hankwang writes "Did you know that Microsoft has ethical guidelines? It's good to know that 'Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials' while lobbying for OOXML, and that 'Microsoft conducts its business in compliance with laws designed to promote fair competition' every time they suppressed competitors. In their Corporate Citizenship section, they discuss how the customer-focused approach creates products that work well with those of competitors and open-source solutions. So all the reverse-engineering by Samba and OpenOffice.org developers wasn't really necessary."

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When they hear the word PAM, most people think of a certain blonde Canadian Playmate, but readers of this Web site surely will recognize the basic element of Linux security: the Pluggable Authentication Modules. So let's talk about how this PAM works, and look at some examples of how it is used.

Orbity sends in a Boston Globe report on the unusual calm on the surface of the sun. The photos, many taken in more active solar times, are excellent — see the sequence from last year of a coronal mass ejection carrying away the tail of a comet. "The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minimum — in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year — with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of the significance of this unusual calm..." As if to be contrary, New Scientist mentions that the number of sunspots seem to be increasing.

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Aqua Data Studio is a database developer's complete IDE. It provides three major areas of functionality: a database query and administration tool, a suite of comparison tools for databases, source control, and filesystems, and a complete and integrated source control client for Subversion and CVS. It supports Oracle, DB2 iSeries, DB2 LUW, MS SQL Server, Sybase ASE, Sybase Anywhere, Sybase IQ, Informix, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache Derby, JDBC, and ODBC. License: Other/Proprietary License Changes:
This release has a new ER modeler, MS SQL Server debugger, DB2 for LUW debugger, DB2 for LUW DBA tools, MySQL DBA tools, and localization to 11 languages. It has an enhanced charts toolkit for grids and pivot grids, multiple selection scripting, quick filtering and sorting, Apache Derby support, DB2 for iSeries support, and more.

FastDup is a tool to find identical files within directory trees, with a focus on the ability to scan very large trees and files in reasonable amounts of time. The use of clever techniques and optimizations to avoid comparisons allows fastdup to significantly outperform many existing solutions, and has a benefit of being entirely I/O bound (insignificant CPU usage). It is released under a modified BSD license, allowing all use, redistribution, and modification for non-commercial purposes. License: BSD License (revised) Changes:
This release includes vast improvements in memory usage, especially when scanning large numbers of files, and more informative and active output. Numerous internal changes were also made with the aim of cleanliness and future expandability.

im-chooser is a GUI frontend application featured with IMSettings to choose the input method you want to use. It can also disable input methods entirely on the desktop. This allows you to pick an input method and switch it on demand without restarting either your applications or your desktop. License: GNU General Public License v2 Changes:
An improved UI and translation updates.

IMSettings is a framework that delivers Input Method settings and applies the changes immediately, so it will take effect without restarting applications and the desktop. License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Changes:
This release fixes a memory leak and has a workaround for the race condition issue on XIM. It also fix a freeze issue with the applet on desktops not supporting XSETTINGS.

libgxim is an X Input Method (a.k.a. XIM) protocol library that is implemented by GObject. This library helps you implement XIM servers or client applications to communicate through the XIM protocol without using the Xlib API directly, particularly if your application uses a GObject-based main loop. License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Changes:
This release fixes a memory leak and freeze issues when it received an invalid packet and failed to parse it.

Recovery Is Possible (RIP) is a CD or USB boot/rescue/backup/maintenance system. It has support for many filesystem types (Reiserfs, Reiser4, Ext2/3/4, HFS+, ISO-9660, UDF, XFS, JFS, UFS2, CIFS, MS DOS, NTFS, and VFAT) and contains several utilities for system recovery. It also has IDE/SCSI/SATA, RAID, LVM2, and Ethernet/DSL/cable network support. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
The kernel and some software were updated.

BoolStuff is a small C++ library that computes the Disjunctive Normal Form of a boolean expression binary tree. The library also has a C programming interface. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
Memory leaks have been fixed. A bug with the expression a&!a has been fixed. The source code now compiles as is with g++ 4.3.0.

An anonymous reader writes "I received a state university degree in Computer Science. After graduation, I immediately took jobs in QA to pay the bills while waiting for other opportunities, which of course turned out to be as naive as it sounds. I've been working QA for several years now and my resume does not show the right kind of work experience for programming. On the whole I'm probably no better as a a candidate than a CS graduate fresh out of college. But all of the job postings out in the real world are looking for people with 2-5 years of programming work experience. How do you build up those first 2 years of experience? What kinds of companies hire programmers with no prior experience?"

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Riding with Robots writes "New images of Saturn from the robotic spacecraft Cassini are shedding new light on monstrous storms that swirl at both poles of the ringed planet. 'These are truly massive cyclones, hundreds of times stronger than the most giant hurricanes on Earth,' said one mission scientist. Cumulus clouds twirl around the vortices, betraying the presence of giant thunderstorms lurking beneath. But the storms do not disturb the bizarre hexagonal cloud formation previously reported."

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Simple Groupware is a complete enterprise application offering email, calendaring, contacts, tasks, document management, synchronization with cell phones and Outlook, full-text search, and much more. Simple Groupware combines standards like RSS, iCalendar, vCard, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, CIFS, CSV, WebDAV, LDAP, and SyncML under one platform. Unlike other groupware software, Simple Groupware contains the programming language sgsML to enable the quick customization and creation of powerful Web applications. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
The Javascript component Flexigrid was added for exporting data. External links from sgsML were added to the HTML export. Updating the search index when moving data sets was fixed.

extract_url.pl is a Perl script that extracts URLs from either correctly-encoded MIME email messages or from plain text. It can be used either as a pre-parser for a URL selector (such as urlview), or as a standalone URL selector. It is very configurable, can handle URLs that have been broken over several lines in format=flowed delsp=yes email messages, and eliminates duplicate URLs. It was designed primarily for use with Mutt, but can be used by for any similar purpose. The idea is that if you want to access a URL in an email, you pipe the email to a URL extractor (like this one), which then lets you select a URL to view in some third program (such as Firefox). License: BSD License (original) Changes:
This release adds support for a configurable alternative selection key (via ALTSELECT), allowing a person to, in effect, temporarily negate the PERSISTENT setting. It adds conditional support for long options if Getopt::Long is available.

GTD-Free is personal todo/action manager inspired by the GTD (Getting Things Done) method by David Allen. It tries to be a simple and easy to use management tool. It aims to guide users to manage very efficient GTD workflow even if they are not familiar with GTD or are too unorganized to follow it. The user interface is clean and simple at each step of the workflow: the user objective should be to get things done and spend a minimum of time with the tool itself. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
This release fixes encoding problems when opening XML from older versions.

RHQ is a management infrastructure upon which systems and application management projects can be built. The core project includes a robust server-agent management model on which custom product support can be developed through a rich plugin model. It supports inventory and auto-discovery, rich monitoring and alerting, operational control, event and log tracking, application configuration with history and auditing, and software tracking and delivery. It supports fine-grained security and rich group management. License: GNU General Public License v2 Changes:
This release adds a number of new features and enhancements, including high-availability management via clusters of RHQ servers, increased performance and reliability, user interface improvements such as a DynaGroup wizard, and bugfixes. It also adds new plugins for monitoring SSH, JIRA, Oracle, Hudson, and other projects.This a recommended upgrade..

AcouSTO is a linear acoustics solver based on a Boundary Element Method (BEM) solution of the Kirchhoff-Helmholtz Integral Equation (KHIE). The code is written in C, and includes an MPI-based preliminary parallelization scheme. Plan wave scattered by a unit sphere. An (extended) FORTRAN version of this code has been used for years in the authors' research group, and has reached a remarkable level of reliability. The numerical formulation has been well assessed, as the large number of scientific papers produced throughout the years demonstrates. License: GNU General Public License v3 Changes:
A bug in impedance evaluation has been fixed.

PhpWebGallery is an image gallery with a very simple installation interface and administration panel. It features free or restricted access, user management, groups, access management for each category, multi-server support, user comments, HTML templates, virtual categories, multi-lingual support, an RSS notification feed, EXIF and IPTC support, multi-category support (each picture can belong to more than one category), compliance with W3C specifications, and simple external authentication. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
Graphical bugs were fixed. The icon set was completed. The ability to remove photos imported with pLoader was added. Non-English languages were updated. pLoader supports auto-rotation of image using EXIF metadata, can upload in high resolution format, and has improved user feedback in the upload progress dialog.

Likewise Open is an application that joins Linux, Unix, and Mac OS machines to Microsoft Active Directory and securely authenticates users with their domain credentials. Features include: joining non-Windows systems to Active Directory domains in a single step from the command line or from a GUI; authenticating users with a single user name and password; enforcing the same password policies for all platforms; supporting multiple forests with one-way and two-way cross forest trusts; caching credentials in case your domain controller goes down; and providing single sign-on for SSH and Putty. It does not require Active Directory schema changes for installation.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "President Bush has signed the EIPRA (AKA the PRO-IP Act) and created a cabinet-level post of 'Copyright Czar,' on par with the current 'Drug Czar,' in spite of prior misgivings about the bill. They did at least get rid of provisions that would have had the DOJ take over the RIAA's unpopular litigation campaign. Still, the final legislation (PDF) creates new classes of felony criminal copyright infringement, adds civil forfeiture provisions that incorporate by reference parts of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, and directs the Copyright Czar to lobby foreign governments to adopt stronger IP laws. At this point, our best hope would appear to be to hope that someone sensible like Laurence Lessig or William Patry gets appointed."

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