Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are helping the U.S. military analyze and develop the advantages of open-source software -- programs that make their source code open to others so it can be changed and improved. Bringing many minds to bear on a given program can lead to software that is both high quality and low cost, or even free.

Bryan Cantrill, one of the three developers behind Sun's DTrace technology, has left Oracle, joining the ranks of other Sun alumni who have moved on since Oracle's acquisition

NCR announced two compact POS (point of sale) devices that run SUSE Linux for Point of Service, as well as a number of Windows operating systems. The RealPOS 40 and RealPOS 60 use Intel Atom and Celeron processors, respectively, offer enhanced energy efficiency, and provide both four powered serial ports and up to eight powered USB ports, the company says.

"GPS tracking enables the police to know when you visit your doctor, your lawyer, your church, or your lover," said Arthur Spitzer, Legal Director of the ACLU-NCA.

The official release of Eclipse 4.0 SDK, which reworks the underlying platform of the IDE, is now available for early adopters. Production users will have to wait for tools to be updated to feel the benefit

Bash has had multi-processing for a long time, via job control, the $! environment variable, and the "wait" command. Judicious use of parentheses for sub-processes, and pipes where necessary, can put comparatively long-term procedures into the background. Bash 4 now provides a new multi-processing paradigm for shell scripting, via the "coproc" statement.

The Bash shell is the default shell environment in most Linux distributions, including all flavours of Debian. One default feature of the Bash shell is to record a history of all the commands entered by a user in a log file called .bash_history, found in the user's home directory.