The Open Source Census is collaborative project that attempts to collect and share quantitative data relating to the use of open source software in the enterprise.

The Open Source Census has a tool called OSS Discovery that scans individual machines and generate anonymous reports regarding what open source software that machine has installed. It is completely voluntary and any individual or company can participate in The Open Source Census.

As many of you know VMware finally released Fusion for the Mac. Fusion allows you to run Windows within a MacOS. It is by far the most seamless way to run Windows within a Mac.

Fusion has all of the nice features that VMware Workstation for the PC has with some additional features. One of the nicest features on Fusion is the "Unity" feature which allows users to interact with Windows applications on Mac OS as if they were Mac applications.

Here is a video demonstrating its functionality.

As you know April Fool's Day is among us. I've tried to compile a list of some technology related pranks that you may want to use at your own risk.

Here are some of my favorites:

1) Fake Format. A free tool that simulates Window's formatting of drives. The user is unable to stop, interrupt, or cancel this format. Once the fake formatting is complete, the standard Windows format summary appears. Upon closing this summary screen the program can be exited. No harm done.

Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? That is the premise of a recent Wired IT article.

Some would say that not all rewards are financial ones. Open source is motivated by community, social interactions, and peer recognition.

An informal survey over on Epicedit.com show that over 60% of photoshop users obtain their software illegally.

My first reaction was "only 60%"? Pirating is very prevalent especially for very popular (and very expensive) software. I guess this is one of the reasons why the software is so expensive to begin with...

Here is a cool tool I ran across that will allow you to convert any html into a pdf file:

http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/

This is nice for people who want to save a file with all images in one file. Usually when you use the "Save As" option from a browser it creates a separate folder for images. This makes it difficult to share docs. This tool, as well as other like it, allow you to create one single file with images embedded that can be emailed and shared easily.

A survey from Symantec and Applied Research-West reported by Baseline show that younger workers (those born after 1980) pose a greater risk to corporate networks because of their tendency to want to run almost any device and install almost any software on their work machines.

Being able to monitor web traffic to your sites is very important. You want to be able to gather metrics like where are users are being referred from, how long users stay on your site, what ads are working or not. Being able to gather statistics helps you find out what types of things are working and helps you adapt and build content users enjoy.

There are several very expensive web statistics packages that do a great job, but there are also plenty of free tools out there that do very well.

Here we've compiled a list of some of favorites:

Advanced WindowsCare Professional from IOBit is an advanced Windows optimization and maintenance utility providing PC users an fully automated, all-in-one PC Healthcare Service including anti-spyware, privacy protection, system optimization and cleaning capabilities.

Cfengine is an open source tool that allows system administrators to maintain 1 to thousands of unix based systems. It automates almost every aspect of system administration. Cfengine is a direct competitor to commercial software from Blade Logic and OPsware. Both of these commercial packages come with fancy GUIs and nice features, but they also come with hefty licensing fees (can get close to $1K per server managed + maintenance fees).

BitTorrent has been getting a lot of press recently with regards to the amount of illegal activity that is associated with this tool. Many companies and universities have banned it from their organizations to limit liability.

Unison announced at CeBit that it has launched what it claims is the best Linux based communications suite available. It combines IP telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, address book, capable of running on a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

Ever work on a computer that doesn't have Microsoft Office installed and you need to view an Excel sheet? MS now makes a MS Excel viewer . The new version also support xlsx format.

You can view _and_ print spreadsheets created with any version of Microsoft Excel. You can also copy data from Excel Viewer to another program.

Edsor3
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http://www.outervillage.com

I came across a service called Twitter a few months back. At first I brushed it off thinking it was probably a fad that would slowly fade away. But after looking at it a bit more closely I think that this idea may have legs especially in a society where information overload has caused our attention spans to shrink.

Twitter is in a category called "microblogging". What is Microblogging? Basically it gives you the ability to send very short (less than 140 characters) messages to family, friends, co-workers, or other people in your network.

Virtualization seems to be the buzz word all in IT are using these days. It can mean a bunch of different things depending on who you talk to. Refer to Wikipedia for many of the latest definitions. For our discussion let's define it as a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources in a way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.