“What would happen if arithmetic hadn’t been in the public sphere?” he asks. “What if, before doing something that involved arithmetic, you had to stop at the arithmetic store? Over time, the arithmetic owners would get very rich, but there would be a noticeable gap in the production of arithmetic, which would get more expensive without getting better.”

Of all four OpenOffice.org applications, Base is probably the most complicated one. It is a powerful tool that allows you to build complex databases, but this power comes at a price: if you've never worked with database applications, you might find Base a bit overwhelming.

In my last article, Quick and Dirty with Open Office Base, I described my initial experiences with building a simple database application for my wife in Open Office Base, having had no prior experience with the program. In that article, I described how easy it is to get started, and how easy it is to build usable software with Base.

Today we're going to look at the little tools in KDE 4, or at least some of them. There are far too many to be able to cover in one blog entry, and so I've decided to cover a few of the ones that I personally use and which have had visible improvements over their KDE 3 counterparts.

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters.

PureWave Networks is using Linux, a Freescale processor, and an off-the-shelf middleware package from Enea to create its next generation of WiMAX base stations. Due later this year, the base stations will aim to bridge the gap between macro and pico WiMAX stations, says the company.

Voters in the first Red Hat innovation awards program have given a collective salute to programmers at Hill Air Force Base in Utah.

Participants in the online campaign picked the Hill base information technology team as the winner among six individual category winners that were announced at the recent Red Hat Linux software developers conference in San Diego.

OpenOffice Base is a database management system capable of creating its own databases or connecting to a database created by the more powerful MySQL database server. But for the average user, creating a stand alone database is enough power. And OpenOffice Base handles this task easily.

Personally, I never considered album art for my iPod all that important. That has changed now that we have an iPod touch in the family. If I'm missing a lot of album art, the experience of virtually flipping through my music collection, something Apple calls "cover flow," is diminished. iTunes doesn't always offer art for albums I didn't purchase from iTunes. Thankfully, a little GPL-licensed application called Album Cover Art Downloader (ACAD) solved my problem.