It is not an area of business where you'd normally think of Novell providing the infrastructure. But business and retail transaction security is becoming a burgeoning business for the company that helped create the PC network.

A lot of hard core weather fanatics out there, and even some less fanatical ones, have their own personal weather stations. In fact, there's enough of them that the national weather service and a number of TV and radio stations have tapped into them to help provide a much clearer view of the weather over a given area. This is helpful because weather can vary significantly over a one mile stretch of land. But funding thousands of individual weather stations per county is cost prohibitive. Hence why the ability to tap into these personal weather stations has become so important to NWS and so many others.

Which brings me back to Wx/Net.

As you may know, Google uses Wine to implement Linux support for Picasa. Beyond that, Google has been supporting Wine in several other ways.

R.E.M. today released 11 videos for the first song from their forthcoming album, all in MP4 format in HD and under an open source license. "Supernatural Serious," is the first single from the band's next album, "Accelerate," due to be released April 1st.

I continue to be surprised by the amount of weight given to downloads as a metric for OSS success. A topic Matt Asay also touched on recently over at The Open Road. Like Matt, I’m talking OSS at the product or company level (i.e., not OSS projects) and by success I mean sales.

Researchers at a major security vendor are exploring the extent to which Linux systems - especially servers - are involved in the botnet plague.

I managed to score an email interview with Olli Toivainen, Nokia's director of product management and one of the key guys behind the N Series of Linux-based Internet Tablets. Although I couldn't get him to spill the beans on future products, he does provide a good perspective on the development and success of the Nokia N810.

This is something that had to come out eventually - has Xandros picked up where the SCO Group left off? Well, let me put it this way. The single most effective way to defeat something that's offered for free it to find a way to make it better, then make a fortune doing it.