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No more cords for your computers to run? Is that a joke? Not really. All these cords to get electricity to our computers and other gadgets are annoyingly in our way.

Many people think of the Internet as an incredible system that let people of all nations communicate without a problem.

The fact is that governments are in control, as always.

The Internet was born in 1995 and, with it, cheap worldwide communications. The truth is that the Internet, very early, was used as much by programmers as it was by marketers and political minorities. This is where the problem started.

In 1997, France arrested 3 business men of a newly formed Internet company. The charges were: your website is displaying discriminatory information about Jews. They were ...

This year, 2008, I decided to register and go to LinuxWorld. It is in August and my kids are not at school so it was easy to manage. Also, I had to go to the French consulate to get a birth certificate for my daughter. In other words, I had the chance to do two things at once!

I found it quite interesting to hear that many people were not too excited about the event. Many of the people walking around are like me: they themselves sell their own Linux solution. In other words, they are not going to be customers. I had the chance to talk with Roger Levi, the Vice President of the Open Platform ...

I heard of Voyager 2 and the fact that it was still functional: 30 years after it left Earth! Just that is amazing to me.

The craft went through the termination shock several times now (5 if I’m correct). This is far. Further away from the Sun than Pluto. And Pluto is on average around 39.5 AU from the Sun. It is even further than Eris and Eris lies at about 67 AU on average.

This week, Amazon published a brand new set of tools for merchants. We already had PayPal and Google Checkout, now we have the same with Amazon.

Dear reader,

Yes. With all these terms, it is quite easy to get lost.

As a developer, my skills are quite extensive. I started with Logo, learned assembly language, BASIC, C, C++… and all these other languages in between, those that most people pass by such as Ada, Eiffel, Icon… And the languages you kind of have to learn because you’re in it: Bourne Shell, configuration files for 100 different software, Makefile, etc.

And once you know all of these languages, you think you’re done. Well… Not quite!

The web has got it’s own set of languages! It

At my company we have the sandbox. This uses different free libraries that we compile within a specific directory (to not have problems with the system installation of a customer.) This means you need to include an RPATH in the binary (.ELF) files.

Most of the libraries that we use have a modern configure script that uses libtool. libtool knows how to automatically add the RPATH information to the libraries and binaries generated in a project.

Some people, I have noticed, have been skeptical about the amount of care taken by the US government and agencies in the last few years. Companies are also catching up. The security measures change every year, when not every semester, every month and for some, probably every day.

For sure, making sure that the most wanted information remains top-secret, you need top level security features on your network. I do not know how much data is of interest, but I found out today that there are hackers attacking the federal websites quite a bit…

“The Pentagon last month acknowledged ...

More and more, enterprises make use of Open Source software. Why is this a good idea for your company as well?

Many people are scared to do the move. The result is very costly. When you use proprietary software, each time you need an upgrade, you need to pay for it. And in most cases, it is not just once, but a number of times equal to the number of computers you own or the number of staff that use the software. A $200 software may sound really cheap. But if you have 1000 staff, it makes it $200,000.

This is of course very good business for the vendors. However, many small companies just ...