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Here’s the basic question: If you had the choice (and you do!), why would you choose Windows over Linux? I don’t need it. I have every bit of functionality in Linux as I did in XP. This article includes a list of my typical setup in XP and Linux and the difference between them based on functionality (hint: There isn’t any).

Despite the growing acceptance of open-source software, not all companies are willing to entrust their operations to a community of strangers.

US newspaper The Boston Globe is looking to talk to recent converts to Mozilla Firefox for a forthcoming article.

You can tell that Microsoft is scared about something when the company can't stop talking about it. On the client side, the software giant is so nervous about the amazing advances made by Apple Computer with its iPod portable audio player and iTunes Music Store that the company recently spent hundreds of millions of dollars rejuvenating Windows XP with a variety of digital media updates that likely will prove more confusing than exciting to many consumers. On the enterprise side, long-time nemeses such as IBM and Novell have rallied around the open-source Linux standard in their latest bid to outflank Microsoft's server products. Predictably, Microsoft has come out firing.

Dan James at CEO Blues writes about the challenges and opportunities facing the Mozilla Foundation as it moves beyond the 1.0 release of Firefox. With the excitement and attention, the Firefox release provides a perhaps once in a decade chance to inspire and educate the general population about open source software. Will the Mozilla Foundation capitalize on this?

Experts believe this latest customer relationship management product could force down the cost of CRM and make rival vendors such as Salesforce.com raise their game. Open source CRM vendor SugarCRM is about to launch an on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) product that it says will set busineses back just a fraction of the cost of Salesforce.com's offering.

Microsoft is having difficulty convincing the Open Source people that its Sender ID is now kosher. Microsoft has re-submitted its SenderID standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force after it was rejected because of difficulty over licensing arrangements.

In the past couple of years, technologies such as intrusion detection and protection systems have become mainstream tools in the corporate security arsenal. But many feel less than satisfied with the performance of some of these technologies. In particular, the number of false positives - when a legitimate piece of communication is flagged as being a possible security threat - is proving to be expensive for organisations in terms of the amount of time IT staff must spend dealing with what is actually legitimate traffic.

Although Sun is planning to show off Solaris 10 next week, there are signs that it will take a while for the open source version to hit the shops. Glenn Weinberg, vice president of the Operating Platforms Group at Sun, told internetnews.com, here, that it could be months before an open source Solaris 10 is available.

Tarantella has announced a key reseller partnership with IBM, as part of the company's effort to recast itself as a viable alternative to Citrix in enterprise data centers that are embracing Linux.

Patents pose equal danger to all classes of software and in some cases the free and open source genre may have less to fear, the senior counsel of the Free Software Foundation says. The FSF is the principal organisational sponsor of the GNU Project which was launched by Richard M. Stallman in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX style operating system which is free software.

Gated communities are popping up all over the country, in every echelon of society. Security at such communities really does seem to be more urgent when you've got people like Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston living in your neighborhood; not only do you have to keep pesky fans out, but you have to be able to get those cops in quickly to answer domestic dispute calls. Plus, the residents of Country Club of the South in Alpharetta, Ga., where the Houston-Browns and several other big-name celebrities and sports stars make their home, have lots of parties for all their famous friends, and famous friends don't like to be left out in the cold because the guard can't find them on the guest list.

Sun Microsystems demonstrated what it calls the third generation of desktop computer accessibility technology, which it hopes to start shipping for the Linux operating system next year.

There have been a lot of articles written recently about the Firefox web browser as it nears 1.0. I've used Mozilla or other Gecko-based browsers as my main browser for quite a long time, first with Mozilla and then a few years ago Galeon. I particularly loved Galeon's tabbed browsing features and configurability (something Mozilla didn't have at the time) and other nice features such as vi-style navigation (using h,j,k, and l to move left, down, up, and right respectively, just like in vi).

News from the Mozilla project.

New features include Saved Search Folders (aka Virtual Folders) which allow you to display messages based on previously set search criteria across multiple folders. Message Grouping allows you to organize e-mail in a folder by grouping them based on various attributes like Date, Sender, Label, etc. Thunderbird 0.9 also includes numerous bug fixes and other improvements.

The Firefox developers please ask that you look at the following areas: site authentication (especially over SSL), extension installation via update.mozilla.org and other sites, MacOS X builds, and software update - "we're making another attempt at this. We think we've got the bugs from RC1, so please test by following these instructions."

Top Open Source Innovators Gather for Three-Day Show; Open Source Applications Foundation Chair Mitchell Kapor to Speak

In my previous article, I introduced some of the exciting new tools people are using to manage information on the Web. One of these is del.icio.us, which is best described as a social bookmark manager. The concept of del.icio.us is simple: every time you come across an interesting site, use a bookmarklet to type in a few keywords about the page, and save it to del.icio.us Web site. All saved bookmarks are public and everything is available through RSS feeds. Like any useful tool, del.icio.us has attracted a number of extensions and improvements as people figure out new ways to use it. Here are a few of those tips, tricks, and tools for del.icio.us that I have found particularly useful.

Much of the attention that Linux has received has been focused on its growing use in servers. However, Linux scales down as well as it scales up, and as a result, Linux has become an ideal operating system for a wide variety of systems. Nowhere has this been more evident than the world of embedded computing. Here's why.