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What do you do if your PC sales are slumping and the newest versions of Windows aren't boosting demand? If you're HP, you put Windows 7 on a few of your new PCs and offer $150 discounts on them to attract new buyers, giving your customers a place to go if they don't want the changes ushered in by Windows 8 but aren't tech-savvy enough to downgrade their own PCs.

"It is a miracle that curiosity escapes formal education." These words by Albert Einstein reflect a lot about the current state of education. It also captures the need for overhauling the fabric of our school system. Society needs technology solutions that extract the best out of all the stakeholders in education—students, teachers, and parents. And we need enterprises that revolutionize the learning ecosystem. inBloom is one such company that utilizes and integrates massive amounts of data to change the landscape of the education sector.I talked to Vincent Mayers, open source community manager at inBloom, to learn how the company is changing school systems and how open source technologies aid in its mission.

Every company and individual joins an open source project for any number of reasons. Some are altruistic, but many times it's about about a business agenda. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it can lead to tension and a need to build a consensus on the future of the community.

CrunchPwn 0.1a is available. CrunchPwn is a newer lightweight, Debian-based distribution designed to be used in penetration testing.

If grep is one of your favorite tools, chances are that you will like ack even better. ask a Perl-based command-line utility similar to grep, but designed to improve the search speed and capabilities of grep. Especially if you are a programmer, I strongly recommend replacing grep with ack. The usage of ack is heavily optimized for code search, so a programmer can perform complex search on source code trees with fewer keystrokes.

Pear OS has been bought out by an undisclosed company, and all free versions of the OS have been removed

Android has more than 80 percent worldwide mobile marketshare, so it makes sense it would see the desktop as the next logical target, but just because they want to do it doesn't mean the market is looking to have an all-Android experience. Google also has to be very careful it doesn't end up damaging their growing ChromeOS business.

Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion this week has been heralded as the company’s big move into home automation. Nest has made overtures about customer privacy, but given the size and profitability of its new owner’s advertising and personal data business, the new relationship needs a closer examination.

Certainly, Nest’s products—currently a thermostat and a smoke detector—have potential in their own right, and Google is getting a new slate of devices to sell in the deal. But along with the devices, Google is getting access to new types of data it can put to very good use along with a new set of very interested customers. And like other types of data collection, this has potentially negative consequences for consumers.

The Debian GNU/Linux Project's technical committee appears to be split down the middle on the question of the default init system for the next release. But the panel is tilting towards a compromise on systemd as the default. It means that the future direction of Linux development will be determined by Red Hat, the company that is behind systemd, and the biggest commercial entity in the Linux game.

A controversy regarding Canonical's CLA has been going on for a couple of days, and now even Linus Torvalds has entered the discussion, although in a more peaceful manner.

For anaylzing Fantasy Football data, somebody who obviously takes Fantasy Football seriously and knows a thing or two about R, seems to agree with me and has written up a good number of reasons why R is the best tool for Fantasy Football data analysis.

If you read the technology press lately, odds are you already know about the launching of the AllSeen Alliance (a Google News search I just did produced 412 results in a wide range of languages). That's not a surprise, because this is an important and ambitious project. But there's a story behind the story that likely won't get the attention that it deserves, and that's what this blog post is about. (Disclosure: the AllSeen Alliance is a Linux Collaboration Project—the 11th so far—and I assisted in its structuring and launch.)

Security researchers have published a report that Ars is having a tough time swallowing, despite considerable effort chewing—a botnet of more than 100,000 smart TVs, home networking routers, and other Internet-connected consumer devices that recently took part in sending 750,000 malicious e-mails over a two-week period.

The line between traditional, paid advertising and organic editorial content on the Internet can sometimes be hazy. A recent stealth promotional campaign between Microsoft and Machinima highlights just how hazy that line has become, and how behind-the-scenes payments can drive ostensibly independent opinion-mongering on by users on services like YouTube.

In Linux, the 'free' command is used to show memory usage; but the information presented is more complex than just 'used' and 'free'. This article explains what the additional fields mean, and shows you how to determine your system's actual memory usage.

Linux 3.13 is out bringing among other thing the first official release of nftables. nftables is the project that aims to replace the existing {ip,ip6,arp,eb}tables framework aka iptables. nftables version in Linux 3.13 is not yet complete. Some important features are missing and will be introduced in the following Linux versions. It is already usable in most cases but a complete support (read nftables at a better level than iptables) should be available in Linux 3.15.

True story. A project team was in need of an open source tool. Following their company's policy, the team requested their Information Systems (IS) department download the tool. They were soon bombarded with a host of questions and a form that needed to be filled out, which they complied with. Not satisfied with the information provided and unable to take a decision, the IS department then forwarded the request to the Legal department. After due diligence, the Legal department allowed the use of the tool, provided that the team obtain an approval from their customer (read: the customer takes all responsibility and liability). The tool in question? The humble, unix2dos!

A recent Georgia Tech study found that Kickstarter projects often find success thanks to the use of effective marketing buzzwords like “guaranteed.” That word never shows up the Rex project’s Kickstarter page, which is perhaps one reason why this promising project has yet to reach a third of its $90,000 funding goal, with less than two weeks to go. We think Rex is worth a closer look. (Satisfaction guaranteed!)

Question2Answer (Q2A) is a popular open source Q&A platform for PHP/MySQL, currently running on more than 11,000 sites in 40 languages. Here is what's new in Q2A v1.6.3.

I have started developing a Gtk front end for the Linux uTorrent server. I know there is a Web UI but you can not click magnet links in web pages to add them. I was developing this for myself but if there is any interest in the project I will make it public.