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Most people use social media sites to keep in touch with old friends and to make new ones. But more and more, law enforcement agencies are using them to fight crime – and some criminals are making that task very easy. [not OSS related, but examples of why you should care about personal data, big brother IS looking - Az]

With Google said to be working with Intel and Sony to develop a way to bring the best of the Internet to television, industry analysts wonder if the time for a smart TV has finally arrived.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on CentOS 5.4. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system 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.

As Firebird approaches the final 2.5 release, a new campaign is born to help increase Firebird’s visibility and awareness.

Team Amarok is proud to announce Amarok 2.3.0. It contains many improvements and bugfixes over Amarok 2.2.2 as well as many new features. Areas such as podcast support and saved playlists have seen huge improvements, as has the support for USB mass storage devices (including generic MP3 players).

After Mark Shuttleworh's recent comment regarding the decision to put the Metacity window buttons on the left, the debate is more intense then ever. In a recent comment (posted a few seconds ago), Mark Shuttleworth states that:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently appointed Jeff Jaffe as their new Chief Executive Officer. Jeff had most recently worked as Chief Technology Officer at Novell. W3C is an international community that sets standards for the web. Its work has had significant positive impact, and has helped free the web from proprietary standards. W3C is also famous as the home of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.

When I first found out about open source software, I felt the sky was the limit — with the source code, I could do anything now! But after working on open source ERP for the last seven years, I’ve come to realize that customizing software, even open source software, should not be taken lightly. I recently spoke with Phil Simon, long-time enterprise software veteran and author of "The Next Wave of Technologies" and "Why New Systems Fail", and asked him for his thoughts on when you should customize open source software such as ERP and CRM. Here’s what he had to say...

I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best. You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.

Phoromatic, our remote test management system that makes it incredibly simple to deploy the Phoronix Test Suite across an array of systems within an organization or around the world, has been in development for more than a year. We publicly announced this unique enterprise solution when developing Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and it publicly went into beta with Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 where it became possible to easily build a benchmarking test farm using our Phoronix software. Before ending out the year we launched Phoromatic Tracker with an initial reference implementation to monitor the Linux kernel performance on a daily basis and in a fully automated manner. Phoromatic has been a huge success, but today we are announcing that Phoromatic has reached a 1.0 status and additionally we are providing the Ubuntu Linux community with a new performance tracker in collaboration with Canonical.

OpenSSO is one of the best (if it isn't the best one) open source web Single Sign On projects out there. Sun Microsystems on 2008 open-sourced one of their products called Access Manager, and rebranded it as OpenSSO. But it's sad to see how Oracle after Sun acquisition, is slowly shutting down this amazing open source project, marking it as "not strategic" and dismembering the few parts they think are worth for their own SSO product.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is now out for developers to try out and test -- well kinda/sorta. You see the IE9 Test Drive Platform Preview isn't really a browser is it? IE9 as it is currently available lacks tabs. It lacks a back button and it lacks an address bar. In my view, it's a crippled browser that does not represent the modern web browsing usage model at all. The idea for Microsoft is to show off new features without the confusion of a full fledged browser -- though why tabs, address bar and tabs would do that is beyond my comprehension.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced that its affiliate organization LPI-Portugal has signed an agreement with UMIC, the Knowledge Society Agency of Portugal's Ministry of Science, Technology and Education to promote training and certification of professional skills in the use of Linux, open source technologies and free software in higher education institutions in Portugal.

TerminalRun can run commands and execute scripts from websites via right click and has the ability to detect malicious scripts and warn users when a command requires administrative privileges to run. Besides this, it has some other really nice features:

Of course when I say leopard, with regards to anything computer, you think Mac OS X. Not this time. This time we’re talking about a different flavor of Linux – Pardus.Pardus is developed in Turkey and named after the Anatolian leopard. It’s goal is to be a complete distribution that new users can use with little introduction to Linux. It takes advantage of KDE 4 and offers a very user-centric experience. Pardus has a few features that most will have never heard of or seen before. In this article I will introduce you to some of these features as I introduce you to Pardus Linux.

opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Version 1.4 was officially released today and can be downloaded from SourceForge. This release introduces many new features and reports in CRM, Financials, manufacturing, and purchasing; new human resources and project management applications; Web application security enhancements; and a much more advanced technical framework with the domain driven architecture, Spring, hibernate, and the Google Web Toolkit.

As my readers have seen, my posts tend to focus more on market trends and such than they do on technical topics (though I have made posts regarding the latter a few times). Working in computer repair I meet a variety of people every day, and while I am ritualisticly astounded by the daftness of many, I do try to help those people figure out how to do what it is they wish to do. Often, this means that I simply remove viruses and the like from Microsoft systems. With Macintosh machines, it sometimes means simply installing packages that will add more functionality, and occasionally installing MacPorts and "port install"ing a few packages from the FOSS world. Sometimes I may have to replace hardware, but not frequently. The thing that gets me in a bind here is that Linux would work for most of these people.

Love it or hate it, Ubuntu has changed the way Linux is perceived by many. What was once a mysterious hacker OS is now on the desktop of many technophobic grandmothers, and part of that success in recent years is due to Ubuntu. Next month, we’ll have the newest long-term release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. A lot has changed since Warty Warthog, the first release, so we here at MakeTechEasier thought it was time to take a look at how Ubuntu has evolved over time with screenshots, software information, and the origins of some of the important features that we all now take for granted.

A startup that includes former members of Openmoko has begun shipping a hackable Linux-based "copyleft" clamshell for $99. Qi Hardware's Ben NanoNote incorporates Ingenic's MIPS-compatible 336MHz XBurst Jz4720 processor, 32MB SDRAM, and 2GB NAND flash, and offers a 3-inch, 320 x 240 display.

ach year, the Linux Foundation is responsible for putting on some of the biggest names of the conference season. LinuxCon, the Kernel and End-User Summits, the Linux Plumbers Conference — they all have the Foundation behind them. The next up on the schedule is the Collaboration Summit, and as of last week, attendees can now check the details on the Summit's who, what, where, and when.