According to a new report, the market for netbook computers grew 40 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2009, almost twice the rate of standard notebooks. Netbook shipments actually outstripped notebooks in Latin America and Greater China.

Apple started the App Store revolution. Canonical hopes to continue it with the Ubuntu Software Store for Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.10. I bet eager adopters will be kids who are already familiar with the iPod Touch (iTouch) and Apple App Store.

Apache Wink is a new framework for developing “RESTful web services”. The project currently resides in the Apache Incubator, where newly introduced projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) are matured and evaluated for promotion to full Apache projects, having entered the incubator in May. The code base for Wink was contributed by HP and IBM, who also intend to oversee the project in the future.

Anyone wanting to watch just a short video on YouTube probably won’t need Minitube, for those that want more, it’s a must-have app. Minitube is a classic Unix program for the playback of YouTube films. Enter a keyword and the program will retrieve all relative URLs from YouTube and play them one after the other. With a binary of just 440KByte, Minitube does without Flashplayer, is advertisement-free and relies fully on the Phonon framework for audio and video support.

Red Hat, Inc. , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Derek Chan, Head of Digital Operations for DreamWorks Animation, will keynote at the Red Hat Summit in Chicago, Sept.

The Slackware team released version 13 of its venerable Linux distribution, now supporting 64-bit computers. Slackware 13 provides “completely reworked” X packages, upgrades to KDE 4.2.4 and Xfce 4.6.1 desktops, a new .txz package format, and support for Ext4 and the GRUB bootloader, says the project.

In my last article I wrote about accessing a PostgreSQL database in C/C++. In this article, I’m going to discuss performing the same functions in C against an SQLite database. Unlike Postgresql and the supporting libraries, SQLite creates completely self-contained databases that aren’t dependant upon a client-server architecture.

Steve Jobs is a genius of design and marketing, but his track record on calling the right balance between utilizing proprietary arts and public resources (like open source and open standards) is more questionable.

Wayan and I and others have wrangled over the last two years over what OLPC programs would cost, and whether countries can afford it.

The threat to Linux is its users, advocates, and fanboys not the megacorps of the IT industry.