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FreeSWITCH is an open-source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow.

Two interesting tidbits of news about Microsoft today. First is that the company is to make it legal to rent both Windows and Office. The second is an analysis on how slates will affect the Redmond giant’s bottom line. Both are interesting reading, but both also are indications of the problems that Microsoft is likely to encounter over the coming years.

Another week, another example of how Microsoft is being forced to react to the increasing adoption of OpenOffice.org as the 2010 office software of choice. Clearly worried by OpenOffice.org’s increasing market share,

OpenWrt Kamikaze 8.09.2 is released. This is a Linux distribution for network routers, like the Linksys WRT54G, or the Asus WL-500g and a lot of other routers. This distribution adds a lot of new functionality to routers, like improved ipv6 functionality.

Most comparisons of the KDE and GNOME desktops focus on usability and productivity apps. However, they often neglect what might be called the leisure apps -- specifically, those used for image and music management. But in the modern online culture, these leisure apps are often as important to users as any other aspect of the desktop. For many, especially at home, they are probably more important than a word processor or spreadsheet. In KDE, photo management is generally handled by DigiKam, and music by Amarok. In GNOME, F-Spot is used most often for photos, while traditionally Rhythmbox has been used for music.

In a recent attack on the web server of the BerliOS (Berlin Open Source) open source platform intruders replaced the portal's home page. The unknown attackers left a message accusing the BerliOS operators of not investing enough time in proper system maintenance – and in protection against attacks.

CodeWeavers CrossOver 9.0 is slated for launch sometime towards the end of January beginning of February 2010 and represents a major step forward for the CrossOver product.

That long wait while Windows cranks up can be avoided, says Rich Jaroslovsky It took about 20 years before television viewers no longer had to wait for their sets to warm up. Yet here we are, 30-plus years into the personal computer era, and the instant-on PC remains elusive. That may be about to change.

Back in July of last year we were one of the first to review the ASRock NetTop ION 330, which was the first Atom-based "nettop" computer from this budget manufacturer that worked in conjunction with Pegatron Corp to assemble this compact computer. The original ASRock NetTop ION 330 worked out quite well and packed reasonable hardware (a dual-core Atom with NVIDIA ION graphics), but the latest computer in this series from ASRock is the ION 330HT-BD. This new nettop computer, which we are reviewing today under Linux, comes complete with a Blu-ray player along with 802.11 g/n WiFi, EuP 2.0 certification, and an MCE remote controller.

Boxee Beta is now open to all. Even its alpha release was rock solid, so one could think of the kind of expectation everyone has for Boxee Beta. From the first look, I have to say, Boxee beta has pretty much lived up to the hype.

Every year, for the last couple of years, FOSS community Nepal has been getting a small stall to showcase whatever they have to the unusually large mass that come to witness the event. Not that FOSS is going anywhere in Nepal, but still that opportunity to try and create awareness existed. From this year onwards FOSS community is not going to be able to do that too as they have been told that due to lack of space they will not be able to put up a stall.

Facing criticism is part of the cost of doing business for large companies, and Google is no exception. Among the chief sources of criticism for the search giant is its accession to the censorship demands of the People's Republic of China. The outcry may soon see a change of tense, however, as the company has announced an end to its cooperation.

We know that we can adjust Openoffice to our needs by adding more functionality with the help of extensions. In this article is listed five useful extensions for Openoffice.org with installation guide.

Amid the pomp and circumstance of tablets and hybrid netbooks from CES 2010, there’s a few notable introductions that slipped under the radar. The HP Mini 5102 — backed by a SUSE Linux option — is one of those devices. Coming soon from HP, the Mini 5102 is shipping with some interesting features. Here’s the deal.

Google's newly-acquired startup AppJet released the source code to its popular EtherPad web editor recently, making good on a promise to EtherPad's users who were previously faced with a service shutdown following the acquisition. The source is under the Apache 2.0 license, which is GPL-compatible, making the code potentially useful to a wide array of free software projects. The release has the community debating the impact on similar and related software, and revisiting the contentious question of how free software in general can and should transition to the web-hosted environment.

A few tips I put together while re-creating the robots.txt file on my Linux web server. The robots.txt is used to provide crawling instructions to web robots using the Robots Exclusion Protocol. When a web robots visits your site it will check this file, robots.txt, to discover any directories or pages you want to exclude from the web robot listing on the search engine. This is an important file which determines SEO for search engines and can help rankings.

Yahoo has finally offloaded its open source enterprise e-mail division, Zimbra, to VMware. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the sales price is believed to be far less than the US$350 million Yahoo paid for the company in September 2007. Kara Swisher at Boomtown reported that the sales price was "well below" the acquisition price, but didn't specify an amount.

The Linux Box will provide Opsera Enterprise edition subscriptions and services to organizations across the U.S. It will also continue to offer services for the Opsview Community edition.

Quartics Inc. used last week's CES (Consumer Electronics Show) to show off a VPU (video processing unit) claimed to improve video quality on the fly and do real-time conversion to 3D. The Windows-ready QV1721 targets netbooks, laptops, and other PCs, and includes an on-chip ARM926EJ processor, the company says.

Google said Tuesday that it may pull out of China because of a sophisticated computer network attack originating there and targeting its e-mail service. The company said it had evidence to suggest that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists." The attack was discovered in December.

[Not really related to FOSS but certainly newsworthy I would say. - Scott]