TechnoReaders.com

source: Linuxreaders.com

The French national police force has slashed its IT costs by 70 per cent by cutting Microsoft out of the equation.
There are many arguments for or against switching from Windows to Linux. Many times these arguments are based more in fanaticism than fact.

In a recent report, the French national police force, Gendarmerie Nationale, has provided some great facts supporting the switch from Windows to Linux.

In 2002, the Gendarmerie Nationale adopted a strictly open-standards IT policy in order to improve inter-organisation communications.

Until 2004, a large part of the IT budget was spent on software licences — between 12,000 and 15,000 licenses each year. In 2004, an accountant in the Gendarmerie Nationale tried OpenOffice and, after finding it a surprisingly competent replacement for its paid counterpart, started pushing for it to be adopted within the organization instead of Microsoft Office. read more..

The elastix core development team and much thanks to Alex Villacis, the first beta version of 64bit Elastix 1.5 have been made available for download. They are getting ready for the first RC but this beta will provide much better Elastix performance in 64 bits OS.

Elastix version 1.5 is now available for download in its 32-bit and 64-bit ISO versions. This release took a bit longer than normal because it has some major improvements. This release took a bit longer than normal because they have made some important improvements. elastix now use DAHDI instead of Zaptel which brings better support for telephony drivers. Here is a list of some of the changes:

• 32-bit and 64-bit ISO images generated
• Asterisk upgraded to 1.4.23.2-0
• FreePBX upgraded to 2.5.1
• Support for DAHDI 2.1.0.4
• Misdn upgraded to 1.1.8
• Native R2 support included through libopenr2 1.1

This release is the first one to have gone through our beta testers scrutiny using our beta testers mailing list . Thanks to this group of community members we have solved bugs ranging from the small and annoying to the serious and critical ones. Thanks go out to all our beta testers because without their work we could not have the even more stable version of Elastix that we are making available today. We would like to give our special thanks to the following hardworking members of our community: Fernando Villares, Bob Fryer, Tzafrir Cohen, Saleh Madi and Frank Danard.

Read the complete ChangeLog here.

Wonder how you can do a quick conversion to PDF format for reference when browsing and reading an interesting website’s article? There are various ways to do it but in case you don’t want to mess up your computer with unnecessary software installation, you may want to give this web service a try. The website, with the name of HTML-PDF-Converter, allows users to convert any websites’ contents to popular PDF format in simple steps.

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If you try to install RealPlayer, a media player available at real.com, you’ll notice that the setup downloads Google Chrome. The option to install Google’s browser is enabled by default and I assume that most people will not bother to disable it.

RealPlayer seems to be first third-party application used to promote Google Chrome. The browser has replaced Firefox in Google Pack and it’s installed along with Google Earth if you’re not paying attention.

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This seems to be a recent change: Google Translate can now be used to translate PDF files and Microsoft Office documents. Google first converts the document to the HTML format and then it displays the translated HTML file.

The nice thing is that Google converts the documents on the fly even if they haven’t been indexed by Google. Just paste the address of a document in Google Translate’s textarea and wait until the translation shows up. Unfortunately, the service is not well-suited for long documents: it only translated the first 9 pages of a PDF file.

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