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One excellent open-source program that often gets overlooked in the focus on products like Linux is The Gimp. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is freely distributed software for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

The foundation just released their latest stable security update, which fixed a crucial security flaw. This IDN bug has now been published on the Internet as per the news released by a French security vendor. FrSIRT has now warned the users to upgrade to the latest release soon as the exploit can now be deployed by random public sites, which can lead to problems for the users.

The 451 Group is hosting a senior executive-level industry summit to discuss the impact of open source software in the enterprise IT arena and to identify how to build a successful business model around open source. The use of open source software is fundamentally changing the way that vendors, end users and investors do business and make money. Like all powerful tools, open source can do damage if used improperly; however, the potential benefits also are massive, and that's why it's important to understand where there is upside potential in the commercial adoption of open source.

South African software house Dariel Solutions has launched a full service level agreement for Jboss and PostgreSQL platforms.

The Mambo Foundation has said that Mambo has been approved for inclusion in the SpikeSource Open Source component stack. Users are now able to tap into the resources of SpikeSource for information and automated installation tools for the Mambo Content Management System.

Mac owners and Linux users have been verbally bashed by Tommi Kyrra of the Finish division of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IPFI). The bashing of both the Mac platform and Linux platform came after users of these systems kicked up a stink about songs with DRM / Copy protection not working on their platforms.

In his reply to the Massachusetts decision to use only documents in OpenDocument format, the Microsoft manager Alan Yates writes: (paraphrased) Star Office, Open Office, KOffice and IBM Workplace are all derivatives of the same codebase. Thus there is only one program that supports Open Document, and that is illegal. This is, of course, not true, and here is an open letter written by KOffice Marketing Coordinator Inge Wallin on behalf of the KOffice team which clarifies these facts.

A very interesting little read came through my RSS feed this morning. (The image, by the way, is from Mark and Susan Andriani, who do business together as Cloudcat.) It was a fairly balanced look at Linux, from a corporate perspective. It cited two main reasons to choose Linux, a "drastic reduction of hardware costs" and "fear of being locked into proprietary software." It did say Linux isn't free, and called performance enhancements over Windows and Unix a myth, but it noted "many firms do realize significant cost reductions" when they switch, and that "Linux is the perfect service-oriented architecture." There was nothing remarkable here except the byline — Laura DiDio.

The Mozilla Quality weblog has announced the availability of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 release candidate builds. Thunderbird 1.0.7 is a minor update that will fix a few bugs, including a return receipt regression introduced in version 1.0.2 (bug 289091) and the Linux command line URL parsing security flaw (bug 307185).

Prepare for LPI certification with developerWorks tutorials! The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) certifies Linux system administrators at two levels. Each certification level has two exams: the 101 and 102 exams for junior-level certification (cerification level 1), and the 201 and 202 exams for intermediate-level certification (cerification level 2).

With globalization considered one of the key factors in IBM's restructuring, Big Blue is scouting for new IT talent with numerous openings in Russia, China, Brazil and India--as well as the U.S.

Goodbye checkboxes, hello preview pane. No more client refreshes, no more "Move…" button. Now you can just hit the delete key on your keyboard and watch the message immediately disappear - instead of clicking a checkbox, hitting a delete button, and waiting for the page to refresh

Quick -- name a Canadian-made computer-programming language. Time's up. If you answered "Java," that's true enough -- its originator, University of Calgary graduate James Gosling, created the language for Sun Microsystems Inc. But the top prize goes to those who answered "PHP." Ten years ago this summer, Rasmus Lerdorf created the wildly popular Web-development language while working at the University of Toronto. Mr. Lerdorf, who returned to the city last week as keynote speaker at the PHP Works conference, is also a University of Waterloo graduate and worked for a number of years at Bell Canada, but is currently employed by search engine giant Yahoo Inc. in California.

Micro/sys is offering a free Linux development kit along with first orders of its new XScale-based PC/104 SBC (single-board computer). Aimed at point-of-sale terminals and industrial control panels, the SBC1670 includes a color flat-panel display controller, audio, debounced keypad inputs, and several PC-style interfaces.

Massachusetts has finalized a proposal to move away from proprietary document formats to open standards based on XML, which would eliminate Microsoft Office as an option for creating new documents. Microsoft responded harshly to the plan, calling it "inconsistent and discriminatory." The final Enterprise Technical Reference Model version 3.5 was completed Wednesday following a period of public comment and a "lengthy discussion" at the September meeting of the Massachusetts IT Advisory Board. A draft of the proposal was published in late August detailing the changes.

Typically, people use Red Hat Network to download patches using the errata updates. I use it often, and I can tell you that it can do a lot more than that. I've used Red Hat Network successfully in the past, so I was happy to get my hands on a demo of Red Hat Network 4, which is in the process of being released. Before I drill down into RHN4, I have to say RHN4's new features are cool, particularly the ones that enable you to manage Unix-based Solaris servers and monitor systems more effectively. In this tip, I review the overall features of Red Hat Network 4, describing its different types of configuration and architecture and the improvements in the new release. To illustrate some points, I use sample screenshots, courtesy of Red Hat, from an older version, Satellite, but these features work the same as in the new release.

Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Sams.

Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco is winding down, and the fifth richest American took some questions from the 35,000 assembled for the gathering. InformationWeek reported that future applications developed for Project Fusion could be certified with IBM's DB2. Microsoft's SQL Server would be a candidate as well, but not open-source favorites like MySQL or PostGreSQL. "It's a nontrivial process to supply certification…. IBM is much better equipped to go through it. I'm not sure I can say that for these other databases," he said to InformationWeek.

The recent court decision on Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net (also reported by Slashdot) does not deal a death blow to reverse engineering by any means. But it resembles the June ruling on Grokster in that it weakens an important right of technologists. Just as the Grokster case made it harder to develop technologies that carry audio, video, etc., without directly outlawing those technologies, so the Blizzard case insidiously eats away at the right to do reverse engineering, without directly attacking the legal foundation that protects reverse engineering. So this case marks not, perhaps, a major precendent, but another inch-long drift of the continental shelf in American law toward making established companies harder to challenge, and making both competition and innovation less likely.

After seeing the same mistakes repeated by different IT managers over the years, I've noticed a pattern of common errors. Here are the five common mistakes, along with tips for avoiding them.