The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005.

There is no question that USB Flash Drives and their electronic counterparts are a valuable addition to the road warrior's toolbox. They have also created a nightmare for data security managers and have spawned an entire sub industry that is aimed squarely at portable data storage security.

With "only a little Java code and a third-party product," Bob Reselman was able to make Windows pay attention to the goings-on of a Macintosh server. Here's how he did it.

This chapter will discuss essential Linux concepts, such as understanding the login process, using the command-line and graphical environments, finding your way around the filesystem, using the available help systems, and understanding text-editing tools in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 environment.

With the backdrop of the OSX/x86 brouhaha, a story at Low End Mac reminds us of the secret Novell/Apple project to port MacOS to IBM compatible PCs. The team of engineers responsible for the project were successful in porting Mac OS, QuickTime and portions of QuickDraw GX until Apple canned the project and reallocated resources to PowerMacintosh.

Capacity planning is an important part of the work that Systems Administrators perform on a regular basis. The knowledge about the current utilization levels becomes indispensable to predict when the next hardware upgrade will be needed. Moodss (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet) is a free tool for collecting data from different systems and making it readily available for analysis.

Linux Today has posted Linus Torvalds' notes on the release of Linux 2.6.12.

The royalty-free license under which Microsoft plans to make its upcoming new Office Open XML Formats widely available is incompatible with the GNU General Public License and will thus prevent many free and open-source software projects from using the formats, community officials say.

This is not a full FC4 review but a brief overview of a user's experieces with it and five screenshots.

The next-generation Microsoft Command Shell has made it to the beta stage. The Monad team has announced to testers that Beta 1 is now available from Microsoft Betaplace. For more information about MSH and how to get it, check out the Channel 9 wiki.

For the first time since the introduction of the "top sellers" section at Apple's online store, there is not a Macintosh among the 20 top selling items. Just before the x86 transition announcement there was an iMac in that list (while there were 3-4 Macs listed consistently each week a few months ago), but after the announcement, the Macs have dissappeared from the top selling list. The only Macintosh-related products in the list now are iLife and OSX Tiger. The rest are all iTunes/iPod products. The lower desire for PPC systems after the x86 announcement was predicted by some analysts. Update: Either OSNews' Mac advocates just went out and bought a bunch of computers to skew the results, or the "Top Sellers" data is very dependent on the time of day. Because as of 2:00pm EST, Macs are well represented in the list, at #1,3,4,5,6,7,9 (but this is the Amazon list, not Apple's store).

slamd64 is an unoffical x86_64 port of Slackware Linux. A stable 10.1 version has just been released, which closley follows the packages in Slackware 10.1.

Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux operating system. "It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"

According to Fortune Dell has signalled interest in including and selling MacOS X in their computer systems. They also put an eye on AMD, and it seems that Apple never talked to AMD about their x86 switch. Read the whole article here.