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It's becoming increasingly clear that the Internet's perfect copying machine makes copyright largely irrelevant today: once a copy is online somewhere, it's impossible to take it down everywhere. Could the arrival of digital 3D printers like the open source RepRap do the same for patents, by making it possible for anyone to download and print off analogue objects? With copyright and patents powerless, what might manufacturing companies turn to in order to differentiate themselves from counterfeit versions? How about trade secrets and trademarks?

Earlier this week we published benchmarks comparing Arch Linux and Ubuntu. There were only a few areas where the two Linux distributions actually performed differently with many of their core packages being similar, but one of the areas where the results were vastly different was with the OpenGL performance as Ubuntu uses Compiz by default (when a supported GPU driver is detected) where as Arch does not. This had surprised many within our forums so we decided to carry out a number of tests with different hardware and drivers to show off what the real performance cost is of running Compiz as a desktop compositing manager in different configurations.

Ever since the Web was spun there has been tension between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Generally, Hollywood has won. The passage of laws like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and their strict enforcement not just by American cops but by foreign trade representatives, is well-known.

Ever since Google announced its purchase of video codec company On2 in August 2009, there's been an expectation that On2's VP8 codec would someday be open-sourced and promoted as a new, open option for HTML5 video. An open VP8 would offer comparable quality to H.264, but without the patent and royalty encumbrances that codec suffers. Last month, this speculation seemed confirmed, with inside sources claiming that Google would announce the open-sourcing of the VP8 codec this month at the company's I/O conference.

I am a Windows guy. I have always used Windows at home, work, school, everywhere with the exception of my phone (iPhone now Nexus One) and one Linux class at FIU. I have an A+ and MCTS in Windows Vista. Soon I will have my MCITP. I drink the kool-aid. But Linux saved me and the company I sub contract to, a large fast food giant, from near-total disaster. Last month McAfee posted a virus definition update that flagged SVCHOST.EXE as a virus. This is my story of what happened.

For those not familiar, Hulu is a popular video playback site from NBC that streams many mainstream television shows right to your browser. The biggest problem with the site is that it blocks access for users outside the continental United States. Hulu isn’t the only site in the world that does this either. Many sites restrict access based on the IP Address that you are currently connected with.

Last article we introduced the SMART capabilities of hard drives (who knew your drives were SMART?). In this article smartmontools, an application for examining the SMART attributes and trigger self tests, is examined.

Novell expects to evaluate initial takeover bids for the company this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. As many as 20 companies have expressed interest in Novell, the Journal said. Of course, The VAR guy has his own opinion of the situation. Here it is.

Nautilus is the default file browser in Ubuntu and Nautilus Elementary is a patched version of Nautilus with an emphasis for simplicity. The whole idea originated during the 100 paper cuts for Ubuntu Karmic and it was stated that the menu and columns are too big and take away precious real estate. But the idea never took off and in its place came Nautilus Elementary.

Ubuntu regularly claims to be the most popular Linux distribution. But, if so, Fedora is a competitive second. Both have thriving communities and are a major source of free and open source software innovation. Regularly, you can read on mailing lists of users having grown discontented with one and deciding to migrate to the other. In many users' minds, each is an alternative to the other. But how do the distributions really compare?

New LC2130 Supports upto 8GB memory and 500GB disk, and starts at $799

Packt is pleased to announce Hacking Vim 7.2 that helps readers to create, install, and use Vim scripts in order to enhance Vim's functionality.

This is a Bordeaux on Mac 10.6 Screenshot tour. This tour will show you how easy it is to install Bordeaux on your Mac and start installing Windows Applications and Games.

Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage at low prices, which makes it an ideal solution for storing backups. But to make use of it, you need a piece of software that can actually interact with Amazon S3. And aws, a simple command-line utility written in Perl, is the perfect tool for the job

MeeGo is arguably the dark horse in the mobile platform race: it is new, unfinished, and unavailable on any currently-shipping product, but it is going after the same market as a number of more established platforms. MeeGo is interesting: it is a combined effort by two strong industry players which are trying, in the usual slow manner, to build a truly community-oriented development process. For the time being, though, important development decisions are still being made centrally. Recently, a significant decision has come to light: MeeGo will be based on the Btrfs file system by default.

Now that Songbird has abandoned Linux, where will we turn for a browser-based music fix? Not to worry, you can still find plenty of add-ons and extensions for Firefox and Chrome to turn them into excellent tools for finding and listening to music.

Apache has always been the web server of choice for me. It is a real beast when it comes to resources usage specially in a resource limited environment such as a VPS. I started playing with Nginx a lightweight, high performance web server. My area of interest was running Nginx as a reverse proxy and making it work in a Apache/ISPConfig 3 environment.

The VirtualBox team released a significant new version of Oracle VM VirtualBox(TM), its high performance, cross-platform virtualization software. VirtualBox 3.2, the first Oracle branded release since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc by Oracle Corp. earlier this year, contains many innovative new features which deliver further significant improvements in performance, power and supported guest operating system platforms.

If you remember my December Linux Journal column, I was excited about a particularly cool-looking submarine simulator, Danger from the Deep. This month, I'm proud to feature it.

If you need wireless internet access on your boat, car, helicopter or while hiking, this may be the solution you are looking for. A Linux powered device sharing mobile broadband EVDO/HSDPA on a wifi router. The hardware runs on 110/220 volt with a DC power supply but it's very flexible allowing for 11-56 Volt DC input and even 5 volt trough an internal connector