For the past month we had been running the 2007 Linux Graphics Survey at Phoronix where we polled users to find out what display hardware they use, what their driver choice(s) are, and their other preferences as it pertains to Linux desktop users on the visual front.

There has been a meme going around in the Linux world that Vista is really a dog and that Microsoft is only managing to make its numbers by jamming the new OS down the throats of unwilling customers. Now I admit I don't use Vista and haven't spent a lot of time benchmarking it against Ubuntu or Mac OS X or any of the other non-Microsoft alternatives.

"In a very short time Ruby on Rails has gained popularity in the enterprise development community among both programmers and system managers.

" France is about to filter internet content according to music and cinema majors’ request. We strongly oppose to the filtering of Internet content, either when the majors ask it, or when the european commissioner Frattini does. French government asked the CEO of FNAC, France biggest CD and DVD retail chain owned by the PPR* Group, to propose repressive measures against P2P file-sharing..."

"Nearly five months after the release of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has completed the updating of its key licenses by the release of the GNU Affero General Public License (GAGPL). The GAGPL is designed for use with software distributed over a network, such as a Web application or software as a service..."

"This week Mozilla released the first beta of Firefox 3. Originally scheduled for mid July, the delay responds to the very long list of features this new version brings. Eight alphas and an estimated 14 months under development are both firsts for a Firefox upgrade but again are necessary for the amount of improvements and new features Firefox 3 will bring..."

Today I've finished installations of two very different operating systems, Vista and Kubuntu. Both are essentially trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to provide desktop users a satisfying and relatively seemless desktop computing experience. Both succeed to a certain degree and both fail in some important areas. The question is why?

When deer hunting season begins in Mississippi, or its time for the alligator lottery to start down in Florida, sportsmen flock to the Internet to order their licenses through companies like Automated License Systems (ALS). To keep its servers running reliably, ALS's Infrastructure Manager Rich Edwards uses Red Hat Linux and servers from Levanta, no questions asked.