Tired of all the knee-jerk banter from fanboys about whose operating system is the most secure? So are the organizers of the CanSecWest security conference, which will be held in Vancouver later this month. And with a contest awarding as much as $25,000 worth of prizes, they're likely to breathe fresh life into a stale debate.

When open source software pioneer Linus Torvalds first posted the Linux source code on an internet newsgroup site in 1991, he was clear about its terms of use: no one should be able to make money from Linux, he said.

Bernard Golden had lunch with Simon Phipps, Sun's open source point man, during which Phipps noted that one of Sun's major challenges for its open source-forward strategy is that many existing customers are uncomfortable using software that does not require a licensing fee, That's true even when Sun explains the company is happy to take money from them, just that the fee is for support services.

"During the last month the Grants Committee changed its composition. [...] The full list of Grants Committee members is available at The Perl Foundation website."

Keeping track of all of your tasks can be a chore. It is very easy to forget a deadline or to let a little job slip through the cracks. That is where good task management software comes in handy.

Looking at the software listed at Kokkini Zita it's easy to see where developer Fons Adriaensen's interests lie. He has written one of the best organ synthesizers for Linux, he has contributed to the LADSPA collection of processing plugins, and he has provided Linux sound researchers with some excellent tools for measuring and representing audio signals.

It is one case to walk through 7000 pages of rather technical documentation and to try to extract something useful out of it for a concrete question. It is another thing to look at the actual XML produced by the Microsoft Office 2007 suite.

In order to carry samples of my audio and video work to tradeshows, I need to be able to play a wider variety of audio and video formats than is available on any of the pocket devices out there.