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Of the five big names in the Tablet PC OS market, who will emerge dominant?

The TOR project has gained much popularity over the last months. The Free Software Foundation has also given the project the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. This is fantastic news for an open source project. However, all this popularity combined with the way TOR is promoted through its web site and sometimes the Press may lead typical internet users into thinking that TOR, apart from providing a form of anonymity, is also a secure way of communication with the various internet services. This is not true.

Development on the Portable C Compiler (PCC) began back in the 1970's, but this week version 1.0 of this BSD-licensed compiler was finally released...

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Okular now supports searching for words with ligatures. Work on new NetworkManager 0.9 branch in NetworkManagement and PEAP-GTC wireless authentication suppport. A new plugin which provides a rating and an annotation menu action for files and folders (Dolphin/Konqueror) from Nepomuk.

I have a FreeBSD file server sitting in my office that has happily been serving files for a few years now. But the server is built from a conglomeration of very old parts and some of them are now wearing out. I am in the process of building another PC from old parts to replace the existing server. ...

Scientific Linux (SL) 6.0 is the latest release of a Red Hat-based distribution specifically tailored to meet the needs of the scientific computing community (see Figure 1). It's championed by Fermilab and used for some experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Fermilab released its first version on SL in 2004 with a target audience of the high-energy physics community. Since then, it has been adopted by research facilities across the world.

Browser add-ons are a great way of bolting on new functionality and customizing the experience to a high degree. But they're also a great way of slowing down browser quite a lot, which is why Mozilla is introducing several new measures to cut down on poorly optimized add-ons for Firefox.

Earth science (also known as geoscience) is the focus of understanding the sciences related to the planet Earth. It includes a wide range of fields such as geology, geography, geophysics, meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology. Some people are surprised to learn that astronomy is also regarded to be an earth science. Geology is generally considered to be the primary earth science.

Camino—the Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa user interface—is considering switching its underlying rendering engine to WebKit. Developer Stuart Morgan announced the proposed change this week after Mozilla effectively put an end to the project that supported embedding Gecko into other software. While the team is still putting the finishing touches on a long overdue 2.1 update, which would finally bring rendering parity with Firefox 3.6, the small group is looking to recruit help to make the transition happen.

For those that have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction April 1st is a dangerous day for internet surfing - doubly so in the world of FOSS. Mischievous web admins were a-foot in many places around the world wide web for the last twenty-four hours, the following is a round up of some of the better ones I came across.

Mentor Graphics released an "OpenMCAPI" open source implementation of the Multicore Association (MCA) MCAPI (Multicore Communications Application Program Interface) specification for inter-process communications. The announcement comes two weeks after the MCA released the MCAPI 2.0 spec, adding a new "domain" layer touted for improving messaging routing and security.

3 days after its release, 3.6% of visits were made through Firefox 4 in Europe, in other words three times more than Internet Explorer 9.

[ English version just became available it seems, sometimes it takes over a month for AT Internet Institute to provide an English version, but this time they did it within a week -hk].

Mozilla, the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser, has announced that it's proposed "Do Not Track" (DNT) header is gaining industry support. In a post on the Mozilla Blog, Alex Fowler, Technology and Privacy Officer for the Mozilla Foundation, says that "Two developments bring it closer to being respected by industry".

UMPlayer is a new cross-platform SMPlayer fork. Since it uses Mplayer, it can play most video formats and comes with some very interesting features. For instance, it supports CSS skins so it's very easy to theme.

Thanks to sponsor ConferenceByWire ABLEconf will be streaming the main presentations from UAT's auditorium. Watch the schedule for links to the streams.

Last year, Mark Shuttleworth christened Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", saying the disto would be stylish and create a good, lasting first impression. While its debut in beta form is smart looking and definitely chases the fashion in operating-system design it's also the single worst beta release of Ubuntu I've ever tested.

I came across by chance in what I consider one of the more comprehensive guide to creating audio in Linux, and Stefano gave me the permission to republish his material that I consider really good and that he uses as musician. Stefano it’s an Ubuntu user and his guide it’s based on this distribution

Elementary OS 0.1 "Jupiter" is fast, slick, and pretty, and it's an amazing distribution, but the developers did promise some things that couldn't be included in the end.

The paperless office: whether to combat clutter or save the forests, it has been the dream of many a computer user ever since the first electronic record of, well, probably anything. But it remains elusive, in no small part because whatever your personal intentions, you just cannot control the actions of other people, and many businesses today still insist on sending you printed bills and receipts. You can at least dispense with the filing cabinets, however, by scanning in the documents you need as searchable, full-text PDFs. Fire up the scanner and the weekend.

We popped along to Google's London HQ this week to talk Chrome OS, Google's new low-resource Linux-based operating system for netbooks and notebooks. Chrome OS product marketing manager, Eli Lassman, took us through the features of the CR-48 prototype portable which TechRadar saw last week and gave us some background on the imminent launch of notebooks featuring Chrome OS.