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In another sign competition is heating up in the software industry, Microsoft Corp. has slashed prices by more than half for Paris City Hall as the French capital considers switching to low-cost open-source programs.

Hackers have long insisted that steering clear of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is one of the easiest ways to protect computers from many of the security threats that lurk on the Internet. That suggestion is often greeted with apathy or angry accusations that the geek in question was indulging in Microsoft-bashing -- admittedly a not-uncommon activity in hacker circles.

Internet Explorer isn't the only browser companies are being urged to drop due to ongoing security problems. Hewlett-Packard (HP) is now also recommending users erase America Online's (AOL) Netscape browser from their hard drives due to a hair-raising list of "potential" vulnerabilities allowing denials of service, information leaks, unauthorized access and remote malicious code execution.

MPlayer has set itself apart as a versatile movie player under Linux and other platforms. Whether you love or hate it, once you try it, you'll have to agree that it is very different, with its versatile keyboard control and alternative methods for handling video playback.

Red Hat and Sun have showed us that GNOME can be both nice to look at and fun to use. However, GNOME is horribly bland in its natural state, and fixing it so that it's more palatable seems like such a daunting task. But what if you could do your own Bluecurve-like customizations and turn a boring and annoying default GNOME installation into a thing of beauty and productivity in about 20 minutes?

Con Kolivas released on updated version of his staircase CPU scheduler. Con explains, "Version 7.7 was nice and stable but probably underperformed about 4 minor versions before it. The stability was necessary, though, because a whole swag of little annoying starvation issues made it into 7.4. This version adds a few more planned features, and has improved the performance substantially, and improved the fairness of the non-interactive and computational scheduler settings."

BEA Systems on Wednesday cast its vote in favor of Sun Microsystems making parts of its Java technology open source, ratcheting the debate up a notch. "We'd like to go on the record publicly in favor of open-sourcing J2SE, and we've been working behind the scenes on this," said Scott Dietzen, BEA's chief technology officer, during a speech at the JavaOne show in San Francisco Wednesday evening.

The on-again, off-again issue of having Sun Microsystems participate in the Eclipse open source tools initiative may soon be on again. Sun’s Jeff Jackson, vice president of Java developer tools at the company, said during the 2004 JavaOne conference on Wednesday that he will be meeting next week with the new executive director of Eclipse, Mike Milkinkovich, to discuss issues related to Eclipse and Sun’s own open source tools platform, NetBeans.

The Chinese government has shown that it is willing to try out and incorporate a number of different software systems, including Windows arch-nemesis Linux.

Fujitsu this week announced an expanded collaboration with Microsoft on servers for mainframe computing, but the Japanese hardware giant is also investing in open source, paving the way for a handful of new PostgreSQL functions that will benefit all of the open source database's users.

Remember the days of Linux Expo (Raleigh), Atlanta Linux Showcase, and other great community conferences? This October, the second annual LUG managed Ohio LinuxFest will be held, and it has the markings of a true community event.

Several readers took exception to a newsletter last week, which reported on a new Microsoft-based study that claimed Windows 2003 Server is faster at file-and-print serving than Red Hat Linux. (Do we report on these studies just to stir up reader emotions? You bet!)

Founded in 2003, by some of the key employees of Open Care, the first European Linux support company, Edge-IT focuses on the delivery of services and support to the corporate market in France. It has 6 employees and counts among its customers, OECD, the world economic organization, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, an elite French Political Science School, and Prisma Presse, one of the top press group in France.

After years of work, Novell Inc. announced Wednesday the availability of Mono 1.0, an open-source development platform based on Microsoft Corp.'s .Net framework.

Automating software testing allows you to run the same tests over a period of time, ensuring that you are really comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. In this article, Linux Test Project team members share their methodology and rationale, as well as the scripts and tools they use to stress-test the Linux kernel.