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Canada's big Internet carriers have scored a major victory, as the telecommunication regulator ruled it is okay for them to slow down some of the Web traffic travelling to customers' personal computers – as long as the companies explain ahead of time what they are doing.

[In typical Canadian fashion, a middle ground was struck here. Disclosure and privacy rules were imposed on the ISPs, which is good. - Barbara]

One of the reasons I haven't done almost any video editing is due to the relative lack of "mature" software for the job in Linux/Unix. Sure there are a half-dozen projects out there, and there is always the video-editing capability of 3D-animation app Blender (which gets a whole lot of developer attention), but when it comes to dedicated video-editing apps, there is the basic Kino and a bunch of others that don't seem ready for real, soup-to-nuts production work.

Sure, IBM partnered up with Canonical this week to promote Ubuntu Linux and open source desktops against Windows 7. But Big Blue’s other big open source move — a growing relationship with Digium — has caught The VAR Guy’s attention. Here’s why. Fact is, desktops no longer sit at the center of the IT universe. VARs are looking for higher margin recurring revenue opportunities — many of which involve network-enabled applications. That’s where the IBM-Digium relationship enters the picture. Digium promotes Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that is turning heads in many IT departments.

One of the interesting features of Mac OS X is its "universal binaries" feature that allows a single binary file to run natively on both PowerPC and Intel x86 platforms. While this comes at a cost of a larger binary file, it's convenient on the end-user and on software vendors for distributing their applications. While Linux has lacked such support for fat binaries, Ryan Gordon has decided this should be changed. This professional game porter has created the FatELF project, which basically brings the universal binaries feature to Linux. The FatELF file format allows multiple binaries for different architectures to be embedded into a single file. Ryan may take this even further by introducing the ability for Solaris and FreeBSD binaries to be embedded into a FatELF as well.

How can users protect themselves from the loss of important data when a computer goes missing? Well, the latest release of Ubuntu makes this not only possible, but frighteningly easy!

Appcelerator Titanium - the open source platform that lets you build desktop and mobile apps with web-happy development tools, including JavaScript, Python, and Ruby on Rails - has now embraced PHP. The three-year-old Appcelerator will officially reveal its PHP love tomorrow at the Zend PHP conference in its home town of Mountain View, California. Essentially, the platform offers a laundry list of desktop and mobile APIs accessible from common web languages. Tagged with an Apache 2 license, Titanium is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

A few days ago we found a nice blog post on the usability approach taken by the KDE community for the KDE 4 series. We have contacted the author to see if he was interested in doing a guest article for the dot expanding on his blog post. So without further ado, I present a writing by Daniel Memenode, web publisher and designer.

Last weekend a few Phoronix benchmarks were underway of the Linux 2.6.32-rc5 kernel when a very significant performance regression was spotted. This regression caused the PostgreSQL server to run at about 18% of the performance found in earlier kernel releases. Long story short, in tracking down this performance regression we have finally devised a way to autonomously locate performance regressions within the Linux kernel and potentially any Git-based project for that matter. Here are a few details.

To follow up on the big success of CeBIT Open Source 2009, the theme focus will get an especially attractive location at the trade show site in Hanover, Germany in 2010. The conference organization and Linux Magazine Online are now calling for open source projects to apply for free exhibit space at CeBIT Open Source 2010.

Teradata reckons its Linux-based Extreme Performance Appliance 4555 will deliver blinding-fast answers to business questions. To be available in the first quarter of 2010, the Extreme Performance Appliance uses enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs) for rapid analytic processing of huge data sets. The Appliance will run a 64-bit version of Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Cloud computing: you may have heard of it. It seems to be everywhere these days, and if you believe the hype, there's a near-unanimous consensus that it's the future. Actually, a few of us have our doubts, but leaving that aside, I think it's important to ask where does open source stand if the cloud computing vision *does* come to fruition? Would that be a good or bad thing for free software?

Most people nowadays have more than one computer. Often, you are using one, and would like to do something in another. In this video, I will explain how trivial it is to do that without leaving your seat in a modern Linux using KDE.

LXer Feature: 22-Oct-2009

“By the end of this book, You’ll be well on your way to becoming a Linux expert” is quite a bold claim for a book that is aimed at people who only have some familiarity with Windows and networking. “Pro Linux System Administration” by James Turnbull, Peter Lieverdink and Dennis Matotek aims to do precisely that and surprisingly, it largely succeeds. In its 1080 pages it explains how you can set up and configure multiple Linux servers to operate a small business network. Starting with basic Linux management and working up the stack through networking, e-mail and webservers you will end up with a pretty complete network that includes document management, groupware and disaster recovery.

It was well over a year ago now that news of the Symbian operating system--found on approximately half of global smartphones--going open source broke. The news was interpreted as particularly important to Nokia's forward-looking Symbian strategy, but after all this time, an open source version of Symbian's platform is still only in beta testing.

US armstech mammoth Raytheon has announced that its "government insider threat management solution" for information security will be powered by Linux. Penguin-inside crypto modules to be used in Raytheon's mole-buster tech have now passed tough federal security validation, apparently. "The accreditation of the FIPS Linux cryptographic module certifies that Raytheon's industry-leading enterprise monitoring and investigation tools are fully compliant with the highest security standards," says Steve Hawkins, info-sec veep at Raytheon.

I laugh — LAUGH! — when a tech journalist writes something to the effect of, "for lightweight tasks such as Web browsing," when you know, and I know, that there ain't nothing light about using present-day Web browser on present-day Web pages filled with Javascript, Flash and enough CSS to fill a book.

Registration for Camp KDE 2010 has officially opened! Camp KDE 2010 will take place in sunny San Diego, CA on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Both KDE and UCSD have high hopes that all attendees, whether from KDE, UCSD or the public will find the conference fun, informative, productive and warm. Presenters are needed, so if you're interested in presenting, be sure to indicate during the registration process that you'd like to present and on what topic.

Meet Hannah Montana Linux or HML for short. Hannah Montana Linux is a unix-like Linux Operating System based on Kubuntu.

[A bridge too far? OK this is really pushing it. A Kubuntu derivative aimed at who I wonder? The purple nearly made me barf. Check out the awesome song too! - Montezuma]

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth on Oct. 26 is set to speak with the press about Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition and Server Edition. WorksWithU will be extra careful not to “hype” Ubuntu 9.10 over the next few days. Instead, we hope to ask Shuttleworth some timely questions about the new Ubuntu and Canonical’s long-term business strategy. Here’s a sampling of issues on our mind. Admittedly, we’re long-term believers in Ubuntu. Otherwise why would we have launched WorksWithU? But that doesn’t mean Canonical and Ubuntu 9.10 are guaranteed to succeed.

In this case study about a US-based manufacturing company with 200 employees replaced its legacy mainframe ERP system with opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM. In the process, the company was able to reduce costs, connect with new business partners worldwide, and replace a Windows-based IT infrastructure with Linux.