"Remote helpdesk" means you have remote control of a user's PC, and can operate it from your comfortable IT lair just as though you were sitting in front of it. So instead of trying to coach some poor user through their own PC surgery, you can take control of it and quickly figure out what's going on and set it right.

Is the true open source revolution finally coming to college campuses this fall?

Two weekends ago was the Smithsonian Folklife Festival....we walked over toward NASA's area, and I stopped to read a big sign. As I was reading the paragraphs, [my friend] walks over, looks at the photo of a woman in front of a projector, and goes "that's gnome-terminal!" Sure enough, gnome-terminal is minimized in the bottom panel. Kevin then came over and asked what we were looking at.

Last weekend a friend was moaning about endless problems with Windows XP on his desktop PC. We installed Ubuntu 7.04 on it. The problems went away. That started me thinking about my own "daily driver" computer, a Dell Latitude that also runs Ubuntu 7.04, and it made me realize that I hadn't thought about my laptop or its operating system in many months.

Over at the Open Sources blog, Savio Rodrigues calls attention to two critical security vulnerabilities in the Spring Framework for Java. They were discovered by security consultancy Ounce Labs, which disclosed the exploits in a detailed report. If you use Spring for critical business applications, you'll definitely want to be aware of the threats and take appropriate measures.

There are two fundamental approaches to building software, and they're often called the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Not too ago, I stumbled onto a post that was created by a rather irate blogger who felt that Ubuntu was getting the shaft. Apparently someone had decided to "sell" Ubuntu CDs, with packaging, on eBay. In this article, I want to seriously examine what, if any, harm was done here.

I have been using Linux in one capacity or another since I first downloaded a Red Hat ISO a number of years ago. What finally allowed me to go full-time with my chosen distro was not so much the progression of hardware detection and self-mounting partitions but the applications. Today, I would like to share some of my personal favorites with you.