Tired of getting up from your desk to fax a document? Have you ever wondered why your company’s call center maintains wall-sized desks of fax machines? Employees at many large organizations are asking the same questions. Fortunately, so is Biscom, Inc. While there are a few companies providing enterprise fax solutions, Biscom, in this author’s opinion, stands out as the market leader.

Recursion is a tool not often used by imperative language developers, because it is thought to be slow and to waste space, but as the author demonstrates, there are several techniques that can be used to minimize or eliminate these problems. He introduces the concept of recursion and tackle recursive programming patterns, examining how they can be used to write provably correct programs.

Sun Microsystems unwrapped two new identity management products this week, designed to ease the process of federating identity across multiple partners and customers.

Badly designed software is costing businesses millions of dollars annually because it's difficult to use, requires extensive training and support, and is so frustrating that many end users underutilize applications, say IT officials at companies such as The Boeing Co. and Fidelity Investments. Despite those problems, most CIOs remain unaware of a 3-year-old standard designed to help IT managers compare the usability of software products.

A U.S. District Court judge let stand two of the six counts in Novell Inc.'s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., which accused the software giant of damaging Novell's business through monopolistic behavior. The remaining counts were dismissed. Novell's case is that Microsoft wielded its OS monopoly to prevent Novel's office applications from competing fairly in the marketplace.

Celtix, a collaboration between Iona and ObjectWeb, is a low-end, freely available back-end integration tool that adheres to Java standards. It's an enterprise service bus (ESB) -- a standards-based integration server, which use messages to carry data between different programs.

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.

Danny Thorpe is the chief scientist at Borland Software, and was part of the original team that developed Delphi. In this interview Thorpe talks about Delphi, Kylix, and the future of working with the Mono project.

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.

Proc: Manipulating all manners of runtime state information by using file-level system calls and commands. Read more at LinuxJournal.

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.

GNU/DOS version 2005 was released today. GNU/DOS is a FreeDOS distribution for desktops which includes some FreeDOS utilities, much of the DJGPP suite including many GNU utilities, vim, Arachne, and OpenGEM. All code used in GNU/DOS is open-source or public domain with source. ISO images are currently available, and there are plans to produce commercial CDs very soon. Installation is currently difficult due to the lack of an open-source CD-ROM driver. For more information, go here.

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.