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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.

ThePlaceforitAll.com has posted instructions for installing Linux onto Apple's iPod nano, providing video-playback capability in full-color with new movie support in iPod Linux. Detailed instructions denote each step of the process, providing graphic illustrations where necessary to complete the installation process. Earlier this month, iPodNN noted that iDoom offers support for the Nano in full color, providing the Nano has iPod Linux installed.

Angela Lee, Google’s International Product Manager, followed the Blog Search Session here at CNET Japan’s Fall Innovation Conference with a overview of Google’s global mission, and growth in Japan’s search market. Angela introduced herself to the crowd a bit and then described Google’s mission to organize the world’s information.

The third release candidate for the upcoming Firefox 1.5 browser has been posted for download as the open-source Mozilla Foundation strives to attract new users.

Microsoft this week released a plug-in for the rival Firefox browser so that users can validate their Windows systems prior to downloading software from the Redmond, Wash.-based developer's Web site.

Do you spend a lot of time moving around the filesystem with cd commands, typing ls to see what’s there? Do you build lists of arguments on the command line using wildcards or filename completion? If you do a lot of work with files and directories, vshnu is worth a look.

An informed source says the newly created Open Invention Network (OIN) has received $40 million, down precipitously from the $280 million originally envisioned by its founders. The sources also says that erstwhile founding members Nokia and Yahoo also dropped out of the original announcement, and that the company was months late in its founding.

When SuSE Linux founder Hubert Mantel announced his resignation from Novell ast week, he became the third former SuSE executive to leave in the past six months. There was much speculation as to why Mantel left, which was sparked, in part, by the manner of his leaving. He announced his resignation via a Linux e-mail discussion list, claiming that SuSE had changed so much it was no longer the company he had founded 13 years before.

A little while ago, I read on the O’Reilly Network an blog entry about a cool mailing list manager called Mojo Mail. Not being in the market for such a software at the time, I read the interview with great interest, nodded thoughtfully at the mention of a successful, cleanly laid out, “it just works” open source project and went ahead trying to figure out how to speed up iDisk browsing. Little did I know that Dada Mail (the application’s new name) would be essential to my publishing experience a few years later and that usable iDisk browsing would only be possible courtesy of the folks at Panic, within approximately the same time frame.

In a company Weblog posting, Novell Senior Manager of Public Relations Kevin Barney said the report "aims to confuse the market about the value of Linux and downplay the various reliability, security and TCO issues Windows users are facing."

Do you have an existing MySQL database with valuable data in it? Would you like to be able to access it with OpenOffice.org 2.0's new Base database application?

I didn't really plan using a $20,000 laser cutter on my 17" Powerbook to etch a 19th-century engraving of a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur (also the vi book cover image, from O'Reilly), but it seemed like it had to done. The results are stunning - photos and more...

Last week, IBM certified the Ubuntu Linux distro for use with its DB2 enterprise database. These types of vendor certifications are pretty routine; and as a rule, they're nothing to get worked up about. This one, however, is truly interesting: Could an obscure Linux distro with a funny name, hippy-dippy motto, crazy-commie talk about truly free software, and a Debian (ahem!) lineage soon have both Red Hat and Novell on the run?