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Markdown is a formatting "language"1 like HTML that you can use to specify the final appearance of text. When you use a "word processor" like Microsoft Word or Openoffice.org Writer, the text you generate is "marked up" (or "marked down" as it were) with formatting codes that determine how the text looks on a screen or when printed out. If you were to look inside a PDF file you would find commands that do this as well. And, a web page is rendered properly in your browser because of formatting codes in HTML. (If you want to see what the HTML guts of this web page look like and you are using Firefox, just hit ctrl-U and a window with the raw HTML coding will pop up and amaze you.)

(Toronto, Canada: February 4, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) issued a call for volunteers to assist in the development of its world leading Linux certification program (http://www.lpi.org). Volunteers are sought for participation in a Job Task Analysis (JTA) survey for the organization's new specialty exam LPI-304 (High Availability and Virtualization).

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project. Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.

When we last reviewed Linux Mint, it received high marks for usability and productivity. Does the new release also rate highly? Paul Ferrill takes it for a test drive to find out.

Backing up data can be difficult, especially when you only want to copy files that changed since the last backup. TimeVault is a backup utility for Ubuntu that addresses these problems.

After the program is finished searching and comparing between DNS it will give you the results including the fastest and nearest DNS in your area.

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us. In this second part of this two-part interview he adds to his thoughts on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, and more.

Palm hits the gas pedal: with a six-figure monetary award for the most downloaded webOS applications the California company wants to heat up the app development market.

Every few weeks, I like to browse the OpenOffice.org Extensions site to see what is available, and what people are using. New extensions that are both useful and well-designed seem to be getting few and far between. However, if you search patiently, you can still find extensions worth trying. Below, in no particular order, are the extensions that I have explored in the past couple of months. None radically transform the office suite, and some work better than others, but all of them show some aspect of what can be done or needs to be done to make OpenOffice.org more efficient or convenient.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) draft for a "System Information API" specifies JavaScript functions for accessing the battery, CPU, sensors and other hardware characteristics of a device. For this purpose, the window.navigator object's SystemInfo interface has to implement the get, set and watch methods. set can only be applied to some screen properties such as brightness and orientation, while all other hardware properties are marked as readonly. watch is used for monitoring readings, for example those of a heat sensor.

Google has pissed off some powerful people of late, but none so much as the CEO of Apple. Jobs is unhappy about the Nexus One and gunning for Google. Could Google live to regret the day it decided to go into the phone business?

LOS ANGELES – Attendees at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will be able to go “UpSCALE” on Friday, Feb. 19, as the expo provides a series of lightning talks that evening. Based on the O’Reilly Media “Ignite” talks which have occurred at OSCON, the UpSCALE talk is a presentation in which participants are given five minutes to talk on a subject, accompanied by 20 slides which are displayed for 15 seconds each. If you think you’re up to the pace of a quick presentation and can wow an audience in five minutes or less, UpSCALE is for you.

The open-source project shadowing Silverlight has come a step closer to mirroring the latest edition of Microsoft's challenger to Flash. Moonlight leader Miguel de Icaza said a preview of Moonlight 3.0 has been delivered for early testing. Features include early work on UI virtualization to handle large sets of data, and a platform abstraction layer that separates Moonlight from the windowing system engine and should make it possible to port the player to windowing and graphics systems that are not X11/Gtk+ centric.

Symbian has annouced that it has completed the migration of its entire platform to open source. The move, which was completed four months ahead of schedule, now makes billions of dollars of code available to developers for free.

With the right attitude, and some tips and tricks from industry experts, you can soon turn your homegrown Android app into a nice little earner. Adrian Bridgwater explains how…

An insiders view of the slow motion disaster that is Microsoft. Heart-warming stuff and proof that all bureaucracies private or public fail eventually without some kind of proper connection of their outcomes with the customers real needs.

[Dick Brass was a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004. - Scott]

FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple's OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo!

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on OpenSUSE 11.2. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

The book "The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time", part of a series from the Encyclopaedia Britannica titled "The Britannica Guide to the World's Most Influential People", lists the top one hundred most important and influential inventors since Cro-Magnon man. Linus Torvalds, creator and chief architect of the Linux kernel, is listed among the IT innovators for his contribution to open source software.

Last week we delivered our first Linux benchmarks of Intel's Core i3 Clarkdale processor with a variety of computational tests through the Phoronix Test Suite. While the Core i3 packs a nice performance punch, that is not all it has to offer. Also found on the Clarkdale (and mobile Arrandale) processors is an integrated 45nm graphics processor that is supposed to offer a decent level of performance in comparison to earlier Intel IGPs normally found on the motherboard's Chipset. In this article are these first Intel benchmarks for the Clarkdale graphics processor as we see how its open-source Intel driver stack compares to that of AMD with their open-source Radeon stack up through the Radeon R700 series.