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Talk about a careful balancing act involving Ubuntu. Canonical appears to have financial relationships with both Google and Yahoo. Here’s how the relationships — involving Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and Google Chrome OS — are shaping up. Plus, the potential financial implications for Canonical. Here's some perspective.

One of Silicon Valley's last true characters has signed off - Sun founder Scott McNealy has sent a final goodbye memo to his staff. In his own words McNealy is "a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip" and his swansong email does not disappoint. He said the last four years (since he left the company) had "not been without serious withdrawal". He said: "So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company." He said he hoped the rest of the US economy would fall in love with capitalism again soon.

Audio processing and synthesis plugins are always a lively topic for musicians. Many contemporary music-makers rely completely upon their plugin collection for all their sound sources and processing routines, and it is not at all uncommon to discover that some of these composers have never learned to play a traditional instrument. However you feel about audio plugins they are a fact of life in modern music production.

The scientists at IBM Research – Zurich, in cooperation with the FUJIFILM Corporation of Japan, recorded data onto an advanced prototype tape, at a density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch — about 39 times the areal data density of today's most popular industry-standard magnetic tape product.

Only three days after posting my blog regarding the plight of Google's Chinese customers and how their data is now at the whims of a US-based company and its conflict with the Chinese government, I read about the issues of SourceForge.net and the U.S. State Department's Export lists and how the data stored in a US-based company, sometimes created by non-U.S. based citizens, is now being controlled by U.S. State Department rules.

FreeNX is an open source implementation of NoMachine's NX Server. It is a bit more akin to Microsoft's RDP protocol than the usual VNC, so while keeping bandwidth to a minimum, it maintains good visual quality and responsiveness.

Get the most out of your netbook with an operating system built to purpose. Netbooks were big news in 2009 and we can expect them to be just as popular in 2010. But, being small and ultraportable there are compromises to be made: smaller screens, slower processors and smaller keyboards are just some of these. So, to get the best out of your netbook you need to pair it with an operating system built to make the most out of the smaller form factor.

Is your family prepared to access and or recover data, personal or professional, in the event of your death?

Back in August we shared that Sun would be discontinuing SXCE, or formally known as Solaris Express Community Edition. Solaris Express Community Edition for the past five years has served as Sun's delivery mechanism for the latest and greatest Solaris code that will eventually make it into the next Solaris stable release, but earlier this month Sun Microsystems put out their last bi-weekly build of SXCE and as of the end of this week all downloads will cease. OpenSolaris has superseded Solaris Express Community Edition, but with this article, we are taking one last look at Build 130, the final version of Solaris Express Community Edition.

It's the thought experiment we all like to engage in. What would life be like without Microsoft Windows? To listen to the free open source software crowd, the demise of Windows -- and by extension, Microsoft's hegemony over the PC universe -- would signal a kind of rebirth for information technology. Software would finally be free of the corporate shackles that have stifled innovation and dragged down the best and brightest among us. Such thinking is naïve, at best. Rather than freeing IT, the demise of Microsoft would plunge the industry into an apocalyptic tailspin of biblical proportions -- no visions of hippie utopia here. The withdrawal of the Redmond giant's steady hand would cause today's computing landscape to tear itself apart at the seams, with application and device compatibility and interoperability devolving into the kind of Wild West chaos unseen since the days of the DOS big three: Lotus, WordPerfect, and Ashton-Tate.

[The author's take is nothing short of hilarious. - Scott]

Steve Jobs once again weaves his magic spell, and the world is all agog over the announcement of Apple's latest gadget, the iPad...The Free Software Foundation is unimpressed: "*With new tablet device, Apple's Steve Jobs pushes unprecedented extension of DRM to a new class of general purpose computers*"

The schedule of weekend talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized and are posted on the SCALE web site at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org. The topics are interesting and wide-ranging - check them out! The schedule for the Friday specialty sessions (OSSIE, WIOS and the Try-It Lab) will be posted in the next week.

The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn. Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didn’t go far enough.

Red Hat has a new website, opensource.com, where they intend to explore how open source affects more than just software, and they're publishing articles on open source in education, business, law, and government. And life. It's designed to be a community forum, one way to give back to the community, as expressed by Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst in his welcoming article, and they hope you'll join in the conversation.

There are many days when I show my age with Linux. In some instances, I just refuse to embrace some of the more modern applications. In many ways, I fully accept the modern computing desktop. (I use a full-blown Compiz desktop with all the bells and whistles now.) But there are still some holdovers that will have to be pried from my cold, dead hands. I thought it would be fun to list 10 of these old-school Linux tools and then see what other people refuse to let go of (regardless of platform). Not only will it be a trip down memory lane for some users, it might show others a tool they hadn’t thought of that could solve a perplexing problem.

Improving the performance of the kernel is generally a good thing to do; that is why many of our best developers have put considerable amounts of time into optimization work. One area which has recently seen some attention is in the handling of soft page faults. As the course of this work shows, though, performance problems are not always where one thinks they might be; sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and reevaluate the situation, possibly dumping a lot of code in the process.

The Open-PC project, which developed an open source Linux PC based on community survey requests, says its KDE-flavored nettop will ship next month. The Open-PC is equipped with a 1.6GHz dual-core Atom N330 with 3GB RAM, but the nettop's high $500 price has stirred some controversy.

Originally, I strongly believed Canonical needed to build rock-solid relationships with traditional server vendors like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. But fast forward to the present and my thought process is changing. In fact, I think Canonical has found a back door into the server market. It's cloud computing. Here's what I mean.

Back in 2007, Adobe's Mike Melanson, who is responsible for much of the Linux work on the Adobe Flash Player, had blogged about the jungle of audio output methods. Linux audio has been a mess with so many choices and each project like PulseAudio having its advantages and disadvantages. Things have improved somewhat over the past three years, but Mike is now focusing his attention on the Linux video acceleration APIs. Melanson has published a new blog post not calling the video APIs a jungle, but rather a thicket.

Google has announced the official release on Windows of Chrome 4, an updated version of the company's Web browser. It offers a handful of significant improvements, including support for extensions and bookmark synchronization. Due to Chrome's rolling development model, these features have been widely used by testers for quite some time. The official release means that the new functionality will be rolled out to regular end users through the stable channel. In addition to the major feature enhancements, Chrome 4 also brings a performance boost. Its score in the Dromeo DOM benchmarks is a 45 percent improvement over the previous version.