With the advancements in technology available today, you can make contact with just about any place you'd like within a few seconds, thanks to the border-crossing and barrier-smashing power of the Internet. If it's Mars you're trying to reach, though, your best chance is more likely to come on the end of a probe than a DSL line. That may well change, however, as scientists at NASA have just completed testing new technology aimed — quite literally — at blasting the Internet out of this world.

Just a month after the release of Adobe's Flash Player 10 — with, for the first time, full Linux support out of the box — Adobe is back with another surprise: a 64-bit Flash Player — exclusively for Linux.

It's been six months since Mozilla's Firefox 3 leapt onto the scene. In that time, the browser required a tuneup only three times — until Wednesday, when patches for a swath of vulnerabilities upped the count to four.

Just months after losing 10% of its workforce in a mass layoff, and mere days since it came to light that employees were being asked to take unpaid leave to avoid additional cuts, Dell is now facing another loss: Kevin Kettler, the company's Chief Technology Officer, is cashing in his chips and going home.

Mozilla's Firefox browser is unquestionably one of the most popular web browsers on the market — topping 20% at times while the browser-to-beat continues to slide — and certainly so among Open Source users. The release of Firefox 3 in June was a major milestone for Mozilla, but still, nearly six months later, there are those who have eschewed the new for the comfortable, homey, well-worn-in welcomeness of Firefox 2. That will be changing soon, though, as funeral arrangements for the second-era Fox are in full-tilt at Mozilla HQ, and the service is fast approaching.

It was this time last year — almost to the day — that Google revealed their plan for gaining a share of the ever-so-profitable mobile phone market. Though we all thought it would be a true gPhone — designed, manufactured, and marketed entirely by Google — we were nonetheless excited and intrigued by what was actually revealed: Android, an Open Source, Linux-based mobile OS.

Election Day has come and gone in the U.S. — though it will likely linger in the memory for quite some time — but that doesn't mean that all the electing there is to do has been done. No, another election is upon us: the December 2008 election for the Fedora Project has begun!

The Federal Communications Commission — the government agency that generally concerns itself with policing wardrobe malfunctions and the like — took an enormous step into the 21st Century yesterday as its five commissioners voted unanimously to open previously restricted areas of the wireless spectrum for public use.

One of the hottest areas of Linux development these days is in mobile Linux — it seems everyone has their hand somewhere in the Linux-on-cellphones pie. Two of the big players in the field — Google and Motorola — kicked their involvement up a notch yesterday by becoming official members of the GNOME Advisory Board.

It's been nearly a month since the strains of the 175th Oktoberfest died down, but the reasons to celebrate live on. Behind the scenes at the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), the diplomats are toasting freedom — not with beer, but Open Source software.

The openSUSE Project — responsible for the openSUSE Linux distribution upon which Novell's SUSE line is based — has completed a major transition, more than a year in the making, with the announcement this week that the first-ever openSUSE Board Election is complete.

More and more, it seems the cool thing to do these days is to put Linux everywhere. It's on computers, of course, from the biggest to the smallest, but it's also powering DVRs, mobile phones — even toasters. Now, BMW is planning to take it a step further, and offer up heated seats, active cruse, and a killer sound system — along with your favorite brand of Linux.

Google's Linux-based Android mobile phone platform is the talk of the town this week, as just about everything heretofore unseen makes a grand public appearance.

The KDE Project — the desktop environment preferred by 43% of Linux Journal readers — likes to hear from its users. From annual conferences to IRC channels, KDE is listening — and beginning last week, they have a new opportunity to hear what the people have to say.

No one — well, very few, anyway — who uses Linux lacks the experience of Linux being the last major platform to gain native support for proprietary applications. Whether it's being held at arms length by rabid legal teams or just being overlooked as an important market, we all know the pain of finding out our shiny new gizmo is useless on our Linux systems. Wednesday, however, marked the end of one such experience, as Adobe released the latest version of its Flash Player — with full Linux support out of the box.

An excited — and apparently somewhat overwhelmed — OpenOffice community released the next major version of the office suite — OpenOffice.org 3.0 — into the wild yesterday, sparking a near-instant rush to be the first on ones block to have the much-anticipated application.

Mandriva Linux — the seventh most-popular Linux distribution1 — has just provided as good a reason as any for a popularity-push, with the unveiling of their latest release, Mandriva Linux 2009.

It's commonplace, perhaps even de rigueur, for company executives to say their goodbyes when someone snatches up their firm mdash indeed, if we sold our share for eleventy-billion dollars, we'd probably be inclined to take a long vacation too. This wasn't so, however, for MySQL, where the company execs kept right on going post-sale — at least until recently.

The annual LinuxWorld conference is always a blast and a half for those who attend, especially the crew here at Linux Journal. Sadly, those halcyon days are over, as the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is no more. Weep not, however, as in its place has appeared a new event, the freshly-christened OpenSource World.