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Moody Gardens welcomed another baby penguin on Sunday, the third this month. The new babies are among 24 eggs expected to hatch this season, which would be a record. They include gentoo, chinstrap and king penguins. Since the penguins are originally from the Southern Hemisphere of the world, they observe opposite seasons from Texas. This is their springtime and breeding season. Chinstrap and gentoo penguins build rock nests that can reach up to three feet across to protect the eggs from sudden floods and the cold ground. King penguins, on the other hand, hold their eggs on their feet, switching...

With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side. ..... All operating systems were left with their default options during the installation process and left with the default set of packages for each operating system except for the...

2010…a new decade, and with it must come a new round of predictions, right? It’s a particularly interesting time to be a pundit, though. Not only is technology emerging at a blistering pace, but education itself is undergoing some serious transformations as we look towards global competition. I won’t even try to predict how Ed Tech will look in 2020. Ubiquitous WiFi was barely conceivable in 2000; we were just happy that we finally got to party like it was 1999. I can take a pretty good stab at the next couple of years though. Let me know what you...

Linux and open source middleware JBoss has made its mark in the enterprise, and it is just a matter of time before open source becomes mainstream in other functional parts of the IT infrastructure as well. Where exactly that will happen, however, is the interesting question.With most companies spending 10 to 20 percent of their revenue on enterprise software, many IT managers would love to see more enterprise-class open source options. However, IT architects and project managers of IT tend to be cautious -- the back office has a low tolerance for risk, which makes it difficult for projects to...

Apparently the Department of Defense believes that PS3s are a better value when it comes to supercomputers than IBM products specifically designed for the purpose. Granted recent price drops probably didn't hurt in justifying a 2,200 console order either. This isn't the first time that the DoD is using PS3 consoles for supercomputing. In fact, these 2,200 units are going to be added to an existing Linux cluster of 336 PS3s used by the United States Air Force.

With the intention of expanding its server lineup, International Business Machines (IBM), has rolled out a new mainframe system which is specifically designed for Linux, targeting high-end x86 systems. The new server system, which uses IBM’s specialty Linux processors, will either run on Novell SUSE or Red Hat based systems thereby bypassing the z/OS mainframe operating system. Instead, the server includes mainframe management software as well as IBM's z/Virtual Machine system which come together to form IBM’s low-cost integrated stacks for mainframe. Interestingly, the new system is designed to compete directly with large multicore systems used for virtualization consolidation and comes in two...

What is it? Where is it? What's it do? ZoneAlarm Firewall

Conclusion After spending several days with Fedora, I find that I'm happy with this release. The live CD by itself was a bit underwhelming, but the distribution as a whole has been excellent. This is probably the most stable and most polished release the Fedora team has put together to date. Security is strong over most of the system, though the hole introduced in the software management system is a concern. Package management is fast and KDE feels like it's getting the attention it deserves. The system is responsive and I have yet to run into any serious problems. Due...

A radical new day has dawned for the operating system. Today Google finally aired its long awaited Chrome Operating System. The operating system was detailed at a press conference starting at 1 p.m. EST, and the open source code was posted online just before the start of the presentation. The new operating system brings a dramatically different look and perspective to the market and just may give Microsoft and OS X some tough competition by reinventing a tired old wheel -- the operating system -- offering the first laptop/desktop OS built around the browser and web applications. A Google engineer...

Welcome to the third edition of Eva's Useful Guide to Ubuntu! This guide contains many tips to enhance and customize a fresh Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" installation. I have been using various Linux distributions since 1998, and Ubuntu since its first release in 2004. During the last five years, I have accumulated some experience installing and maintaining Ubuntu systems. This guide was first meant to be my own reference, but I think it can be useful to anyone wanting to get the best of his Ubuntu box.   SummaryA. Media codecs, DVD support and more B. Use the Gnome Control...

cptdondo writes "I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a network card for that. My goal is to get a minimal GUI that lets me run a basic browser like Dillo and open a couple of xterms. I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine. I've...

Ex-Microsoftie says that Windows 7 is doomed and Linux, free software, will ultimately dominate.A lot of open source advocates like to rage against the machine at Microsoft, but when a former Microsoft Research employee says that Windows 7 won't stop Linux from market domination, that's an opinion to note. Keith Curtis, author of the book After the Software Wars, says just that. But he goes further. He thinks Microsoft and its customers would be better off if the company ditched Windows and instead built its own version of the Linux operating system. These topics came up yesterday during my interview...

My logs show that only a paltry 3.6% of readers have reached Complete Enlightenment. The bad news is that 83.1% of you live a hellish existence and suffer regular torments and agony, much of it self-imposed. How I weep for you! (The remaining 13.3% are in Limbo, including the 2 jokers last month who logged on using a PlayStation 3.) There are many flavors of Linux, but I recommend Ubuntu—one of those trendy African words meaning “warm fuzzy”. Log on to the site to see pictures of multicultural people holding hands and grinning weirdly, just like the photos appearing on...

Unix code claimant SCO Group has jettisoned its controversial captain, Darl McBride, as part of the company's latest scheme to emerge from bankruptcy. The serially litigious SCO's executive ousting was revealed in a filing today with US regulators, although corresponding paperwork gives McBride's actual dismissal date as October 14. The decision to remove McBride was done under the auspices of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy trustee assigned to SCO by the US Justice Department. That leaves COO, Jeff Hunsaker, CFO, Ken Nielsen, and General Counsel, Ryan Tibbitts grappling for the helm. According to the filings with the US Securities and Exchange...

An enterprising PC user has been refunded on his copy of Windows, after he rejected Microsoft's operating system and license Reg Reader Graeme Cobbett was paid $115 (£70.34) by Dell after he bought a Studio 1555 notebook with Windows Vista already loaded and complete with a free upgrade to Windows 7. Rather than accept the Windows 7 upgrade, though, Graeme installed Ubuntu-based Linux Mint instead. Why reject Windows 7, an operating system Microsoft's been pushing ahead of Thursday's launch as making PC users happy again, after the misery of Windows Vista? Graeme, who outlined his reasons - with his experiences...

An investigative series I've been writing about organized cyber crime gangs stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses has generated more than a few responses from business owners who were concerned about how best to protect themselves from this type of fraud.

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company's Linux-based Millennium Exchange software. I saw this move coming. While the LSE never...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., have for the first time successfully demonstrated the ability to run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines. The achievement will allow cyber security researchers to more effectively observe behavior found in malicious botnets, or networks of infected machines that can operate on the scale of a million nodes. Botnets, said Sandia’s Ron Minnich, are often difficult to analyze since they are geographically spread all over the world. Sandia scientists used virtual machine (VM) technology and the power of its Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration....

Linux runs on a tiny share of corporate desktops, but open source partisans say the upcoming release of Windows 7 and the popularity of lightweight netbook PCs could help it gain ground -- even in Windows shops. Canonical Ltd.'s Ubuntu distribution is a favorite among many IT pros who would like to convert the end users they support. Canonical does not release user data, but Gerry Carr, the head of platform marketing for the company, said that whenever a new version of Windows becomes available -- especially in the case of Vista -- interest increases. "Vista was a big push...

A security researcher has discovered a cluster of infected Linux servers that have been corralled into a special ops botnet of sorts and used to distribute malware to unwitting people browsing the web. Each of the infected machines examined so far is a dedicated or virtual dedicated server running a legitimate website, Denis Sinegubko, an independent researcher based in Magnitogorsk, Russia, told The Register. But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they've also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware. "What we see here is a long awaited...