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Microsoft and Yahoo! have pulled their chairs back up to the proverbial negotiating table. Citing an unnamed source, The New York Times insists the two giants are now in "active merger talks." Apparently, Microsoft made that outrageous Yahoo! bid even more outrageous, raising its valuation of Jerry Yang and crew "by several dollars" a share. So, Microsoft is saying that Yahoo! is worth somewhere between $46bn and $52bn. Yesterday, word was that Ballmer and the Ballmerettes were mulling a raise to $33 a share, before some large Yahoo! shareholders insisted on $35 to $37.

If you pick apart the recent set of Microsoft results (Q1/08) you discover that sales of Microsoft Windows fell by 24% (from $5.3 billion to $4 billion). When the PC market worldwide is growing at 12%, a collapse of 24% sounds disastrous, but those figures provide a distorted view. The $5.3 billion figure from a year ago included $1.2 billion of presales prior to Vista’s release, which actually took place in the previous quarter. So it is more accurate to view it as a revenue decline from $4.1 billion to $4 billion (2.4%) in a market that’s growing at around 12%.

Last week I got a press release about a new utility called Paragon Rescue Kit for Mac OS X Lite. It described a Mac backup and data recovery program, now in public beta testing, and invited potential testers to download a bootable disk image that could be burned to a CD and try the software out. The developer plans to offer this free Lite version as well as a paid full version later on. That all sounds fine, and I'm always interested in learning about new Mac utilities, especially when backups are among their capabilities. I'd previously written nice things about the company's NTFS for Mac OS X software (see "NTFS Options for Mac Expand, 2007-12-09), and I had high hopes for this new utility. But as soon as I downloaded the Paragon Rescue Kit disk image, I knew something was very different. It contains no Mac software at all - it's a Linux disk image.

Recently I’ve noticed an increases in the number of people I know who are migrating from Windows to GNU/Linux. Either my tireless advocacy is grinding them down, word is starting to spread. Perhaps they’ve actually seen Vista in action and decided to jump ship now. Either way there are some things they are going to miss when they make the leap.

Optimism and take-up is growing around the platform-independent code with the industry taking more notice of this fast growing area. Open source technology is far from a new concept, but the market has been making increased noise about its future success. According to IDC, the market for standalone Open Source software (OSS) is in a significant growth stage and adoption will accelerate through to 2011 as barriers to adoption get knocked down.

Mandriva S.A. has announced the availability of an unofficial "Xfce" edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1: "Thanks to the efforts of the Mandriva Linux Xfce development community, an Xfce edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1 One is now available. Just like the KDE and GNOME editions of One, this is an installable live CD edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1, but this time featuring Xfce as the desktop environment. As with the other One editions, three images are available, with different sets of languages on each. This is an unofficial release, but the Xfce development volunteers will attempt to address any problems or questions about this release.

In November 2007, we reported on the GNOME Board Elections of 2007, where Jeff Waugh was getting serious slack flack from some people in the GNOME community. One of the complaints centred around Waugh's apparent inability to properly take care of requests to be syndicated on Planet GNOME, or other maintenance issues related to PGO. Six months later, this complaint is still valid, according to Rodney Dawes.

If you need to administer a remote server but don't feel like installing a complete, complex application like Webmin, try Web Console, a modern, over-the-Web, AJAX-based solution that's easy to configure and use. The GPL-licensed Web Console lets remote users access a shell and execute any commands -- subject to their rights, of course. You can also use the Web interface to upload or download files to or from the server, edit files there, and back up and restore files or databases. In other words, you can do any task you could do if you were sitting in front of the server itself. Other interesting features include a simple installation process (which doesn't even require root permission), secure connection using HTTPS, and quick refreshes using AJAX technology, for a user experience that closely matches an actual console.

The fact that the General Public Licence, better known as the GPL, is oft misunderstood, even by those who could be expected to know better, came home to me with a vengeance yesterday. What led to this conclusion was an article on a site called InteropNews, where a gentleman named Jeff Gould attempted to discuss the topic "Is Ubuntu selling out or growing up?"

Most enterprises which choose not to go with vendor support may find this model not sustainable in the long term, says Oracle exec. In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Shane Owenby, senior director, Linux and open source, Oracle Asia-Pacific, said the software giant's customers in Asia face the same pressures as those in the West--keeping up with their customers' expectations. Moreover, they are expected to continually produce better services and take on more IT projects while keeping customer's bills constant.

A storage virtualization start-up that takes standard PCs and adds their disk space to a virtual storage-pool is in beta mode and planning a product release in the third quarter. Kapsean makes software called iSCUBE, which consists of a Linux-based storage server operating system that takes disks from multiple x86 PCs, aggregates the storage (compare storage products) and allows administrators to move storage units across such devices as Windows servers, desktops and notebooks, said Roger Gaudet, Kapsean's vice president of engineering and chief architect.

Standards are supposed to be about a process of creating points of reference that people can rely upon, arrived at through a process of careful honing and consensus. Against this background, the manner in which Microsoft's OOXML has been put through the ISO has been astonishing. As I've written elsewhere, there is a widespread feeling that the credibility and usefulness of the entire ISO system has been seriously damaged as a result of the way in which OOXML has been put through the national bodies, often by means of unprecedented procedural contortions.

Last August, the nail was poised over SCO's coffin when Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell never relinquished the copyrights to UNIX, but nobody really knew when it would be driven home. The decision meant that SCO could be on the hook for as much as $20 million in unpaid royalties. Not long afterwards, SCO filed for bankruptcy, but that Chapter 11 filing was only able to delay the inevitable trial to determine how much Novell was owed. That long-awaited trial began this week, and Ars was on hand to report.

While bored in an airport recently, I pored over the magazines at a newsstand and noticed that the new Harvard Business Review (April 2008) has an article on open source. Curious to know how the corporate types view open source, I got hold of the issue - at my local library rather than paying the Harvard-style $16 cover price - and read it. Here are my impressions.

This month'sHarvard Business Review features a case study of a company debating whether to open source its software. Here's a mini review of the article.Should KMS Choose Open Source? While bored in an airport recently, I pored over the magazines at a newsstand and noticed that the new Harvard Business Review (April 2008) has an article on open source. Curious to know how the corporate types view open source, I got hold of the issue - at my local library rather than paying the Harvard-style $16 cover price - and read it. Here are my impressions.

You can see YouTube videos everywhere nowadays: on blogs, Google search results, even some news sites. From time to time, you can even manage to find something interesting. This article will show you some Linux tools you can use to save and convert YouTube videos. clive is video extraction software for Flash content stored on sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Metacafe. The syntax is simple: clive video_url. The application takes the given URL, downloads the FVL file, and converts it into MP4 format by default. One smart way to use clive is to create a text file containing links to videos you want to save and pass it to the program by using a pipe. Use cat video.list | clive and be sure to separate each URL in the file with a new line.

Linux desktop distribution vendor Xandros and Web content management firm Viyya Technologies have announced they will jointly market integrated, Linux-based software for "netbook" and Mobile Internet Device (MID) devices. Meanwhile, Xandros has strengthened its collaboration with Microsoft on its mixed-environment BridgeWays management tools.

Users of GRUB legacy, which is version 0.97, are getting bitten by an e2fsprogs incompatibility that renders their systems unbootable. e2fsprogs is the utilities package for the Ext3 filesystem, so it doesn't affect other filesystems. Resident expert Carla Schroder explains the problem and details some fixes to get affected systems back up.

If you like the latest and greatest version of everything and you use an RPM based system you probably want to learn how to create RPMs. You don't have to, you can just download the latest source and compile and install it in /usr/local. This of course leaves your system in a state where your RPM database does not accurately reflect what is installed on your system. Again, this will work, but building RPMs isn't (usually at least) that difficult.

Virtually any photo manager lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, and applying effects to your photos. But even powerful applications like digiKam and F-Spot can't really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos. For that you need a batch processing utility like Phatch. This nifty tool can perform no fewer than 35 different actions on your photos, and its user-friendly graphical interface makes it easy to create advanced multistep batch rules.