Anonymous Coward writes "For the second year in a row, Microsoft has waited for Novell's annual BrainShare show to start before claiming a huge customer migration win off NetWare and onto Windows. According to this article Microsoft says that there were more than 1.8 million successful commercial sector migrations in 2005 alone, and a total of 3.3 million customers migrated over the past two years. It has also launched a new program to lure customers in the education and state and local government sectors off NetWare and onto Windows." Novell's comments are enlightening about where they see themselves within the market.

merkel writes "The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the IRS has proposed rule changes allowing tax-return preparers, like H&R Block, to sell an individual's return information to marketers and data brokers. The proposed rule [PDF], which does contain some substantive protections for the processing of electronic returns, was published in the Federal Register on December 8, 2005. The official comment period has passed, but hearings will be held this month."

Dennis Law writes "I was just checking out the latest GPU releases from NVIDIA. Non-gamers will be delighted to hear that NVIDIA also released a budget-edition of their new 7300 series, namely the 7300 LE. 'Targeted at the X1300 LE, this card will be priced lower than the GeForce 7300 GT at a price range of $49 to $69.' Now that's cheap enough for me to afford."

Ki writes to tell us that he has put up a short review of Fedora Core 5 which covers the install and general first impressions to the new release. The author highlights several quirks in the installation and a few problems getting down to business, but overall the Fedora team seems to have made some very good progress.

merauder writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that the new Star Wars TV series is set to run at least 100 episodes. From the article: "The series will be set between episodes three and four of the film saga. It would cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up that remains a mystery to most film-goers. McCallum said there would be 'a whole bunch of new characters' and the series would be 'much more dramatic and darker.'"

DieNadel writes "In an entry to the OpenBSD Journal, Marco, from the OpenBSD project, warns about the somewhat disturbing financial situation in which they are now. The OpenBSD team is the one that also develops the OpenSSH suite, used nowadays almost everywhere. From the entry: 'What I want to point out what a lot of people don't seem to realize is that OpenSSH development is paid from the same pool of money as OpenBSD. OpenSSH is in use by millions around the world however the revenue stream just simply isn't there. This is where other projects could help. Without naming entities or projects by name there are others out there that are sitting on some cash. It would be wonderful if these entities could share some of the wealth to keep us going.'"

oneill40 writes to tell us New Scientist is reporting that NASA's Stardust spacecraft may be gearing up for another run. Stardust recently made the news by returning samples from the comet Wild 2 and is being looked at to pick up where the Deep Impact mission left off. From the article: "In addition to revealing the comet's interior composition, studies of the crater should shed light on the comet's structure and density. "If the impactor hit something that was very hard, it would produce a smaller crater than if it hit something very soft," Veverka told New Scientist."

Mini-Geek writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Lightning 0.1 is released. Lightning is a new Mozilla-made calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that will eventually (once it becomes more mature and stable) be built into Thunderbird. From the article: 'The Lightning Project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Its goal is to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Mozilla Thunderbird.'"

abb_road writes "Wall Street responded to yesterday's report of a 42% rise in profits by pushing Oracle's stock down. Despite a 77% increase in applications business, investors are worried that Oracle's core database business remains comparatively stagnant. Though Ellison claims that the DB business will grow in double digits over the next few years, it seems that more companies are switching to open source rather than paying Oracle $40,000 a processor."

mikepotter writes "Adobe released the second beta of Flex 2 yesterday. As well, they announced a coding contest, where 6 people will win a Plasma TV and an XBox 360. Developers can also use the Flex / AJAX bridge to build applications using both Flash and AJAX technologies that can interact with each other, similar to what Google Finance does."

lessthan0 writes "In Mac OS X, the root account is disabled by default. The first user account created is added to the admin group and that user can use the sudo command to execute other commands as root. The conventional wisdom is that sudo is the most secure way to run root commands, but a closer look reveals a picture that is not so clear." The article is about OSX but the debate is a little older ;)

ansak writes "The case of Wallace vs. the Free Software Foundation has been dismissed. It wasn't entirely on the merits of the case. From PJ's analysis, 'despite the judge clearly telling him where his previous complaint was lacking, he didn't fix it.... In this case, he had five tries.' Nevertheless, the judge did make a strong statement that the GPL 'encourages, rather than discourages, free competition' and ordered Wallace to pay court costs: 'Judges do that when they'd like you to learn a good lesson. It's a signal you shouldn't have brought the case in the first place.'"

t3rmin4t0r writes "Forbes.com is reporting that google has rolled out a finance site. The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together. The Forbes article mentions that "Google had previously provided financial information through a framed page featuring information from Yahoo! Finance, Fool.com, MSN Money Central and ClearStation " and that the information is collected from various sources rather than a direct feed from the stock exchanges, making it probably less useful for buy & sell decisions. "

the_bikeman writes "According to CNN, many FBI agents do not have access to an email account, and only 100 of the 2000 New York FBI agents have a Internet-ready mobile phone. Spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said 'e-mail addresses are still being assigned, adding that the city bureau's 2,000 employees would all have accounts by the end of the year.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Now you can wear a Tin Foil Hat and not be subject to ridicule or discomfort." From the article: "This hat -- made from cotten fiber, silver and copper -- will help reduce your brain's exposure to EMF. LessEMF also sells shirts and cell phone covers to accomplish the same thing."