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One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function.

Chris Green, a Microsoft employee who appears to use his MSDN blog here-and-there, posted a rather telling product support lifecycle update on December 2, 2009. In it, he details not only the public information found on Microsoft’s product support lifecycle site, but he boldly goes where no one has gone before by mentioning not only Windows 8, but Windows Server “2012? (Windows 8 Server) and Office “2012? (Office 15)… with dates.

The book aims to be a book for PHP application developers who want to improve their user interfaces through jQuery's capabilities and responsiveness. I really think the author has done a great job at achieving this goal. The code examples are very practical which can be used inside loads of websites. You don't especially need to be familiar with jQuery, since the book will provide you with numerous practical examples on how to improve your application. Through the code, you'll learn some great jQuery too!

Being a SysAdmin (as most of you who read this blog regularly know), I love to look at logs to solve problems. If there is an issue, the first thing I always do is look at the logs to see what went wrong. Even when I am writing programs, I build debugging in from the beginning to make sure I know what’s going on at all times (especially when something goes wrong).

I’d like to talk about the Nokia N900 Linux-based phone I’ve been testing for the past 6 weeks. It’s the first Maemo powered device to feature phone functions. Does this move signal a new direction for Nokia? Nobody seems quite sure just yet, but the hardware and software are causing a lot of interest in the Linux community. Here’s my thoughts on the experience so far. A Linux fan's view.

A top European official has announced plans to begin a major overhaul of European Union privacy laws, saying that the existing framework has failed to keep pace with technological innovation.

A user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client-server distributed computing system. The term most notably refers to applications that access the World Wide Web, but other systems, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), use the term user agent to refer to both end points of a communications session.

New work on the Sandia National Laboratories Red Storm supercomputer — the 17th fastest in the world — is helping to make supercomputers more accessible. Sandia researchers, working hand in hand with researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, socialized 4,096 of Red Storm's total 12,960 computer nodes into accepting a virtual external operating system — a leap of at least two orders of magnitude over previous such efforts.

Hardware failures, power failures, and most of all, storage media failures. Ever notice how fragile digital storage media are? Are we ever going to get digital storage media that can match plain old paper, and other analog media, for reliability and longevity?

Once again the Defective by Design have sprung into action to denounce another product from Apple, and once again nobody really cares. Defective by Design is a marketing campaign sponsored by the Free Software Foundation. While the FSF does plenty of good work, DBD is increasingly out of touch with the majority of users. Contrast the tone of the Defective by Design campaign with Stan Schroeder over at Mashable, who nails Apple's goals with the iPad:

According to a letter seen by heise online, the German Federal Office of Justice last week launched summary proceedings against The SCO Group GmbH for "breaching regulations pertaining to the publication of its accounts." The proceedings were suspended after the imposed fine was paid. No information on the size of the fine is available. According to the agency's website, the fine can range from 2,500 euros to a maximum of 25,000 euros.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux today. Bordeaux 2.0.0 marks major progress over older releases. With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon.

The total number of dollars rushing toward cloud computing is massive. The various top research firms - IDC, Gartner, et al. -- all have eyebrow-raising forecasts about the growth rate of cloud-based computing services. But are you seeing a lot of headlines about safety? No, not really, though the worries are out there. The vendors don't seem to broach the issue much, but clearly security concerns are one of (many) reasons firms are dragging their feet about adopting cloud services.

Recently, I was showing a Motorola Milestone phone to a non-technical friend. When I mentioned that the phone was running Android, he said to me "Oh, thats the Google Linux for phones isn't it... does it run OpenOffice?". I had to disappoint him at that point, but it lead to a question I had to ask: When the user interface is different and the API for developers is different, is an operating system still Linux, or is it something else?

The N900 is Nokia's first device built around the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system. Is it a mainstream smartphone, a must-have for Linux developers, or both?

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary. While some in the open source community have held Hungary up as an example to Europe and the rest of the world, there are others in the open source community there who question if the intent behind the quotas has actually been achieved.

Regardless of how severe limitations Apple imposes on the iPad, we can expect it to be reasonably successful. I don’t think it will duplicate the success of the iPhone but due to Apple’s strong marketing and its own technical merits, it will sell in significant numbers. How will this affect Linux and the upcoming tablets based on it? When I say Linux, I mean Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems as well because they are all based on Linux.

The Ubuntu server is the most innovative distribution for servers. It enables administrators to gain access to cutting edge technology and implement that with new ideas. If you are looking for the latest and greatest, this is the server option for you.

Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues” is becoming a huge critical success, and may even succeed financially, which is unusual for any independent film, but virtually unprecedented for free culture films (“Sita” was released under the CC By-SA). There’s only one sad thing about this for free software fans, and that’s that “Sita” was made using proprietary software, and the “source code” is in a proprietary format: Adobe Flash’s “FLA” format, to be precise. Paley has posted these files on the Internet Archive, but she doesn’t know how to translate them into any free software friendly format (and neither do I). Can you help? Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

This guide explains how to set up mod_geoip with Apache2 on an Ubuntu 9.10 system. mod_geoip looks up the IP address of the client end user. This allows you to redirect or block users based on their country. You can also use this technology for your OpenX (formerly known as OpenAds or phpAdsNew) ad server to allow geo targeting.