Advanced Audio Coding, an audio coding format, made its debut as a part of MPEG-2, and was revised and included in the MPEG-4 specification. AAC is probably the most advanced audio encoding system in the world. Freeware Advanced Audio Coder is an opensource GPL'd suite of tools which allow a person to use the AAC format.

The movie "Antitrust," set to open Jan. 12, pits the open-source movement against a multibillion-dollar technology company in the Pacific Northwest that, according to promos, "will stop at nothing" to maintain control of the computing world. "There is no second place," the film's official Web site states.

The market has been anxiously awaiting the final release, which can be downloaded from www.kernel.org, even though some of the features found in the kernel have already made their way into vendors' current Linux offerings. However, vendors are being cautious about detailing exactly when the kernel itself will find its way into their lineups.

Procmail, and the cluster of utilities associated with it, can take one or more actions on individual email messages based on the content of the headers or the body, or the size of the message. Once a specified condition is met, Procmail can file the email in a local mailbox (which could be /dev/null, effectively

deleting it), forward it to another address, or pipe it as input to another command.

Automount and autofs are powerful tools and ease file systems management. They allow all the users of a same machine to mount different file systems automatically the very moment they are needed.

As Linux grows in popularity, so do storage options. But application support and compatibility among different versions of the open-source operating system are seen as vital.

Companies that bet on Linux for business-critical applications should expect many of the same service issues that affect orthodox enterprise applications. Although the robustness of the open source operating system minimises some problems, Linux will eventually face the same lack of skilled support that other systems face today, according to new research by Gartner's Dataquest division.

"In an article in the Los Angeles Times recently, Mark Kellner, wrote of having tried to switch to a Linux desktop for 14 days. Kellner's article, for all its flaws, is just the kind of thing that those of us in the Linux community ought to look at, think about, and at the end ask two questions: What are we trying to bring about? How well are we

doing it?"

"Being a stable, flexible, and affordable operating system, Linux has without any doubt all chances to establish itself as a standard in this new market segment," said SuSE Chief Technical Officer Dirk Hohndel in a statement.

What do people say when you ask them what they'd do if they had a magic wand that was able to make just one change to Linux? These people are programmers, project managers, consultants, and journalists, and they all have two things in common: They like Linux, and they make all or part of their income with it.