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Like any other aspect of life the internet is awash with hype. And snake oil salesmen. It’s lure exceed the benefits those spam e-mails promise that inundate your inbox with offers of little blue pills to reach those parts of your anatomy other chemicals just can’t reach. However, sometimes the hype is not just, well, hype. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been downloaded more that one billion times and its success is reflected in the millions of downloads of one of its killer features: addons (or extensions, as we geriatrics called them). The Browser operates under a tri licence and the addons for it are overwhelmingly free and open too. They empower the user and extend the browser. They help to put the user in control. Ubiquity does this in a way that makes web mashups creative fun and allows you to command the web, not just surf it, without any need to be a programming master of the universe. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

"Dear Steve Jobs, Having read your Thoughts on Flash, I could not agree with you more. Flash is not the Web, and I am glad Apple seizes the opportunity of open standards to build better products for their customers."

On Phoronix Global we have more than 25,000 benchmark result submissions from independent users around the world since launching the public version of the Phoronix Test Suite back in early 2008. As I have been hinting at for several months, with the launch of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 by the end of this year, Phoronix Global will be getting its long overdue overhaul and there are some revolutionary features being worked on as it concerns benchmarking and collaborative testing. This evening, however, there are some hardware statistics to share for the more than 25,000 existing result uploads.

Watching two proprietary software companies deeply opposed to computer user freedom lob accusations back and forth about who is more opposed to freedom has been surreal, to say the least. But what's been crystal clear is that the freedom these companies are arguing about is their own, not that of their users. And what they are calling freedom isn't freedom at all—it is the ability to control those users. Adobe is mad at Apple for not letting Adobe control iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users via Flash, and Apple is mad at Adobe for suggesting that Apple is arbitrarily abusing its control over Application Store users.

If you are into technical reading or writing, you've probably at least heard of informIT.com. Among other publications, they're responsible for the Unleashed series, and their imprints include Cisco Press, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional, and QUE Publishing. While you may use books published by Cisco Press without being overly concerned regarding the presence of a parent organization, you may also be unaware that changes are coming.

Large organization don't contribute that much to the open source projects they use. Why and how can we help create a positive environment inside large organizations that will help them contribute to Open Source projects : bug, patches, translation, documentation for existing project. Is it a dream to have large organizations create and open-source some of the technology they develop internally ?

Performance on my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop has been fairly consistent lately. I'm not sure whether or not my change in "swappiness" from the default of 60 to the supposedly desktop-friendly 10 has made any difference in actual speediness, but seeing swapping go from 9 MB per session down to nothing did make me feel better. And it's all about feeling better (or at least eliminating potential [if not real] causes of desktop sludginess).

The guys who run Hulu, on the other hand, are smart. You'll see why in a bit. I don't even watch network TV, as it turns out. Nor cable. Canceled my DISH subscription a year ago. I get all of my content off of the intertubes. But regardless, let's start with American network television to spotlight some foolishness there. Let's begin with NBC.com.

If user and group management has you in a quandary, it's time to take the advanced filesystem security class at the ACLU. A couple of weeks ago you learned some user and group management basics with “User and Group Management 101.” This week you’re entering the Access Control List University (ACLU) for an overview of advanced user and group management through the use of access control lists (ACLs).

When Apple dispatched an elite police unit to conduct a literal door-busting raid on a Gizmodo editor's house to confiscate his computers, it seemed a clear case of heavy-handed corporate abuse. But a surprising number of people think it's OK.

You probably have a Facebook account--well over 400 million people do. You've probably noticed that the look and feel of your profile have recently changed (again). And you've probably heard a lot recently about Facebook changing its privacy policies (again). Maybe you've even seen something about a rumor that Facebook employees say offhand that CEO Mark Zuckerberg "doesn't believe in" privacy--and how some people very high up in Washington are starting to take notice. Will government intervention in Facebook be saving you from unwanted snooping or just interfering in your Mafia Wars games? A lot's still unanswered, but here's what you need to know now.

According to sources familiar with the matter, Microsoft has cancelled Courier, the folding, two-screen prototype tablet that was first uncovered by Gizmodo.

[ I'm wetting my pants ROFLing, this is the second Microsoft tablet cancelled in one day! - hkwint ]

The device was first unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES 2010 in January and was supposed to hit the market in mid 2010. But our source tells us that HP is not satisfied with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system and has terminated the project.

[ Interesting: I've been preaching desktop-Windows and Intel x86 are not suited for tablets, smartbooks and smartphones for some months now. I've even called the JooJoo, WePad and Slate 'the Epic Fail of the decade'. Would I qualify as a TechAnalyst now? - hkwint ]

Late last week, it was noted that the beta release of Red Hat Linux Enterprise 6 would no longer include support for the Xen hypervisor. Instead, Red Hat is throwing all of its virtualization efforts on KVM moving forward. This raised a few eyebrows in the virtualization community, and led some pundits to question the future of Xen without Red Hat. In two words, the Xen response to date has been "settle down." Well, perhaps with a little more detail...

Whatever your desktop environment of choice, it likely came with its own file manager. Some have one pane, some have two panes, some work in Gnome, others in KDE, and they all have different options. If the default doesn’t work for you, how do you find the best replacement? How do you know if it will work in your favorite desktop environment? In this guide we’ll cover many of the most popular file managers for Linux and include the details to help you decide which one is right for you.

Yesterday the new Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) was released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 9.10 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 10.04.

The Kubuntu team is proud to introduce our latest release - 10.04 LTS, the 'Lucid Lynx'. This is our first long-term support release featuring the KDE Plasma desktop. Our selection of tools and applications will provide you with all that you need for most of your tasks, with many more available just a few clicks away. Whether browsing the web, playing your music, composing an email or connecting with your friends on social networks.

It is time for new q4wine release, tagged by the 0.118 version. I would like to introduce everyone to our new Wine AppDB browser engine, new helper which allows you to trace wine app status, and more.

The project to deliver One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for educational purpose in developing countries is doing great in Paraguay. According to developer Bernie Innocenti, this success comes from a way to manage the development of the Sugar educational software that other countries (or any other similar projects, see for example the Teachermate or the italian JumpPC) could and should imitate.

This tutorial shows how to prepare a OEL 5.4 (Oracle Enterprise Linux) server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3 on a distributed configuration. OEL is a clone of RedHat ES, so, both are very similar. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.