The domain name system (DNS) maps human-understandable Web site addresses into numeric IP addresses. Launched in July 2006, OpenDNS adds a few free services on top of the traditional DNS to block phishing Web sites and auto-correct common misspelled URLs. And thanks to some clever traffic routing and load-balancing technology, OpenDNS can also deliver Web pages faster.

The IT industry is going through another round of major changes. A new concept in technology is bringing about tremendous opportunities for great possibilities. This new technological innovation is simply called Open Source.

Also: Open Source Licensing: An enigma wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in legal fees

Processing digital images is a very common task today. Image processing tools are so common that users often process images by trial and error, without really knowing what they are doing. One of the operations people fail most commonly is resizing an image.

Hardly a week goes by without some story in the news about a company leaking important data through loss of their backup tapes. Whether it is through malicious theft, opportunistic snatching, or accidental misplacement, there is a huge cost to a business when data is lost. When the data contains sensitive information about members of the public, possibly including bank account and credit card numbers, the cost can be severe indeed.

If I had a magic wand, I would take Novell’s resources and Ubuntu’s (Canonical) vision and see the birth of a single Linux product. Each entity has half of it right and the other half of it totally wrong.

The Season of Usability, run by the OpenUsability project has kicked off with two KDE applications in the focus: BasKet Note Pads and the KDE 4 universal document viewer Okular.

Since not all of the development for KDE 4 is in base technologies, this week features two of applications from the KDE-Edu team: Kalzium, a feature-filled chemistry reference tool, and KmPlot, a powerful equation graphing and visualization program.

If you can’t beat them why not join them. This could well be Microsoft’s new mantra. For the first time ever Redmond Giant Microsoft will be rubbing shoulders with its arch rival, the Penguin (Linux mascot) at Linux Asia 2007.

On top of our hardware reviews and comparisons at Phoronix we also cover and compare the latest ATI and NVIDIA drivers along with some of the other popular software packages; however, we have decided to feature Linux kernel performance comparisons with each major release. We will be covering some of the major highlights with each release as well as comparing its performance in a variety of tests against recent kernels.

I recently installed Ubuntu6.10 with the Kubuntu6.10 install cd. Why? I did not feel like downloading the Ubuntu iso while having the Kubuntu cd ready for usage. After a successful install of Kubuntu its easy to revert to Ubuntu.

I have been a strong supporter of Ubuntu but am not a blind fan either. Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy” is simply the worst linux version I have ever used in 8 years of running on Linux. Sure, “Dapper” had the infamous security update that crashed X losing 2 days of our productivity. But one big goof can be lived with - every thing else in Dapper was working well. But then we upgraded to Edgy and more serious problems began.

This HOWTO describes how to setup an openSUSE 10.2 machine to act as a network boot and install server. I have used this method to install openSUSE 10.2 on my Tablet PC (Toshiba Portege M200). The plan is to have a DHCP server assigning IPs, TFTP server for PXELINUX to be loaded (to load the openSUSE installer) and an NFS share to supply the installation files.

Elive is a live CD Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Enlightenment window manager. Elive aims to provide an aesthetically pleasing environment with a full suite of desktop applications that runs efficiently on older systems. Its developers aren't finished yet, but they've come a long way with Elive since the release of 0.3 more than a year ago. This CD shows how beautiful distributions can become without being bloated.

The last commit digest made me thinking about applications development for KDE 4: several of the applications we really got used to in KDE 3 will be left behind because they will be replaced in one way or the other. So I decided to check which applications I know of will be replaced, and by what they will be replaced.

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is preparing itself for an initial public offering, and could even be ready to go public before the end of the year, according to its CEO Marten Mickos.

This article explains how I managed to install over 50 various operating systems on my computer (1 hard drive) without having to burn the distro ISO to disk to boot from. (No floppy, usb, cd, dvd, etc. needed!)

One of the problems dual booters face is trying to share files between the Windows and Linux portions of their hard drive, as Linux’s support for NTFS, Windows’ default filesystem, has always been limited to read only, if any support at all. The Linux NTFS project aimed to put a stop to that, and build a fully-working read and write driver for NTFS, so that Linux can write natively to Windows partitions.

Last week, Motorola and five other cell phone manufacturers announced the official launch of the LiMo Foundation, a "global mobile Linux initiative." The foundation will work off mobile Linux in a private collaborative development environment that has its roots in open source, but isn't quite.

Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone are each throwing $800,000 into the not-for-profit foundation, whose stated purpose is to create a Linux-based "ecosystem" and foster private collaboration on commodity elements of mobile platform and application development.

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Wouldn't it be nice if you could access your Writer documents from any computer connected to the Internet and work with them as if they were on your local machine -- especially if this could be done transparently with just a couple of mouse clicks? To be able to do this, you don't have to install a full-blown document management solution or use a third-party file storage service. All you need is an FTP server and an OOo Basic macro.

It's sometimes hard to see through the brick and mortar of the commercial world, where trade secrets translate directly into dollars. But with open source, the code, the conversations between coders, and the bug tracking systems can be seen by everyone. That openness allows people to contribute and innovate in a variety of different ways.