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For some of us, our original exposure to AI, or artificial intelligence, goes back to an old program called Eliza. Eliza was a kind of computerized psychiatrist written in the 1960s by Professor Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eliza (named after the character in George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion") was an exercise in human response and natural language communication with so-called machine intelligence. The version I played with all those years ago was a DOS program running on a TRS-80. Ah, nostalgia. Eliza may not have been a great doctor, but it was a fun and fascinating program, a kind of whimsical promise of the future of AI.

I somehow never discovered the existence of Scribes until recently. I thought I had tried every word processor and text editor that existed in Linux. But my experiences in using Scribes the last few weeks to enter research notes and create writing drafts has convinced me of its power and usefulness.

Standards icon IT authorities from Germany and Switzerland have announced that they are working together, under the auspices of the Open Source Business Alliance, to improve the way that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org display and process OOXML-formatted documents. The authorities involved include the IT groups from the cities of Munich, Jena and Freiburg im Breisgau, the Swiss canton of Waadt, the Swiss Federal Court and the Schweizer Informatikstrategie Bund (Swiss IT Federation) whose representatives met at a workshop in Zurich in October to launch the "Precise reproduction of OOXML documents in Open Source Office applications" project. Slides for the workshop provide more details of what was discussed.

Pear OS Linux is based on Ubuntu and a dock at bottom gives you the taste of MAC OS X like experience announced its version 3.0 named "Panther" in both 32-bit and 64-bit. David Tavares has announced the version 3.0 of their French Pear OS.

Linux Mint puts its own extension upon GNOME 3.2. Our reviewer has a little fun trying to make sense of it all.

This week we have for you an interview with Simon Tokumine and Javier de la Torre from CartoDB, an open source geospatial cloud database with a business model. Enjoy the interview!

I don't know if you are a TouchWiz fan or not. If you don't know what TouchWiz it then you probably wont care. TouchWiz is Samsung's skin for Android devices. It offers some cool features and has its own share of fans and hater. Irrespective of that Samsung is determined to put TouchWiz on top of Ice Cream Sandwich on its Android 4.0 phones.

Nmap is a powerful utility for scanning your network and discovering all kinds of information about who is on it and what they’re doing. You can discover used and unused IP addresses, hostnames, services, and operating systems, and their versions – information that can help you monitor who is on your network, and lead you to unsafe or unauthorized servers.

Fedora 16 is the latest stable edition of Fedora, a Linux distribution whose development is sponsored by Red Hat, Inc. The main edition uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment, but there are editions, called Spins, that use other desktop environments. The available Spins in order of popularity, based on download count, are: Fedora KDE, Fedora Xfce, Fedora LXDE, Security, Games, Design-suite, Scientific-KDE, SoaS, Robotics, and Electronic-Lab. This review is of Fedora 16 KDE.

If you've ever been in charge of a network you've definitely had the need for a secure remote connection. Maybe you just need to keep an eye on employees or kids. Doing so can be a hassle to some while crossing networks and subnets. On top of that, many businesses may have Internet but no DHCP to more protected machines. Many do this to network machines while keeping employees from surfing the Web. Whatever the case, Linux has many great tools to enable remote encrypted GUI administration. Even better, we will get everything we need for free for accessing a Linux or Windows client.

Changes to the memory subsystem promise improved response times and performance. From Linux 3.2, device-mapper supports thin provisioning and is able to use this ability for improved snapshot functionality.

PowerDNS Authoritative Server is a great choice for handling DNS for your organization. For a successful install (and for this howto in particular) you'll need a Linux server running CentOS. This HOWTO will show you how to get a working pdns nameserver going along with a great web front-end. The most common way to set up PowerDNS (pdns) on multiple servers (ns1, ns2, etc...) is to enable MySQL replication from the master (ns1) and the slave(s) (ns2, ns3). That's going to be part 2 of this HOWTO. Let's just get pdns set up on our master and answering queries for now...

Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 is almost ready and the new version will be getting some cool new features such as Unity settings, an option to change the GTK or icon theme, a package cleaner ("Janitor") and more. The new version will only support Ubuntu 11.10 or later and will come with tweaks for three desktop environments: Unity, Unity 2D and GNOME Shell.

Ladies and gentlemen... Please welcome at this time, The Humble Indie Bundle #4! Pay what you want, help charity, and get some awesome indie games.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a CentOS 6.0 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

LinuxSecurity.com: Using password guessing as an attack vector. Over the years we've been taught a strong password must be long and complex to be considered secure. Some of us have taken that notion to heart and always ensure our passwords are strong. But some don't give a second thought to the complexity or length of our password.

While Gnome meta-morphed into a tablet/touch based desktop environment, which initially created some ripples, KDE has adopted a more mature approach. The free and open source project is working on what is called Plasma Active.

Pear OS 3.0 provides all the applications you need. Among them we can mention Opera web browser, Empathy instant messaging client, Sylpheed email client, Brasero CD burning utility, Synaptic Package Manager, Shotwell picture viewer and organizer, BleachBit system cleaner, and Back In Time system backup utility.

Unity3D has been one of the early adopters of native client technology. The latest Unity3D development tools now includes a simple checkbox using that developers can make their games compatible with Chrome and NaCl. While Unity3D native Linux support is still not encouraging, this news is definitely exciting. In fact, we already have our first Unity3D demo 'AngryBots' working in Linux using NaCl (made with Unity3D 3.5). The demo runs quite nicely with no lag and fps issues.

Busy week for Red Hat with a pair of new releases, as HP open sources webOS -- will it be the next great mobile Linux?