The open source R language has been in use by statisticians to do data analysis, predictive modeling and visualization for over a decade. This week, R is set to undergo a revolution of sorts with a revamped commercial effort.

There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with VLC. VLC can do a lot more than basic video playback, including things like video encoding, DVD ripping, volume normalization and more.

Apple and Microsoft join to fight Opera and Firefox. The next big evolution of the Internet will be in the realm of video playing. Until now the rapid growth of online video has been built on Adobe's Flash technology. Flash has always been a workable solution but not the best platform because it requires an additional plugin to be installed before users can view video.

A new issue of the BSD Magazine is available as free PDF: Embedded BSD (issue 2010-02)

Tech companies are playing hardball on smart phones, yet Linux could gain the upper hand with Intel and Nokia going on the defensive with MeeGo. To get you on Facebook while on the bus, play a tune, and - oh, yeah - make a call, Microsoft and Apple are finding new ways to reign in the competition on phones: they're using patent threats.

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. In addition to a large number of bugfixes, 23.2 includes several new packages, such as the CEDET suite of development tools and a new mode for editing Javascript.

Virtualization technology has long found a home in Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution. Ever since Fedora 4 emerged in 2005, virtualization technologies have continued to advance in the distro and that remains the case with the upcoming Fedora 13 release set for later this month.

You've heard all of the advantages that HTML5 brings to your web experience, but how far away are we from enjoying the benefits of HTML5? With several browsers already supporting HTML5 video, I selected Google Chromium which was available for my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop and gave it a try.