Linden Labs, whose Second Life is so cool yet so lacking in profits it’s been lampooned in an IBM ad, sent out an e-mail alert this week boasting that open source is giving the company, well, a second life.

"...The next talk was about Perl 6. Patrick Michaud was a good speaker, and he could convey his enthousiasm about the (many) novelties of Perl 6 as opposed to 5. He also quickly described what they used for their implementation of Perl 6, Rakudo Perl : the Parrot virtual machine. This seemingly allows you to put together your dynamic language in about 4 hours. Might pick up Perl again sometime..." -- via perlbuzz: http://perlbuzz.com/2008/02/patrick-michaud-spreads-the-word-at-fosdem.html

"I had some problems finding out a good Emacs setup for Python programmers, so I hope this will be useful to somebody. Requirements: ..."

Gimp is universally used for image manipulation. However, with a bit of creativity and a couple of tricks, it can also be used as an audio filter! Here is how…

Preload is an "adaptive readahead daemon" that runs in the background of your system and observes what programs you use most often, caching them in order to speed up application load time. By using Preload, you can put unused RAM to good work, and improve the overall performance of your desktop system. Best of all, it's easy to install and use!

Bob Sutor discusses the effect of open source and open standards on innovation and markets. Specific topics include the effects of open source alternatives on software markets, open standards and interoperability, the new social aspect of software and the open source community.

In a blow to Microsoft Corp., a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit late Friday alleging that Microsoft unjustly enriched itself by promoting PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" even when they could only run a bare-bones version of the operating system, called "Vista Home Basic."