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So you've got to cut costs, but you're not a manager. You're a software developer, or a power user, or just someone who needs to keep the bottom line healthy enough to support your salary. These are ideal situations for introducing open source software solutions into your environment. That might sound like you'll spend the next three weeks learning to program or write makefiles, but it's just not so. Read on and see how open source is a flexible, usable approach to efficiency in your work environment.

While Ubuntu has always emphasized usability, Fedora's focus has been innovation. Now in current beta, Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) is no exception. However, at first Fedora 13 may seem to lack many innovations unique to the distribution as opposed to its component applications. In fact, with many of the improvements and innovations either working behind the scenes or available only if you are specifically aware of them, many of Fedora 13's enhancements risk being invisible to the average user or even administrator.

I queried 109 people. People who either owned, managed or worked as Executive Assistants to those in small to medium-sized businesses. And for full disclosure, there were 144 businesses or people I approached that would not take part in this survey. Of that 109 that did, I asked each of them a few simple questions: The first one being..."What is Linux?"

Browser-obsessed netbooks running Google's Chrome operating system will be the freshest thing to hit computing in two decades, Eric Schmidt claims. Speaking at the Atmosphere Cloud Computing Forum the Google CEO heralded the coming of "completely disposable" mobile devices running Chrome OS that will will boot up in two seconds and incorporate web-based storage, HTML5 for security, and combine input, communication, and data-sharing capabilities.

This type of reporting is little more than propaganda. The goal is to convey the same message over and over: Cybercrime is entirely the fault of cybercriminals and careless users. Malware targets all PCs, that's just the way it is and it's nobody's fault, except criminals and careless users. It's pure baloney: The porous nature of Windows, and the entire Microsoft software stack, is the problem. Don't let anyone make you believe otherwise.

We'd all love to have a supercomputer, but sadly, most of us will never have the chance to put that much umph in our computing. If you happen to be in the market for a sweet little Linux box with a half-million cores or so, though, Cray may have just what you're looking for. On Wednesday, Cray Inc. — maker of some of the fastest supercomputers in the world — released the third-generation of its super-operating system. What makes it so super special? For one, it's Linux — and that's always a good thing.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides attendees with experience in creating Linux kernel source code within various subsystems of the Linux kernel. This course teaches attendees to acquaints developers with the fundamental subsystems, data structures, and API of the Linux kernel

This class is scheduled for May 3rd - May 4th, 2010.

Outside of geometry, the word parallel takes on many meanings. The term is often used to indicate “two or more things used in the same way at the same time.” I remember my first experience with circuit analysis. We learned that total resistance for resistors in series is a simple sum of the individual resistances (RT=R1+R2…), but resistors in parallel did not work that way. The formula for the total resistance was a sum of the reciprocals of all individual resistances (RT=1/R1+1/R2…) and was always less than the smallest resistor in the circuit. At first it seemed odd. You introduced more resistors but got less resistance. Working the numbers shows why, but at first blush it really did not make sense.

At work we image laptops with clonezilla. An average of 10 a day. A colleague and I have created a custom script to speed up the imaging. It is a little script, but it speeds up the restoring because you don't have to make choices anymore. It is fully customizable, and easy to understand.

Once upon a time, IBM was seen as the dark force in the computing industry - Darth Vader in a Charlie Chaplin mask. More recently, though, the company has come across as a strong friend of Linux and free software. It contributes a lot of code and has made a point of defending against SCO in ways which defended Linux as a whole. But IBM still makes people nervous, a feeling which is not helped by the company's massive patent portfolio and support for software patents in Europe. So, when the word got out that IBM was asserting its patents against an open-source company, it's not surprising that the discussion quickly got heated. But perhaps it's time to calm down a bit and look at what is really going on.

By displaying the size of files underneath the files itself, you are immediately aware of the files which occupy a lot of space and those which are not. This is especially useful if you are using a paltry 80 GB hard drive laptop like me ;-).

SiTouch has announced the release of a new wireless keyboard. This is a very cool looking keyboard with back lit keys for low light. For those of us who occasionally work late on our computer this feature is appreciated.

Did you ever see one of those terrible Sci-Fi movies involving a killer Octopus? Ceph, while named after just such a animal, is not a creature about to eat an unlucky Spring Breaker, but a new parallel distributed file system. The client portion of Ceph just went into the 2.6.34 kernel so learn a bit more about it.

Richard Stallman seems an unstoppable force of nature, constantly fighting for the things he believes in. And yet in a new interview he says: “I have certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born.”

Dig deep into the performance of the new 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processor and how to maximize its features for your applications.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Mandriva 2010.0) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Mandriva 2010.0 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

a digital video camera with resolution from 160x128 to 1280x1024 pixels, laser pointer or optional ultrasonic ranging, and WLAN 802.11b/g networking on a quad-motor tracked mobile robotic base. Looks like a cool toy, doesn't it? Now add a rugged aluminum housing, gps a camera inside the housing and heavier tracks and you get this:

The cross-site scripting filter that ships with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 browser can be abused by attackers to launch cross-site scripting attacks on websites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to this threat.

A computer security researcher has launched a project designed to provide people greater privacy when using Google, as the company expands the scope of data its collects about its users.

If you ask what's missing from open source software, one of the top responses is often "documentation." While there's piles and piles of great code stuffed up on Google Code, SourceForge.net, and others, the actual documentation to accompany it is often lacking. This is why it's doubly sad to keep seeing bounty programs aimed at generating more and more code, and more and more coders, but very little being done to address documentation.