I am currently employed with a large global company, working in a division that strictly focuses on embedded Linux development. Earlier this week, during our lunch hour, as one would expect with a predominantly Linux crowd, we had engaged in a conversation on the following question: What technology has Microsoft been the first to market? And of those technologies, which was developed by Microsoft?

Recent news and product releases could be cause for concern over the future of the open source Oracle/Sun Grid Engine. Things change. Indeed, high tech is often a sea of change. For some open source software is a lifeboat in the storms of change. While everything else can be bought, sold, or demolished, your investment in open software is still yours. No where is this more important than in HPC where change is a way of life. Prior to open source, the ability to use hardware often depended on support contracts from vendors. If these companies sank, so did the support and keeping with the ocean metaphor, your prized HPC system has now become an expensive boat anchor.

Allen's lawsuits look like classic patent trolling. There are just four patents involved, all incredibly broad. This means that on the face of it, probably every company involved with Internet activities “infringes” on them. What is described, as the accompanying drawing makes clear, is essentially most Web pages, with information drawn from various sources being brought together. The trouble is, the filing date for this idea is 5 December 1996 and I - along with several million other early Internet explorers - was routinely using this stuff from 1994.

When most of us first saw the HTC Evo we thought "Wow, 4.3 inch screen? That's huge!" Personally I had assumed this was as large as our mobile handhelds where going to be getting for awhile. I was wrong, twice over in fact.

Finally Google Voice and Video chat available for Linux through web browsers using Google talk plugin. Now you will need to chat directly using your web browsers by Voice with high quality voice, and video webcam chat available. Also you can pop out the chat window with video chat included, and view the video chat [...]

Is there some kind of secret brotherhood of lesser-known Microsoft and Apple founders? Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder better known as Woz, is voicing some surprisingly strong support for Paul Allen and the Microsoft co-founder's patent litigation against Google, Apple, Facebook and other tech giants. Asked about the lawsuit during a video interview with Bloomberg News, Wozniak says he's "not at all against the idea of patent trolls," and he believes Allen's suit represents the fact that inventors have rights under the U.S. patent system.

Today is Twitter's OAuthpocalypse: Twitter is shutting down basic authentification so all clients not using OAuth will stop working and one of these Twitter clients is Ubuntu's default microblogging client: Gwibber. That means that you need to upgrade if you want to continue using Gwibber.

Palm revealed the webOS 2.0 SDK beta today and with it, the company gave an outline of the new features expected in webOS 2.0. The Linux-based OS will support multi-tasking through a feature called Stacks, which organizes similar applications into tidy, um, stacks. webOS 2.0 will also support JavaScript node.js, which opens it up to a variety of existing modules, and improved HTML5 support was also highlighted.

Whether or not you care about the woefully unsung gThumb image editor, the state of IPTC metadata in Linux applications, or what journalists need in an image editor, you just might want to care about my journey from discovering the problem through reporting a bug and finally getting a new package for my Fedora desktop. It's enough to make you believe in the power of free, open-source software all over again.

Track projects and collaborate efficiently within an easy-to-use open source project management application called Collabtive. Resident collaboration expert, Dmitri Popov, shows you how to get started…

Firefox 4.0 is probably going to be one among the most important release Mozilla team has ever made. Competition is breathing down its neck like never before. Even IE, in its latest avatar(read IE9) is fast becoming a better piece of software. Mozilla's answer to all this is the upcoming Firefox 4.0. Already a lot of improvements have been made. But the biggest change is going to be the the new JavaScript engine called “JaegerMonkey”.

Earlier this month there was the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 as the last likely release of this OpenSolaris + Ubuntu Hardy mix to be based upon the original OpenSolaris Nevada code-base with Oracle killing the project so now they have the Illumos OpenSolaris fork to utilize. Today there's another OpenSolaris community OS release, this time in the form of SchilliX, which is the OpenSolaris derivative created by two German developers.

Because WebUpd8 reader soee asked in a comment about making an application always open on a certain virtual desktop, I decided to make a full post and a screencast for this - especially since there's an annoying bug when trying to make an app always open on a certain virtual desktop.

Could some upstart kids from NYU with an open source social networking platform give Facebook a run for its considerable money? You never know.

Drupal announced the adoption of a new code of conduct, admittedly borrowed from Ubuntu's own code of conduct. The main difference being Drupal's lack of a conflict resolution section in its code of conduct.

Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Rather than having both parties tied to their computers and logged into their Gmail accounts, one user can now call anyone in the US and Canada with telephone service. Google states that rates will remain free for the rest of the year and very low for international calls.

I wreck servers on a regular basis. Yep, I build and wreck multiple servers every day. As a Linux trainer I am always demonstrating how to build Linux servers in class and then blowing them away. Did it today, built an Ubuntu 10.04 server with Postfix and added the UFW firewall settings, mutt, changed the DNS to get mail going and even, made an image of that server and blew it all away. But today was different, today I used the RackSpace Cloud. Yep, I created an account for $.03 per hour built and destroyed Linux servers.

Starting with the Next version of Opera, as of the next snapshot release (due sometime later today), we are discontinuing the PowerPC architecture on Mac and Linux.

Today, KDE updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1, a new releases bringing a number of important bugfixes on top of 4.5.0. 4.5.0 was released only three weeks ago and receives monthly service updates. 4.5.1 is the first in this series of bugfix and translation updates. Those releases improve stability and the user experience further, while not bringing major new features or bigger changes to the user interface.

Wind River has launched a new community site for Wind River Linux customers, engineers, and embedded Linux community experts. The Wind River Developer Community for Linux is designed as a collaborative site where Wind River Linux users can ask and answer questions using a point rewards system, the company says.