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Microsoft held a "Citizenship Accelerator Summit" at its headquarters yesterday, bringing in executives (including CEO Steve Ballmer) and global nonprofit leaders to talk about how technology can tackle social challenges around the world -- citing, as Exhibit A, its own business and philanthropic partnerships in areas including the environment, energy, disaster relief, worker retraining and the fight against child pornography. Invited to sit in were reporters from national newspapers, magazines and wire services, as well as some influential university professors, social entrepreneurs and philanthropic bloggers. Complete with the obligatory Twitter hash tag, the event was an implicit (and at one point surprisingly explicit) attempt to spread the word about a different side of the Redmond software giant.

[MS showing a different side? Now I'm scared.. - Scott]

I have used a few converter programs on Linux in the past like, Avidemux, OggConvert, and Pitivi. However, a few months ago I stumbled on a media converter for Linux that I had not heard of before and discovered they had a deb file already created for Ubuntu Linux, so I figured it was worth the few clicks to check it out. I was surprised to discover a simplistically elegant interface although importantly it also worked perfectly each time I threw a “family video” at it.

Suppose your computer commits suicide by inviting the latest virus and you are not able to get it back up and running. As a last resort you decide to backup your important documents, photos that you took of your girl friend and the ASCII text file containing your passwords. Today I will show how to do this very easily.

Filmaster.com, a social network for film lovers, has recently presented a new movie recommendations engine. The algorithm that generates recommendations is open source and has been released under AGPLv3 license

Beside its openness, there is also one more reason why ODF is great for everybody who must produce a lot of office documents: ODF is really simple to generate or edit automatically. Even if you aren't a professional programmer, it takes very little effort to put together a script that generates or processes in any way texts, presentations or spreadshets in ODF format. You can also ask for specific ODF scripting recipes that you would like to see added to the website.

As I sat in the audience at Google's I|O conference Thursday morning, I watched Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra and others unveil Android 2.2 "Froyo," an ambitious upgrade to the company's mobile OS. Gundotra began the keynote by framing Android as a moral crusade against "a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice." In case anyone couldn't figure out who the man, company, device, and carrier were, he showed a slide that alluded to Apple's most famous commercial. Then, for the rest of the Android 2.2 announcement, Gundotra and others punctuated demos of impressive stuff -- such as dramatic speed boosts and Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities -- with asides about the iPhone and iPad that appeared to be intended to elicit snickers from the audience. Which they did.

The Wine development release 1.2-rc1 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations. This is the first release candidate for Wine 1.2. It marks the beginning of the code freeze period. Please give this release a good testing to help us make 1.2 as good as possible.

This is something I always asked myself. How is Google Chrome different from Chromium. Apart from the logo, there is hardly any difference visually between the two. So I decided to dig further. Here are some of the interesting facts you should know.

I wrote up a how-to for PC World on how to put Android on the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2G and it went up today. I wanted to be there to tweet about it when it went up, but I've been keeping really strange hours lately and I wasn't awake for it when it went up.

Sell- Verb (used with object)- to persuade or induce (someone) to buy or use something That’s one of the many definitions of the word sell, it is also the definition which allowed me to use the word in this context. This post is all about how we (as a community of Linux users) could persuade or induce someone or some people to use Linux in many different ways; whether is be in an organisation or for personal use.

A plotting tool is computer software which helps to analyze and visualize data, often of a scientific nature. Using this type of software, users can generate plots of functions, data and data fits. Software of this nature typically includes additional functionality, such as data analysis functions including curve fitting.

Here is a script takes an Opendocument template and fills it with data from a plain text file (which could be generated on the fly by querying a database or in many other ways), creating an OpenDocument invoice ready to be printed or sent via email.

"We're creating a Cloud management engine based on the open source deltaCloud project," Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's Cloud business, told InternetNews.com. "We haven't yet issued a delivery date for that product, but it will be sometime next year. We have people using deltaCloud now, but in terms of a fully supported product, it will be incorporated into a family of products for Cloud management that Red Hat will provide."

Print isn't dead, it's just changing despite the best efforts of the titans of industry to resist and foil all change. Here is a roundup of excellent Linux print publications, and for no extra charge a bold prediction of the future of print.

SphinX is a great full-text search engine for MySQL. Installing the Sphinx daemon was straightforward as you can compile it from the source or use a .DEB/.RPM package but SphinxSE was a little bit tricky since it needed to be installed as a plugin on a running MySQL server. So if you use Debian or Centos and install your MySQL from a .deb or .rpm package this is how you do it.

Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It comes with a lot of additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area. Don't worry about the battery icon in Ubuntu being a part of the Indicator Applet, when you first add Battery Status to the panel, it will ask to remove the default battery icon (but will keep the Indicator Applet).

At the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco (USA), several leading industry players announced the development of Google TV – an open platform that merges the web and TV.

Games have become the topic of late. Osmos developers wonder whether there is enough market share for GNU/Linux game ports to be worth the cost, but they aren't the only ones. It's been discussed time and time again, is a GNU/Linux -- or really any Unix or Unix-like -- port worth it?

Checking whether a specific Web server is up and running is as easy as issuing the ping command in the terminal, but if you are looking for a more versatile tool that you can use while on the move, try httpmon for Android.

The Linux-based Android version 2.2, dubbed Froyo (frozen yogurt), isn't even officially out yet and the blogosphere is abuzz with reports that the follow-up, Gingerbread, is due in the fourth quarter of this year. During Google's developer conference, Google I/O, the Internet giant yesterday rolled out a new royalty-free, open-source video/media format, labeled WebM, and Gingerbread is mentioned in what appears to be an inadvertent leak in the WebM FAQ.