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This is the full text of the essay I wrote for the O'Reilly Open Government book, in which I discuss what open file formats and other digital standards really mean for us, why they are often even more important than Free Software and why Government must lead the way when it comes to their adoption.

Yesterday I had a look at the response of the Joomla! community to the news that Microsoft had signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement and was contributing code to the content management project. You probably won’t be surprised to find that some people don’t like the idea. The speed and vehemence of their rejection of Microsoft’s involvement in the project is entirely predictable, but none the less depressing for that.

Here's the Bilda board at work, this is a hardware controller controlled by Linux via usb. It's extremely fast and allows for projection of all kinds of great shows. 360 degrees rotating laser projection, thanks to Linux control:

rTorrent is a popular command line based bittorrent client. It provides very powerful features yet it is very light on the system - contrary to other bittorrent clients like Vuze. There are a couple of webinterfaces for it but they are not truly need. SSH access combined with the "screen" program provide you all the tools you need. This howto works for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and for Debian 5 Lenny. The difference is that commands that contain sudo must be executed as root.

Ryzom, a popular massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), is being entirely open-sourced and even the artwork is going to be provided freely too. The Ryzom game is being put out under the GNU Affero GPL and the artwork is going under the Creative Commons.

Other than the default Ubuntu that we all know of, there are also the Kubuntu (KDE), Xubuntu (XFCE), Edubuntu, Mythbuntu etc that run different desktop environment and serve different purpose. And yes, there is a new buntu addition to the family. Let’s welcome: Lubuntu. Lubuntu is a Ubuntu variant built using the LXDE desktop, which is in turn based on Openbox. It’s designed to be a lightweight and easy-to-use desktop desktop environment.

The mobile application for Android got updated today with the ability to snap a picture of some words and instantly translate them into the language of the owner. Google's Goggles mobile application has always been a fun tool. The idea is that if you snap a picture and upload it to Google (as well as your location/time), Google could present more about that object, and by extension, your surroundings. It isn't always terribly accurate in identifying what is in the picture, but the results are sometimes helpful, if not amusing.

For those that haven't been paying attention to our recent coverage of Valve's Steam Client / Source Engine coming to Linux, last month we discovered Linux references in the Steam Mac OS X client and other Linux support references, which that combined with word from sources yielded no doubt that Steam/Source is coming to Linux. We ended up even finding the Steam client binaries that are actively being worked on.

Recently, I came into the possession of an Acer Aspire One (AOA150, ZG5). It's a modest netbook with a 160GB IDE, two card readers, 3 USB ports, 1GB of RAM, an Intel Atom N270 CPU, and a really awful touchpad layout. The system came to me with Windows XP Home Edition installed on it, which wasn't really to my liking. This started some massive Linux distribution hopping and operating system hopping. I was trying to find one OS that would be responsive, stable, energy conservative...

The AMD and Intel graphics drivers now support a wider range of chips and make better use of power saving features on the older chips. A major revamp of the recently introduced KMS driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware means that the Nouveau driver for X.org will in future make use of kernel-based mode setting.

Google released a Chrome 5 beta build this week that brings a significant boost to the browser's JavaScript performance, improved support for emerging Web standards, and a number of noteworthy enhancements to the browser's cloud synchronization framework. After running the beta for most of the day, I'm convinced that Chrome is reaching a sweet spot of feature richness and leading performance that will make it a real winner.

It seemed like they'd be ice skating in Hades before Apple would bless a real competitor to Safari on the iPhone, but Opera Mini has made its way into the App Store. Now that Opera has sailed past the gatekeepers, what's the verdict?

This is something I have never heard of. I was trying to install Google Chrome in Ubuntu and in the download page a small note came into my notice. It goes something like this "Installing Google Chrome will add the Google repository so your system will automatically keep Google Chrome up to date".

Handbrake is considered the Swiss Army knife of video conversion tools. Running on the three major operating system platforms, Handbrake can open a huge variety of formats, including common ones that others can't handle (like the titles in the MPEG TS structure of a DVD). Handbrake outputs to a small selection of efficient formats, including H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 ASP and Theora video. It has advanced features including chapter marking, subtitle inclusion and audio selection, plus filters for optimising video. On Linux, Handbrake can make use of the libdvdcss2 library to decrypt CSS-protected DVDs in-place during encoding, saving the need to use DVD Decrypter or another tool, usually through Wine. This article will guide you through the process for building Handbrake, installing it and converting video with it.

The latest release of Ubuntu shows a great deal of promise but still needs time to really shine. Ubuntu 10.04, otherwise known as Lucid Lynx, was released last week and is the third long term support (LTS) release from Canonical. With much hype around the new Ubuntu theme, as well as the new social networking tools, Lucid had much to live up to. We took it for a spin to see how it fared.

Anyone who has taken a class in economics is familiar with the difference between the direct cost of something and its 'opportunity cost'. Developing free software is a great example of this difference. A KDE developer does not have to spend hundreds of dollars on an SDK, he only needs to give up some of his time to develop.

There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with VLC, the high quality audio and video player for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Its speed, portability, and built-in support for most common codecs make VLC an extremely popular choice for playing video. While that’s all well and good, VLC can do a lot more than basic video playback, including things like video encoding, DVD ripping, volume normalization and more. Today we’ll look at some of VLC’s most interesting and little-known features that help make this an indispensable application for nearly all desktop platforms.

Due to ongoing issue with virsh compiled against libvirt 0.7.5 when working with Xen 4.0 Hypervisor. I attempted to downgrade libvirt and related stuff to Ubuntu Karmic’s ( well tested version with Xen). Proceed as follows

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski claimed power to regulate companies that provide Internet access, opening a fight with cable and telephone companies and sparking opposition from Republicans. Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp., cable operators that sell Web connections, fell more than 5 percent in New York trading. Genachowski’s proposal lays a foundation for net neutrality rules to bar Internet service providers from interfering with users’ traffic. The plan provides “only the modest authority” needed after a U.S. court stripped its power over the Web, Genachowski, a Democrat, said today in a statement.

[Not directly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think. - Scott]

Recently, Eben Moglen was warning about the threat to freedom that cloud computing services like Facebook represent. He also proposed creating a distributed, free software alternative. Looks like the new Diaspora project has taken him up on that idea.