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A lot of people are praising MPD (Music Player Daemon) + Sonata so an article on this was probably expected. But what is MPD and what is Sonata?

Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7, is currently shipping with a potentially serious defect. Ahead of the product's global launch on Thursday, Germany's federal IT security agency (BSI) has issued a warning about a high-risk vulnerability in the SMB2 protocol. This can be exploited over the network to shut down a computer with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

Motorola posted and then removed specs for its Verizon-destined, Android-based "Droid" phone, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Motorola "Calgary" and "Zeppelin" Android phones have been tipped, T-Mobile launched Huawei's Android-based "Pulse" phone in the UK, an HTC Desire photo has appeared, and HTC released source code for the Hero, say various reports.

Apple has closed down its project to develop ZFS for Mac OS X. An announcement on the project's site simply says "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly". Sun's ZFS filesystem was believed by some to be a contender for Apple's next filesystem and the appearance of some support for the filesystem in Mac OS X 10.5 Server seemed to confirm that. The arrival of Snow Leopard, which lacked any ZFS support, contradicted that belief.

The long-awaited operating system finally arrived on this Thursday. Unless you scored a Windows 7 free upgrade or plan to go PC shopping soon, the new software will cost a pretty penny (up to $319 for the “Ultimate” edition). So, is Windows 7 worth it?

I've been using digiKam a bit more to edit images for Web publication. I still find it awkward as hell, I haven't yet figured out the "right" way to sharpen a photo, and I'm puzzled as to why you can't edit an image's metadata and the image itself at the same time. But edit the image's metadata — including the all-important IPTC data that each and every photojournalist in the world embeds into JPEGs — you can.

Back in June, I reviewed Amarok 2.1 and was far from impressed. The layout editor was difficult to work with and felt tacked on, and the fact that a great deal of my music was placed under “Various Artists” for no apparent reason frustrated me. Amarok 2.2 has been released recently, and it’s a definite improvement, and may even be the best music player released this year.

James Hall, of freeDOS fame, talks about how to run and maintain an open source project.

This year's linux.conf.au — which will, despite the name, be held in Wellington, New Zealand — is fast approaching. For those waiting to get in on the action up front, the time to act is now, because the early bird will soon have flown the coop. The annual linux.conf.au conference is the grandest Linux gathering of the Australasian year, and one of the crown jewels of Linux conventions worldwide. The schedule for this year's event includes a wide representation of the Open Source community, as always, including keynotes by Jonathan Corbet, Andrew Tridgell, Matthew Garrett, and Linux Journal's own Glyn Moody. The miniconf schedule — comprising the conference's first two days — boasts sessions on the business of Open Source, cloud computing, Arduino, system administration, a distro summit, and Wave development, among others.

What does this have to do with Linux, you ask? Windows 7 ain't Linux, that's what. Yesterday was Microsoft's big day. Windows 7 was released. Did you go buy your copy already? Are you waiting? Whether you have or haven't doesn't really matter but I'm going to give you my five reasons why you should switch to Windows 7 and five more why you shouldn't. Both are compelling and perhaps might change your mind one way or another.

The top topic in the computer world this week is Windows 7. The following information is gained from tech reports and manuals. As far as I am aware, the following information is reliably accurate.

Yesterday, as anyone involved in computing knows, Windows 7 was released by Microsoft with much marketing hype and fanfare... Hewlett-Packard also did something yesterday, albeit very quietly. HP removed Linux entirely from the part of their website where the sell netbooks. The day Windows 7 became available the HP Mi interface appears to have died a quiet death. A visit to the HP Mini pages reveals that HP is only offering "genuine" Windows 7 and "genuine" Windows XP.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced a two day, hands-on course that acquaints atendees with Linux kernel documentation, kernel configuration, kernel debugging, kernel measurement and other tools. This course trains developers in effective debugging and performance measurement and improvement techniques for Linux kernel. This class is scheduled for October 29th - October 30th, 2009.

The CentOS project, which has apparently settled a dispute that threatened to lead to a fork, released CentOS 5.4. Reflecting changes made to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, CentOS 5.4 upgrades 266 packages, adds 27, and implements preview versions of the ext4 file-system and KVM hypervisor.

Mozilla Labs developers have revealed project Raindrop, an approach to handling a large number of messages from email and RSS to YouTube and Twitter. Raindrop uses a mini web server to dig through messages from those sources and attempts to categorise them, pulling out important or personal messages and bringing them to the top of the user's view. Examples of this filtering include automatically detecting email from mailing lists, messages from friends or relatives or status messages from online retailers such as Amazon, and presenting them in context based on the preferences of the user.

There have been a few upgrades a day popping into the Update Manager on my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope, for those keeping score on the animal names) installation, and have you noticed what I've noticed? Those updates are downloading very, very slowly.

All the computing world hype this week has been about Windows 7: Cheap Windows 7; Microsoft's future rides on Windows 7; etc., etc. What what if you're not that excited about Windows 7? After all, it's still as insecure as ever, and upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major pain. So if you want, or are going to be forced by your aging PC, to move to another operating system, why not give Linux a try?

We all know we can use open source software without paying, but the real question is: what compels people to buy free stuff? Most widely used free and open source software can also be purchased. So what do you get for the money?

Microsoft has invited open source applications provides to run on Windows Azure, Microsoft's forthcoming Windows cloud platform. And some opens source specialists -- including SplendidCRM -- are accepting the invite.

Here’s how the software business really works: A software company charges your firm an enormous upfront licensing fee and locks you into escalating costs for decades to come, often using a set of hardball tactics.