There are plenty of textbooks and teaching materials that can help you to learn foreign languages one way or another. Yet, there is no way to learn a foreign language without memorizing vocabulary and looking up words in a dictionary.

"...GNU Privacy Guard (called “GnuPG” from here on) is an open source cryptography program made available by…you guessed it… the GNU Project. For those without a deep history on the net or open source, GNU is one of the main providers of open source tools and philosophy, historically..."

If you don’t know what a vertical scroller is, then this is easily fixed. Think about Super Mario or Mega Man.

Wanna get a free version of StarOffice for Windows? Google has the answer.

"Did you ever need to display the SQL that Django is generating, within your shell? I was playing around with a problem, which I’ll write more about later, and I needed this exact functionality to help me learn how various options in the Django ORM were being translated into SQL..."

When that technology is run in a Fortune 100 company in a mission-critical app, the CIO will hunt me down to pay me money.

I've been trying to catch on and to understand what this thread's all about (It started with R. Hovespian from Novell explaining why they needed a deal with MS). I thought, maybe I could try to summarize it all to understand - and maybe explain to others - what's happening here, so I made up a tale of the whole situation

"INCITS' executive committee was one vote shy of approving Microsoft's OpenXML as a standard, dealing a setback to the company's efforts to compete with ODF."