The Internet is all about easy access and sharing. Unfortunately even with high-speed broadband connectivity, your computers and networking equipment are hard to get to and isolated. Until now!

Yoics is a powerful network solution that transforms any computer or network attached device instantly into an easily accessible and shareable internet resource. Featuring an intuitive user interface, remote access and sharing has just gotten as easy as using instant messaging.

Overview

The Yoics desktop looks and works a lot like an instant messenger application, except instead of a device list, you get a list of devices.  These devices can be yours or ones that have been shared to you.  With the Yoics desktop you can make any data, service or even device on your network accessible to you from anywhere on the Internet.

During initial setup, you’ll have the option to setup remote desktop, folder sharing, photo sharing and web-cam sharing.  Yoics also provides custom configuration, so that advanced users can configure just about any data, service or device to be accessible and shareable remotely.

If you are ready to go, download Yoics from the above link and off you go.  If you have any problems, here are a couple of links to help you along the way.

Download

 

When you right-click on the Windows desktop, there’s an option to change the default size of desktop icons - you could either choose medium, large or the default "Classic" size.

Now if you are looking for something extra and don’t want to limit yourself to these three default sizes, try this trick:

Left-click anywhere on the desktop, hold the ‘Control’ key and move the scroll wheel on the mouse - the desktop icons will grow smaller or larger depending upon the direction of your scroll.

Uncheck the "Auto Arrange" option for some more interesting results. Now I use this on a Windows Vista desktop.

 

Continuing with the list of the best open source software of 2008.

Object Database
db4o
db4o began life as a Java database library, but its designers have since created parallel editions for the .NET languages. In 2005, db4o implemented Native Queries, which allow you to express queries as Java (or .NET) methods. Recent additions to the library include Transparent Update and Transparent Activation, which more completely automate object persistence. The engine itself deduces how much of a persistent object’s members must be read from and written to storage, simplifying coding and providing better memory management. Also new in db4o is support for Microsoft LINQ.

Version Control
Git
Distributed version control has become a major need as development teams have become more geographically distributed. Originally the brainchild of Linus Torvalds and currently maintained by Junio Hamano, Git is the revision management tool of choice for several prominent open source projects, including the Linux kernel, X.org Server, One Laptop per Child (OLPC) core development, and the Ruby on Rails Web framework. The Git engine is at least an order of magnitude faster than other revision control systems for large projects, and it has strong support for branching and merging.

Web Client Library
HttpClient
HttpClient is an open-source Java HTTP client library begun in 2001. Formerly a component of Jakarta Commons, it is now being maintained by the HttpComponents project. Though there’s nothing earth-shatteringly new about HttpClient, it is as useful as ever. Particularly helpful are property settings that let you configure HttpClient to dump detailed ‘on the wire’ data to System.out. If you’re a Java programmer with a complex application staring at you, swing by the HttpClient-3.x site and you’ll have your client application done in no time.

Parallel Programming
Intel Threaded Building Blocks
The effective use of multi-core processors is one of the more difficult and pressing problems facing software developers today. Over the years, there have been many proposals to address parallelization, many of which involved new languages. Intel Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) is a portable template-based C++ library that implements a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability. The very interesting Microsoft Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework, which implement task-based parallelism through a class library, are not open source.

Business Rule Management System
JBoss Drools
Drools is a worthy rival to leading enterprise competitors Blaze Advisor and JRules, but is available free under the Apache open source license. It combines a very fast runtime engine, a full-featured rule repository, excellent Eclipse-based developer tools, and support for Excel-based decision tables, allowing rules to be written and maintained by business analysts. The developer group is large, and the project moves fast. Drools even has one feature the market leaders lack: the ability to import rules from almost any other BRMS.

Rich Internet Applications
Open Flex
InfoWorld has given high marks to Adobe Flex Builder 3.0, which is a commercial product. We would also like to honor Adobe for open sourcing the Flex SDK (although not the Flex Builder IDE) under the MPL model. This opens the door for open source tools and applications targeting the Flex framework, which in turn is one of our favorite ways of producing Rich Internet Applications. Competitors to Flex include OpenLazlo and better performers such as Curl and Silverlight 2.0, but those last two products are not open source, even though they may be used for free in some scenarios.

JavaScript Framework
Prototype
Prototype, originally the work of Sam Stephenson, is the foundation on which several of the other open source Ajax frameworks, including Scriptaculous and Open Rico, have been built. In turn, the popular Ruby on Rails server framework uses Prototype and Scriptaculous in its Ajax layer. Using Prototype makes writing JavaScript more object-oriented and flexible than “bare” JavaScript, and makes manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) considerably easier and less prone to breakage. Prototype also adds concise, powerful methods to JavaScript while insulating your own JavaScript code from browser dependencies.

Web Services Test Tool
soapUI
Few SOAP testing tools are as easy and powerful as soapUI. It is available either as a standalone product or as a plug-in for Eclipse, IntelliJ, and NetBeans. Install soapUI’s Eclipse plug-in into the Eclipse IDE, and you have a powerful SOAP debugging and testing toolkit. All you need to do is import the WSDL from the target server, ask soapUI to build test SOAP requests, and turn it loose. Various views let you dig into the wire transactions of the SOAP requests and responses, modify test requests, examine responses, and quickly isolate the SOAP server’s problems.

 

The best free and open source software in platforms.

Server Operating System
CentOS
FreeBSD and OpenSolaris always enter the discussion, but our number one open source operating system has to be Linux… and our server has to be CentOS. In a nutshell, CentOS is the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux provided under a different label, without the maintenance and support of Red Hat, and consequently, without the cost of a Red Hat support contract. For Linux admins who don’t need that support, and there are more than a few, CentOS amounts to a free and unadulterated version of RHEL, and users can count on updates that follow quickly in the wake of Red Hat’s changes.

Enterprise Service Bus
JBossESB
Part of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform that combines process orchestration supporting BPEL and jBPM, security and registry services, and the Drools rules engine, JBossESB bolsters integration and service mediation with transformation and content-based routing, business rules and policy management, and both service- and human-based workflow. There’s room for improvement in areas like adapters and change management, and some of the SOA suite’s functionality currently requires third-party add-ons. But JBoss plans to fill out the package with its own efforts, and the group is already busy working on its messaging underpinnings with JBM 2.0 performance enhancements in development.

Database
MySQL
While SQLite3 is extremely convenient for development and testing databases, and PostgreSQL has powerful Generalized Search Tree indexes and is very close to being enterprise-ready, MySQL is the choice for many Web sites thanks to its excellent read performance, transparent support for large text and binary objects, and incredibly easy administration. Stored procedures, functions, triggers, and updateable views were added to MySQL in version 5, overcoming the largest technical objections to its deployment at many sites. MySQL also has a large, helpful user base, and some poster-child deployments including eBay, Yahoo!, and Craigslist.

MySQL Administration
phpMyAdmin
If you want to manage MySQL over the Internet, then phpMyAdmin is your tool. Designed for the creation and administration of MySQL databases, it covers the gamut from mundane MySQL administration tasks and managing users and permissions to executing SQL statements and more advanced SQL management. It can also gather server and database statistics. For PostgreSQL, phpPgAdmin is a Web-based administration tool that does similar wonders for the administrator.

Small-Footprint OS
Puppy Linux
Puppy Linux packs a remarkable amount of capability into a small area. The current release, 4.0, is available in a bootable ISO image that’s less than 90 megabytes. It easily fits on — and can boot from — a USB pendrive. It can also boot from CD-ROM or of course a hard drive. It’s a fine candidate if you want to run Linux within a VM (like VirtualBox) on your Windows system. Puppy loads entirely into RAM, so applications execute with surprising speed.

Data Migration
Jitterbit
For data migration headaches, we used to keep a bottle of our favorite over-the-counter painkiller handy. And then we found Jitterbit, which makes short work of moving data from one format to another, even where very large datasets are concerned. The UI is simple, portable “Jitterpaks” encourage sharing mechanisms among users, and a testing tool lets you know immediately whether the current settings for a source, an operation, or a target are valid or invalid. Add it all together, and Jitterbit easily moves ahead of other open source products in the space.

Desktop Operating System
Ubuntu
With Ubuntu 8.04, aka Hardy Heron, the best Linux desktop gets even better. Between a new kernel, a new version of the Gnome desktop, improved windowing and graphics layers, and a number of default configuration tweaks, nearly everything about Hardy Heron feels snappier and more responsive than the previous version. Windows and menus feel less sluggish, disk access is improved, and programs launch more quickly. The OS even boots faster. Throw in the new, Windows-friendly installer, and Ubuntu becomes especially attractive to novice Linux users.

Desktop Virtualization
VirtualBox
A modular VM solution that lends itself to integration and customization, VirtualBox supports Windows, Mac OS X, and various Linux distributions as hosts while providing a VMware-like laundry list of supported guest OSes. With version 1.5.0, VirtualBox introduced seamless windows, a knock-off of the Coherence and Unity features of Parallels and VMware Fusion, respectively. The VirtualBox implementation, however, represents the first time the capability has been available under both Windows and Linux.

Server Virtualization
Xen
The pundits like to say that virtual machine monitors, or hypervisors, are becoming a commodity, and Xen is the reason why. Now a mature Version 3.2, the server virtualization platform for Linux supports a wide range of hardware and 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, Linux, Solaris, and BSD guests, providing a wealth of options for server consolidation. Xen is even pushing into advanced VMware territory with live VM migration, a feat unavailable to users of Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

 

 

UPDATE (08/14/08)

Just a few minutes ago (1:25 pm CT) I upgraded my 1.1.4 firmware to 2.0.1 following these steps and the iPhone works really fine. I have a 1st generation iPhone and I live in San Luis Potosi, Mexico so the phone is working without problems. I can access to Apple Store and install more applications as well I can install applications with Cydia and Installer 4.0.

So you have just purchased an iPhone(or maybe even an iPod Touch) and now you want to get some cool applications and games on there. Here we will go through the steps you need to go through to ‘jailbreak‘ your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Note - This guide has been updated for the 2.0.1 firmware.

Windows

1 - Download and Install the WinPwn application.
WinPwn Ver 2.0.0.4 (24994 KB)

2 - Get Your IPSW File Ready
a) 2g iPhones - 3g iPhones - iPod Touch 1.1.5
b) iPod Touch owners that have already purchased the 2.0 update can browse to “c:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPod Software Updates\”.
Note ‘USER’ is the login name for your windows installation. Like for me, USER is Doug. . .since when I setup my computer I used Doug as the user account. This will be different for everyone

3 - Open WinPwn and click the ‘Browse .ipsw’ button and locate either the IPSW file you are ‘pwning’.

4 - Once WinPwn recognizes the ipsw file you just selected, now click the ‘IPSW Builder’ button.

5 - In the Applications tab click the box for Cydia and Installer(or whichever one you like better), and click the ‘YouTube Activation Fix’ box if you’re not on the AT&T network(iPod Touch owners do not have to worry about the YouTube Fix).

6 - You can set a custom image or a custom payload, but neither is required to jailbreak.

7 - Click the ‘build .ipsw’ button at the bottom left and it will ask you where you want to save it. Save this new IPSW file anywhere you want(I recommend the Desktop so you can delete it easily afterwards).

8 - After it creates your custom firmware it is time to Pwn iTunes. Click the ‘iPwner’ button and you should be told that ‘iTunes has been Pwned’

9 - Now you can close WinPwn and put your iPhone/iPod Touch into DFU mode. Click here if you need help with DFU mode.

10 - Now open iTunes, hold the ‘Shift’ key on your keyboard and then left click on the ‘Restore’ button in iTunes.

11 - Browse to your desktop(or where ever you saved it), and select the custom firmware that we just created.

12 - Let iTunes do it’s then, and in a minute or two you should see a dialog box telling you that iTunes just restarted your device and it everything is complete.

13 - That’s it, once your iPhone or iPod Touch reboots you should see both the App Store and the Cydia icons.