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If you're looking for the best ways to measure your development team's success, this writer says you need to look at improving predictability and optimizing productivity and he explains how to best do that.

The security-conscious will tell you that a multi-factor authentication scheme involves requiring items from two or more of the categories "things you know," "things you have," and "things you are." Passwords and passphrases both fall under the "things you know" umbrella, and while there are commercially viable options for the latter two categories — security dongles and biometric fingerprint scanners, for example — neither have taken off with the general public. Partly that is a cost issue, to be sure, but the complexity of public-key infrastructure (PKI) smart cards does not help, either.

In August 2011, Download.com was taken on a new path by their General Manager and V.P. Sean Murphy. They started wrapping legitimate 3rd party software into their own installer which by default installs a wide variety of adware and other questionable software on users machines. It also does things like redirect user search queries and change their Internet home page. At first their installer forced people to accept the malware or close the installer (see screen shot of infected VLC installer in this article). Later they added a non-default "decline" button hidden way on the left side of the panel. Also, the initial installer shown in the previous screen shot claimed the software was “SAFE, TRUSTED, AND SPYWARE FREE”. In an unusual show of honesty, they removed that claim from the rogue installer.

A Fedora remix OS from Australia Kororaa 16 named "Chum" has been released a little late but better features. This time Kororaa used many third party repositories like Chrome, Adobe, RPMfusion, VirtualBox. And it also includes many new packages in-built. Overall its very easy and reliable Linux OS.

This week we look at 4 cloud email gottchas, HTML5 as programming training tool and an open source cloud storage server.

I hate to say this but if you don't have issues with a Linux-based OS which looks like Mac then you will like PearOS. What I do like about PearOS is that it works out of the box. The overall experience is great.

Dan Horák announced a last evening, December 15th, the immediate availability for download of the Fedora 16 operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems.

"I can proudly say I purchased the first Humble Bundle (the `Humble Indie Bundle`), and I can say I'm glad to have not purchased the last seven. Why? I know what you're thinking, `It's a good deal, and it's monetary motivation for developers to port their games to Linux, and remove any pre-existing DRM.` Yeah, yeah, but that's nothing compared to the first Humble Bundle."

Because Oracle retired the "Operating System Distributor License for Java", Canonical no longer has permission to redistribute new Java packages.

Since my HP Pavillion DV7-2180US has issues overheating (causing it to have a permanent perch on a cooling pad) an early Christmas gift to me was a Toshiba Satellite L755D-S5204. It’s reasonably priced at around $500 but don’t let the price tag fool you. While the price instantly adds this laptop to the low end laptop shelf in the store it is rich with features and is even prepared for an upgrade to Windows 8, making it a perfect Christmas gift for even the pickiest geek in your family.

If you are of a certain age (and I, most regrettably, am definitely of a certain age), a book means a certain thing, and that is this: something that you can hold in your hands, keep on a shelf, pack up and carry in a box in move after move (after move, after move…), and generally treasure for life, if it’s a good read or a valued resource. But if you're of a certain other age - it just may be an eBook.

PDNSD is a non authoritative caching DNS server. It maintains a disk cache of the queries that your system performs and subsequent queries will be faster from the cache. It is safe enough to be used on a personal Unix/Linux system as a home Desktop or a Laptop.

The file sharing, synchronization market led by Dropbox is a popular target these days. For many companies, it's a chance to horn in on a growing market and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. For open source projects, it's a chance to return control of personal data to the user. For the folks behind ownCloud, it's both.

The ownCloud project is 2 years old next month!! Today is an exciting day because today we announce a company as an addition to the open source project to push ownCloud forward. ownCloud Inc. will offer ownCloud services and support to enterprises in addition to to the normal open source version.

ownCloud Inc. will help us to spread ownCloud and free cloud services in general – way more than we could have done without.

So why is it good for an open source project to have a company which offers enterprise services and solutions around free software?

With the end of another year talks of the year of the Linux desktop is emerging once again. Compared to last years there is much improvement in the chances. But there is also one big problem..

Senator Franken issued this press release making public the responses from carriers (AT&T, and Sprint) and manufacturers (Samsung and HTC) regarding the Carrier IQ privacy issue. No response yet from T-Mobile and Motorola.

Pear OS is a new Linux desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. Development started in early August 2011, and Pear OS 1.0, the first version marked “stable,” was released on August 15 2011. The newest release is Pear OS Linux Panther 3. I tend not to pay too much attention to Ubuntu-based distributions especially when there is no feature or features that truly distinguishes them from their parent distribution, but Pear OS appears to be different. In fact, it looks to be better than any other Ubuntu-based distribution. Perhaps even better than Ubuntu itself.

SkypeTab-NG (NG stands for Next Generation) is a tool that adds tabs to Skype for Linux. Besides providing a tabbed chat window, the SkypeTab-NG also embeds both the conversation and the main Skype windows in a single window.

The PDF import function for LibreOffice Draw in Debian Squeeze, if you're using the libreoffice-pdfimport package from Debian Backports, is broken. Doesn't work. LO wants to open PDFs as text files in LO Writer, not as editable PDFs in LO Draw. So how do you fix this?

Ah, sweet revenge! After winning its court battle to lift the ban on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, Samsung is making the most of the fondleslab injunction saga.