So what’s this cooking appliance? It’s called the halogen oven & there’s more to this little convection oven than meets the eye. The oven cooks food using heat from a halogen bulb & also a powerful fan which helps circulate the heat. Food is placed in a large bowl, usually 7 to 12 litre in capacity. This one single appliance is so versatile with its ability to cook in multiple ways, such as frying, boiling, baking, roasting & steaming. Since buying my own halogen oven I’ve found myself using less of the kitchen appliances that I used daily & I no longer use my gas oven.

So how does this cooker save money? The halogen oven uses far less power, in fact by switching to a halogen oven you will be saving over 70% in electricity in comparison to a regular oven. It also cooks food twice as fast so the oven will be on for less time. When you combine the power & time saving benefits you will be reducing you monthly electricity will quite considerably. To find out much more in depth information about halogen ovens & where to get hold of one at a site called thehalogenoven.org.uk.

A spokesman from the British Dental Association said that the way in which you use an electric toothbrush is just as important as the type of brush you choose. There are many sites online with in depth information on electric toothbrush products to ensure that you get your hand on the best electric toothbrush for you needs. Not only do electric toothbrushes reduce plaque build up and gum disease but also whiten teeth as they are better are removing stain. The end result is overall better dental health and also the aesthetic benefit of whiter teeth which is a great bonus. One of the most popular and highly rated electric toothbrush brands is Oral-B. In fact, Oral-B has a toothbrush on the market called the Triumph 500 and this toothbrush is the only model to have received the highest Platinum award by the British dental Health Foundation.

The electronic paper technology that eBook readers use has advantages over the colour display found on table PC’s. The main advantage is that there is no glare or refection from an eBook reader screen, making it ideal for comfortable reading, even in bright sunlight. You can find out my more in depth information about this & other advantages by reading an Amazon Kindle review as they are the world leaders in digital book reader technology.

Although these eBook reader may seen quite new to most people the first one introduced to the consumer market was back in the early 1970’s, before the internet. I think the steady advance in technology & availability of eBook reader has been responsible for the dramatic growth & popularity of these devices over the past couple of years. The Amazon Kindle which I mentioned early has out sold paper back books on Amazon.com which is quite incredible as Amazon are world famous for being one of the larges online paper back book retailers.

One huge advantage I have found with the digital book reader is its storage capability. The Amazon Kindle for example can store over 3,000 books in the device ready for reading, now I doubt there are many people who could store that many paper back book at home without running into problems. Another thing which I believe makes them so popular is the ease in which you can buy a book. Unlike paper back books where you would have to travel to a book store to physically buy, with a digital book reader you can just download a book straight to the device, ready for reading within seconds & very cheaply.

GoDaddy.com approached the Linux Professional Institute earlier this year and noted that LPI’s exam objectives complemented Go Daddy’s skill requirements for their in-house staff responsible for Debian and CentOS webservers. In addition, the company sought a global standard in Linux knowledge to use as an ongoing recruitment tool for anticipated needs in new IT staff. Go Daddy has doubled in size in the last four years and is always looking to add employees skilled in Linux technologies to support their growing operations.

“Continuing education is vital to the success of Go Daddy. Technology changes so quickly, that employees need to have the opportunity to access the most up-to-date information. LPI’s vendor-neutral certification gives Go Daddy the ability to have employees increase their personal knowledge while helping the company,” said Lane Jarvis, Vice President – Human Resources of GoDaddy.com.

Jarvis also pointed out that an attractive element in their adoption of LPI certification was a flexible training program that would enable the company to develop in-house training aligned with LPI’s exam objectives: “Working with Gurulabs has provided the necessary courseware and expertise for a ‘train-the-trainer’ program – enabling Go Daddy to develop our own in-house solution for LPI certification training of our employees.”

The Linux Professional Institute is globally supported by the IT industry, enterprise customers, community professionals, government entities and the educational community. LPI’s certification program is supported by an affiliate network spanning five continents and is distributed worldwide in multiple languages at more than 7,000 testing locations. Since 1999, LPI has delivered over 290,000 exams and 95,000 LPIC certifications around the world.

Red Hat announced first quarter 2012 financial year revenue of $265m, up 27 per cent from the same quarter last year. Net income during the quarter was $32.5m, up over 35 per cent from the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, leaving the firm in a bullish mood claiming that its revenue might rise to $1.09bn by the end of its financial year.

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat told Bloomberg that the firm expects to triple revenue to $3bn within 5 years. “The market is coming to us because all the new development is happening on Linux or, more broadly, on an open-source platform. Clouds in general run on open source,” said Whitehurst.

Whitehurst’s comments about cloud deployments generally using open source have been echoed by Canonical, which claims that Ubuntu is the most popular operating system installed on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service.

Red Hat also sees cloud deployment as a big revenue generator, saying that as firms use virtualisation and cloud computing to greater ability, Red Hat “is well positioned to capitalise”. Red Hat’s success is also Linux’s success, as the company is seen as the barometer for enterprise deployment.

Many large companies deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux and rival Linux vendors such as Canonical and Suse are following Red Hat in securing new business, which all just goes to show that open source software is a sustainable and growing business model with healthy competition among vendors.

It’s no wonder tempers are running hot, but the latest news from the gang over at Adobe(Nasdaq: ADBE) has done nothing to help.

“We will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux,” wrote Adobe blogger Mark Hopper last Tuesday.

Apparently Adobe’s desktop Linux releases have accounted for less than 0.5 percent of its AIR downloads, causing the company to pack up the effort and focus on mobile instead.

Did Linux bloggers look kindly upon the news? You bet your frozen Mandriva Margarita they didn’t.

‘I Consider This Good Riddance’

“I always thought making sure Adobe doesn’t earn a cent from me is just and proper,” wrote RedSubmarine in the comments on Cnet, for instance. “Yet another time, I’m proven right.”

Similarly, “that gets uninstalled from my computer,” declared Renegade Knight. “It’s enough to have to put up with Flash.”

The Tech Laze blog took an even stronger view.

“As a longtime Linux user I consider this as good riddance,” Tech Laze wrote. “In fact, I think that the Linux community will actually benefit from this decision.”

From there the conversation moved on to LXer and beyond, so Linux Girl knew it was time to learn more.

‘They Desperately Need New Management’

“And nothing of value was lost,” consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told Linux Girl. “There is nothing that runs on Air that can’t be replaced with something better.”

The real issue, however, is that “Adobe seems to be wandering direction-less, and you can’t trust their road maps at all,” Mack added. “They seem to hop from fad to fad, at times changing direction before even completing their last direction.”

Flash, for example, “is a mess,” Mack asserted. “It’s a slow memory hog, and their 64-bit version hasn’t been updated since November last year while they rushed out a bloated and slow Android version.”

Adobe’s PDF reader, meanwhile, “is outclassed by most of the alternative PDF viewers,” Mack added.

“I don’t often agree with Steve Jobs, but he was right about Adobe products being trash,” Mack concluded. “They desperately need new management before their complete incompetence of late eats into their two cash cows: DreamWeaver and PhotoShop.”

‘To Hell With Them’

Adobe simply “is not serious about GNU/Linux,” blogger Robert Pogson opined. “They’ve made many of their GNU/Linux releases second-rate and refused to release many products for GNU/Linux.”

The longer the company continues on that path, “the more irrelevant they will become,” Pogson warned.

“I remember using AcroRead on my first GNU/Linux installation,” he recounted. “It was second-rate and later filled with vulnerabilities. I used xpdf for most of the last decade.”

Similarly, “I can live without PhotoShop; Gimp or Imagemagick are easier to use for what I might have done with PhotoShop,” he added.

In short, “what have they done for us lately besides jerking us around over 64bit Flash and PhotoShop?” Pogson asked. “If Adobe cannot or will not compete in the FLOSS market, to hell with them. The world can cooperate to make the software it needs.”

Android but Not Linux

Thoughts on Technology blogger and Bodhi Linux lead developer Jeff Hoogland was similarly unimpressed.

“Oh Adobe,” Hoogland began.

“I’m wondering how many more technologies we are going to see that support ‘Android’ but not ‘Linux’ in general,” Hoogland said. “Netflix was the first major application to do this, and Adobe is just one of many to follow suit.”

Of course, “at least with Adobe Air they have the spine to tell us they are dropping the support, unlike the 64bit Linux flash client, which they are just leaving us guessing about!” Hoogland added.

‘AIR Is a Bit Player’

It seems unlikely that many Linux users “are really bummed about AIR per se,” Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, told Linux Girl. “AIR is a bit player in the cross-platform app development market – Java, .Net and Python are more important.”

Indeed, “Linux guys would care…. uhhh… why, exactly?” agreed Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “I’m a Windows guy and have exactly ONE app that uses Air, and that is the GOG downloader, and I can download just as easily with FF and have all the same features with download statusbar extension.

“This isn’t like flash, where everybody uses it; this is like Java applets where nobody in consumer land hardly ever touches the thing,” hairyfeet added. “Frankly, if Air went bye-bye tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost.”

‘Adobe Has a Marketing Problem’

Still, the move is “a mistake on Adobe’s part for a couple of reasons, including the ability of the open source communities to eventually clone players (see Mono and .Net), and the eventual ability of these to be brought back into cross-platform space, to compete with their own tools,” Travers opined.

The larger concern, however, “is what this means for Adobe’s commitment to other products, such as Flash, as well as the chance that this will mean that they are not and don’t plan to ever be interested in a native port of PhotoShop.”

All in all, “Adobe has a marketing problem,” said Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by “Tom” on the site.

‘Not Just a Linux Problem’

“When you think of building a ‘Rich Internet Application,’ unless it’s a game, you don’t think of Adobe,” Hudson explained. “And for games, if you think Adobe, you think Flash.”

For everything else, “if it’s browser-based, it’s javascript XHR (xmlhttprequests); freestanding internet apps can use java, python, tcl/tk, qt, wxwidgets, dozens (if not hundreds) of other tools, or again, flash,” she added. “Nobody wants to try to get their users to install yet another runtime (the Adobe AIR runtime).”

The lack of enthusiasm for Adobe AIR is also “not just a linux problem,” Hudson concluded. “Many developers are suffering from ‘YAUIAPIE’ — Yet Another User Interface Application Programming Interface Exhaustion. Once you have a dozen different ways to solve a problem, who wants to invest the time in mastering yet another one?”

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