Today's surprising news of 5,000 Microsoft jobs cut might be good news or bad for Linux, depending on how you look at it.

A few days ago, Kristin wrote about Marketcetera's first full production release of its open source automated trading platform. Aimed at hedge fund managers, traders, brokers and dealers, the system is standardized, open, scalable and modular. Ars Technica also points out that over 20 financial institutions have already adopted Marketcetera.

So, that proprietary 3D graphics driver you installed is now causing you some problems, so you got rid of it. But there's a problem. Your KDE 4 installation had those fancy desktop effects enabled, which now aren't working. Instead of a KDE desktop, you have a nice white screen.

Offsite backups are essential for important data, because we all know the perils of keeping everything in one location: fire, flood, theft, power surges, power failures, permatemps refuse to take it anymore and go berserk-- it's just wise redundancy.

Sony has brought a new mini-notebook to the market that is small, light, stylish and with Windows Vista, although its instant-on feature is Linux-powered.

Yesterday as part of Ubuntu Developer Week I gave a session entitled "Bazaar for Packaging". At the last minute I decided to change the session somewhat, so that it would show how things would work if you were to use bzr to modify an Ubuntu package once Distributed Development is fully up and running.

"...You can still submit papers to the symposium. The deadline for paper submissions is February 4, 2009, and the program committee accepts both original contributions, including research papers and experience reports, as well as descriptions of work in progress. Again, see the symposium website for more details."