according to ABI, are: broadcast mobile video, 100 Mbps WiFi, and high-speed cellular data transfer.

Hi,

Happy holidays, to those who are celebrating them.

Votinge period starts 00:00:01 UTC on December 18th, 2005. Votes must be received by 23:59:59 UTC on December 31st, 2005.

Audacity is a fine open source audio editor, but it cannot currently edit Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. There's nothing open about either the API or the codec for the Windows Media Audio format, so the Audacity Developer Team is taking its time before attempting to incorporate direct import, editing, and export of these files. But if you have WMA files you need to edit with more precision than Microsoft's tools allow, Audacity can still help.

Should Java programmers migrate to it? This article compares two development platforms: Java and Mozilla. The object of this comparison is not to establish which one is best, but rather to measure the maturity, the advantages, and the disadvantages of Mozilla as a platform from the point of view of a Java programmer (as I am).

As if it were not committed to Linux enough already, IBM last week elevated its relationships with two key Linux vendors to the highest level of partnership status that Big Blue offers.

Last June a survey of UK websites by the consultancy SciVisum found that one in 10 of the sites they looked at limited non-Microsoft browsers. Some of those, like the Odeon cinema site, have since improved, but many remain wholly or partially inaccessible to those who don't use IE.

The main reason is that many Microsoft-based sites use a technology called ActiveX to embed active content in their web pages. ActiveX is essentially a Windows-only way of doing the sorts of things that a standards-based website would use Java or Javascript for, and it is not supported by the standard releases of Firefox.

I have a soft spot for “legacy” languages – and I, for one, like getting legacies. Back in my day, we expected to learn new languages for different projects (learning Simula for a port simulation, for instance, made a lot more sense than trying to “standardise” on COBOL; or even FORTRAN, the usual simulation language then). So I was interested when a Register reader, Thomas H. Martin of Georgia, USA, emailed in praise of M, once known as MUMPS.

Software behemoth Microsoft still rules, but its influence may be diminishing feel some experts.

Its déjà vu time for Microsoft, which edged out Netscape ten years back, as it is up against competitors who are using the web space to threaten its monopoly.

For instance, free OpenOffice suite can be effortlessly downloaded with a broadband connection. Its Writer is turning out to be an able alternative to MS-Word and certain experts feel Mozilla's Thunderbird can replace Outlook. So is MS-Office suite's dispensable in the very near future?

We’ve recently implemented Horde ( http://www.horde.org ) for internal mail, calendaring and task management. With tool suites like these available, the old guard must be getting nervous.

This may be obvious, but with the new Horde implementation (and Imp, Kronolith, Turba, Ingo, and Nag), our need for a commercial internal collaboration suite has been obviated. We probably wouldn’t have purchased such a suite (certainly not from a closed source vendor) so perhaps this isn’t a big deal in our case. I'm wondering how many times this scene is played out every day of every week.