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After the program is finished searching and comparing between DNS it will give you the results including the fastest and nearest DNS in your area.

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us. In this second part of this two-part interview he adds to his thoughts on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, and more.

Palm hits the gas pedal: with a six-figure monetary award for the most downloaded webOS applications the California company wants to heat up the app development market.

Every few weeks, I like to browse the OpenOffice.org Extensions site to see what is available, and what people are using. New extensions that are both useful and well-designed seem to be getting few and far between. However, if you search patiently, you can still find extensions worth trying. Below, in no particular order, are the extensions that I have explored in the past couple of months. None radically transform the office suite, and some work better than others, but all of them show some aspect of what can be done or needs to be done to make OpenOffice.org more efficient or convenient.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) draft for a "System Information API" specifies JavaScript functions for accessing the battery, CPU, sensors and other hardware characteristics of a device. For this purpose, the window.navigator object's SystemInfo interface has to implement the get, set and watch methods. set can only be applied to some screen properties such as brightness and orientation, while all other hardware properties are marked as readonly. watch is used for monitoring readings, for example those of a heat sensor.

Google has pissed off some powerful people of late, but none so much as the CEO of Apple. Jobs is unhappy about the Nexus One and gunning for Google. Could Google live to regret the day it decided to go into the phone business?

LOS ANGELES – Attendees at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will be able to go “UpSCALE” on Friday, Feb. 19, as the expo provides a series of lightning talks that evening. Based on the O’Reilly Media “Ignite” talks which have occurred at OSCON, the UpSCALE talk is a presentation in which participants are given five minutes to talk on a subject, accompanied by 20 slides which are displayed for 15 seconds each. If you think you’re up to the pace of a quick presentation and can wow an audience in five minutes or less, UpSCALE is for you.

The open-source project shadowing Silverlight has come a step closer to mirroring the latest edition of Microsoft's challenger to Flash. Moonlight leader Miguel de Icaza said a preview of Moonlight 3.0 has been delivered for early testing. Features include early work on UI virtualization to handle large sets of data, and a platform abstraction layer that separates Moonlight from the windowing system engine and should make it possible to port the player to windowing and graphics systems that are not X11/Gtk+ centric.

Symbian has annouced that it has completed the migration of its entire platform to open source. The move, which was completed four months ahead of schedule, now makes billions of dollars of code available to developers for free.

With the right attitude, and some tips and tricks from industry experts, you can soon turn your homegrown Android app into a nice little earner. Adrian Bridgwater explains how…

An insiders view of the slow motion disaster that is Microsoft. Heart-warming stuff and proof that all bureaucracies private or public fail eventually without some kind of proper connection of their outcomes with the customers real needs.

[Dick Brass was a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004. - Scott]

FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple's OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo!

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on OpenSUSE 11.2. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

The book "The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time", part of a series from the Encyclopaedia Britannica titled "The Britannica Guide to the World's Most Influential People", lists the top one hundred most important and influential inventors since Cro-Magnon man. Linus Torvalds, creator and chief architect of the Linux kernel, is listed among the IT innovators for his contribution to open source software.

Last week we delivered our first Linux benchmarks of Intel's Core i3 Clarkdale processor with a variety of computational tests through the Phoronix Test Suite. While the Core i3 packs a nice performance punch, that is not all it has to offer. Also found on the Clarkdale (and mobile Arrandale) processors is an integrated 45nm graphics processor that is supposed to offer a decent level of performance in comparison to earlier Intel IGPs normally found on the motherboard's Chipset. In this article are these first Intel benchmarks for the Clarkdale graphics processor as we see how its open-source Intel driver stack compares to that of AMD with their open-source Radeon stack up through the Radeon R700 series.

This insider tip comes from Ryan Troy, co-author of Ubuntu Unleashed from Sams. Troy started with Ubuntu in October 2004, and started up the Ubuntu Forums Web site for the community. As a computer consultant, he regularly sees Ubuntu at customer sites. While desktop Ubuntu shines as the leader among Linux distributions, with analysts estimating their share up to 95 percent of the Linux desktop market, Ubuntu's server version lags. Expect huge advances in Ubuntu server installations during 2010 as a result of Ubuntu improvements, customer concern as SunOS comes under Oracle control, and restlessness among the Red Hat user base. Unlike Ubuntu server clients, Red Hat server clients must pay license fees, necessary because many applications remain Red Hat specific. Troy expects the Ubuntu server to make substantial advances attaining more application support and certifications.

I know how we'll know whether the iPad is a success or not. That's right. Somebody will port a version of Ubuntu to run on the iPad. For now, let's call it the Ubuntu iPad Edition Remix. If the iPad touches anyone in the open source community, iPadBuntu is right around the corner. You know how else we'll know. Google will release plans for its own Linux-based pad. Let's call it the gPad.

When Debian issues a point release, as it just did with the current Stable distribution Lenny going from 5.0.3 to 5.0.4, it's no big deal. They happen. But you don't need to throw out your Lenny install CDs or do any kind of reinstallation. The updates have been flowing to your Debian-running machine (assuming you have one) all along if you've been using the Update Manager that ships in the standard desktop, or regularly checking for updates with Aptitude or apt.

If you're fortunate enough to live near New York City, you can catch Eben Moglen at the NY Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-NY) on Friday, talking about "Freedom in the Cloud." Specifically, Moglen will be talking about the implications of "cloud computing" on software freedom, privacy, and security. Cloud computing does pose quite a few challenges for software freedom. In addition to software licensing, users have to worry about privacy, data portability, and more. Just having the source is no longer enough, when users do have the source.

After years of HTML standardization disarray, browser makers Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and most recently Google now are hammering out new directions for Web standards. Perhaps the most visible HTML5 aspect is built-in support for audio and video, but there are other HTML abilities under way: storing data on a computer for use by an application, Web Sockets for periodically pushing updates to a browser, Web Workers for letting Web programs perform multiple tasks at once, and Canvas for better two-dimensional graphics.... It's far from game-over for Flash, though.