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Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representative Chet Littlemore is pressing for a raise in the little known Hard Drive Piracy Tax, a small percentage of a hard disk's storage space kept from a consumer so that it can't be used for pirated materials....Littlemore says that in these early years of the 21st century, up to one quarter of the average hard drive is pirated material. "The Hard Disk tax must be raised a proportional amount. If the space is not there, it cannot be used for illegal storage. We're balancing the effects of people's illegal downloading habits."

Lead by Progeny, numerous Debian Linux distribution companies and nonprofits consider forming a common core server distribution for the enterprise. But Mandriva and Turbolinux are rethinking their involvement.

Although it appeared that its Web site would remain stale and funds would not support Linux developers, there is now growing interest and opportunity for LinuxFund.

The third most popular browser (arguably) on the web Opera has just got a technical preview update with the capability of downloading torrent files from within the browser.

Now, the Open Source Community is in process of developing an extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser to add this similar functionality in the popular Firefox browser.

A few months ago, I started looking for an alternative to Windows Media Center Edition 2005, a personal video recorder (PVR) or digital video recorder (DVR) system. While other complete hardware/software combos, such as the popular TiVo, solve many of the headaches of having to build your own system and find out which hardware works and which doesn't, they also lack a level of customization and user freedom; with TiVo, for instance, you have join one of the company's monthly subscription plans. I decided to build my own system using open source software and carefully picked hardware. This proved to be much easier than I expected, thanks to MythTV.

With the release of several Firefox extensions by Google - we can take a look at how Google officially implements PageRank queries.

Episode #2 of the LQ Radio Show has been posted. The show is hosted by jeremy and includes a panel of LQ moderators. Topics include Linux on the desktop, beagle, Apple moving to Intel, blogging, Linux appliances, broadcom, Google’s Linux app, the Vienna Linux migration and much much more. Total running time is 1:29. A Bittorrent is available. You can also download the show directly (in mp3 and ogg format) or as a Podcast.

Welcome to this year's 28th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The recently released Fedora Core 4 has been getting some bad press lately - what are the reasons? The security problems plaguing Debian sarge in recent weeks have been solved, while Ubuntu's increasing impact on the world of Linux distribution has received more momentum by the launch of a US$10 million Ubuntu Foundation. Also in this issue - we interview Jean-Philippe Guillemin, the lead developer of Minislack and introduce three new Asian distributions - AsianLinux, OpenLX (both from India) and Niigata Linux (from Japan). Happy reading!

If the success of the "Shrek," "Toy Story," "Stuart Little," "The Incredibles," and many other Hollywood hits is any indication, animations add glitz to the mundane. While animation in the movies still requires professional animation packages like Blender, you can make simple animations using the command-line wizardry of ImageMagick.

One of the first developing countries to clearly stand behind OSS was Brazil. For the last five years Brazil’s government lead by President Lula is abandoning proprietary software (mainly Windows) in favor of OSS. The National Institute for Information Technology estimates a $500 saving in software for every machine owned/operated by the government which saves Brazil overall $150M a year

Hot-shot entrepreneurs, VC money, even 'paradigm shifts.' Dot-coms revisited? No, it's today's flood of open-source startups.

The IT world may be an insecure place, but don't blame Linux. In fact, very few IT pros participating in InformationWeek Research's Linux and open-source survey say Linux has introduced security problems into their IT environments

TheOpenCD team is pleased to announce the release of TheOpenCD 3.0, now featuring a live CD based on Ubuntu. TheOpenCD traditionally provides a handy collection of quality FOSS applications for Windows, professionally presented in an elegant CD browser. This latest edition also lets you boot into a highly polished desktop based on Ubuntu for a taste of the world of free operating systems!

Scientists from around Africa will gather in Cape Town from today to learn more about the benefits of open source software in science and maths research. They'll start off by installing their own copy of Ubuntu Linux and a collection of maths and science tools which they'll learn more about over the next month.

With all of the different processors available today from both AMD and Intel, it can be a tough decision to choose even a high-end CPU from the choices available. After all, with both single-core and dual-core CPUs available today, what constitutes the top processor may be different for the gamer versus the software developer

Tested using Gentoo Linux 64-bit (AMD64)

The head of Open Source Development Labs, Stuart Cohen, has added weight to rumours of greater collaboration between Microsoft and the open source community. Microsoft software designed specifically to run on open source platforms such as Linux could be closer to reality than previously thought, according to comments made by the head of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) on Monday.

The PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate release of PHP 4.4.0.

Amstar Systems manufactures and sells "automatic cashiers," cash dispensing machines that run on a modified Red Hat Linux. These super ATMs allow those without bank accounts access to financial transactions that previously only bank customers could access.

The quality of OpenMFG code is at least as good as commercial-grade software, Holowka says. Open-source programmers 'are doing this for notoriety, so they don't want to put garbage out there.'

Thotyelwa Mcongwane of the Meraka Institute's open source centre will give international delegates insight into Southern African free software progress during this week's Eclectic Tech Carnival in Austria.