Best Buy's Geek Squad has certainly enjoyed its share of press in recent months. But I found some amusing things about some of their policies -- which were recently leaked to the public (thanks to a link found at Digg.com). The policies demonstrate that the "agents" are expected to make legal judgment calls regarding such applications as P2P options.

I have read a rather sad story today. Apparently the Best Buy Geeks squad refused to service the machine of someone who had purchased an $80 extended warranty for its netbook just because he had installed Ubuntu Linux.

"The Network Neutrality Squad (NNSquad) is an open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet's users to help keep the Internet's operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions. [...] We invite individual, commercial, nonprofit, government, and all other Internet users and stakeholders (including ISPs) to participate in the Network Neutrality Squad..."

I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.

I consider myself to be a born geek. Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to do cool geek things...

At last week's Guadec meeting, Kristian Rietveld delivered the GTK+ "state of the union" report. GTK+ is the multi-platform toolkit behind a number of popular applications and, perhaps most well known, the Gnome Desktop environment for Linux.

Let's call that site the Geek Ranch. (When I say "let's" I mean us, not everyone. While its primary focus is to appeal to geeks, we will have to call it something else for general marketing.) As far as a site, it is about 265 acres of land in the mountains of the Tisey Preserve near Estelí, Nicaragua.

While there is a lot more to it than just being for geeks, here is the geek angle. The property will have "geek cabinas" scattered around a pine forest within the property. If you want to escape from the rat race for a while--a month, six months, whatever--you will be able to inexpensively rent a private cabina. It will come with Internet connectivity, maid service and all your meals. In other words, no routine responsibilities.

The Berlin-based union of the German police issued a press release two days ago, where they said that their “Poliks” system to handle reports isn’t stable and reliable enough. Taking up a report into that system often would take between 30 and 90 minutes, which would be awkward. Also, the 73 million Euro system would crash far too often.

The International Organization for Standardization has voted against a proposal to fast-track Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an international standard. Here's how the vote went: all 41 of the of the countries that had worked on the proposal participated in the vote. There were 17 "yes" votes, 15 "no" votes, and 9 abstentions.