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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.

Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project.

For a long time KDE has come with an assortment of games. Collectively, this suite of games is simply called “KDE Games“. With the advent of KDE 4, all of the KDE games were given face lifts and a standard set of features that make moving from game to game a seamless exercise. The games are two dimensional and do not run inside of a separate layer like SDL. Instead they run inside a normal KDE window, utilizing the standard QT interface. Nevertheless, the rendering of of the graphics is amazingly impressive because of the use of SVG vector graphics. With SVG, the animations are smooth and the images are scalable. You can play in a small window or maximize it without losing any of its quality.

In 2007, Sun released the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, as a closed source but free application which allowed Microsoft Office users to export and import documents in Open Document Format. Although the Oracle site still, at the time of writing, offers the software for free with the tagline "Get it now: FREE", users clicking through will find that Oracle are now charging $90, per user, for a right-to-use license for the plug-in and offering support costing $19.80 per user for the first year. Oracle also requires a minimum order of 100 licenses, which means the minimum purchase is $9,000.

Many technologies such as Flash, MP3 and DVD are proprietary or patent encumbered and can not be included on the Ubuntu CD. Thankfully, it’s extremely easy to set up your new Ubuntu system to play just about any media file you can throw at it.