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Any Web site owner knows the value of traffic statistics, but finding the right Web statistics package is not as easy as it may seem. Of course, there are excellent packages such as AWStats, Modlogan, and Webalizer, but these applications are overkill for people running smaller Web sites. Moreover, you can't install them if your Web hosting provider doesn't allow you to use custom scripts. If you are in the market for an easy-to-use program that provides essential Web traffic information, you might want to take a closer look at phpMyVisites.

It's been about 6 months since our last big desktop processor review (July '05: Battle of the High-End CPUs), but here we are at another big release from both Intel and AMD. In this review we'll be taking a look at the new big dogs from both companies. This time they're laying it all down and going for the highest clocked dual-core processors they can pump out.

RALEIGH – If you had questions as to why revenues, profits and the share price is up at Red Hat, a new study documents several reasons for the Linux software developer and services provider being on such a roll.

Other companies with a major presence in North Carolina scored well, too. But by far and away the winner is Red Hat.

The Ziff Davis CIO Insight Research Study, which was based on a survey of 844 senior level U.S. technology executives, ranked Red Hat as its winner for the second consecutive year.

Africa Source II, a gathering of free software developers from around the world, is being held this week in Kalangala, Uganda. One of the participants is Douglas Hunter who specialises in social software. Frederick Noronha spoke to Hunter about his project to merge the worlds of the blog, the wiki and flexible tagging.

The South Africa-developed Cubit accounting application is now available in a a range of indigenous languages including Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans and can be run concurrently in various languages across a company network.

Jeff Garzik offered an interesting status summary on the current state of Wireless drivers in the Linux Kernel. He begins, "another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering knowledge or luck (or both)."

Jeff pointed out that there's still a need for an official wireless maintainer, "I'm just the defacto guy, with no interest in the job." He also noted the importance of finally picking a stack [story] and sticking with it, rather than continually coming up with new stacks. He continued on to suggest that this stack and all the wireless drivers should be maintained in the kernel tree, rather than externally as is common now, "the whole point of working in-tree, the whole point of this open source thing is that everybody works on the same code, and the entire Internet is your test bed. Quality improves the more people work together." He concluded that while things are rough now, there's still hope for the future.

Can't think of anything worthwhile to shoot with that new video camera Santa left you? If you make a Firefox commercial, you could wind up fending off offers from advertising agencies.

The computer giant says it's working with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Open Source Development Labs and others to strengthen patent applications.

The Free Software Foundation yesterday announced Gnash, a GPL-licenced replacement for the proprietary Flash player widely used to produce multimedia content. A compatible, high quality Flash replacement has been one of the FSF's high priority projects for a number of years and Gnash is available as a standalone application as well as Mozilla plugin.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX, a technique for creating interactive Web applications, has exploded onto the Web development scene, gaining popularity so quickly that some developers are lagging behind in their skills. To address the need for faster AJAX development, lots of companies and developer communities are coming up with Rapid Application Development (RAD) platforms for AJAX. One of those platforms, ThinkCAP JX Framework, combines more than two dozen open source libraries, and the "framework" portion of the application has just been released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Despite my misgivings about the Mozilla Foundation's lack of support for Mozilla, I've bit the bullet and downloaded Firefox with the Google Toolbar, and downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird. I still dislike the fact that I have to start these applications separately - the Mozilla Suite was one button.

Enhanced cyber security cited as a key attribute of open source leader Linux

User level: Beginner After the holidays, you might need to find a spot to get away from everyone in order to just chill out a bit. The RPG (role playing game) simulation Miller's Quest is perfect for such an occasion. You'll need to have the Ruby language installed on your system -- not to worry, it's included in most modern distributions -- but other than that, it's simply download, decompress, and go.

Jim Ready, CEO of the embedded Linux specialist, will step down from his post to become chief technology officer.

Obsidian Systems has announced the availability of the international OpenICDL course in South Africa, which skills users in basic computer literacy for Linux, OpenOffice.org, Evolution and Firefox.

All the Power and Functionality of ISE Foundation Now Available in WebPACK - With up to 70% Performance Advantage Over Competing Solutions

Linux for enterprise applications is among the 6 hot technologies for 2006.

IBM has joined with three other technology companies, seven universities and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to adopt guiding principles to speed collaborative research for open source software. These 12 enterprises believe the principles will speed innovation and contribute to open source software research, thus enabling the development of related industry standards and greater interoperability, while managing intellectual property in a more balanced manner.

Martin Gregory does one thing, and one thing only, for Microsoft: lobby against open source. Dan Warne talked to him.

Vendors demonstrated everything from a mobile Skype Wi-Fi phone to the ability to support Skype calling through a media center (Yes, making a Skype call through your TV). Netgear (www.netgear.com) took the high-profile lead with the rollout of NETGEAR's Skype Wi-Fi phone. The phone will deliver a “Skype Experience” over any open Wi-Fi access point without having to be tethered to a laptop or PC, so it can be used anywhere with wireless access. The NETGEAR phone is pre-loaded with Skype software and is ready to be used with a wireless network, leaving the user to simply enter a Skype username and password. More information on the Skype Wi-Fi phone, including pricing and availability, will be announced in the first quarter of 2006.