"The second (and hopefully last) release candidate for GNU Smalltalk 3.0 can now be downloaded from..."

Although China's Linux market as a whole doubled from 2003 to 2006 to $20 million per year, sales of Linux desktop software grew more slowly. In fact, the market share of Linux desktop software in China dropped from 16% to 12% in the same period. But according to CCID Consulting, sales of Linux desktop software increased 25.1% in the third quarter of this year, catching up with the quick growth of China's Linux industry as a whole. Several new developments have added fuel to the growth.

Identity is a hot issue at the moment - just ask Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs. But supremely stupid security lapses aside, managing identity is a problem that everyone online has to face on a daily basis.

Officials of the City of Amsterdam to work within a few years probably no longer with Windows. A test has shown that the open source software Linux performs better.

"The Amazon kindle provides convenience, but at the cost of freedom. When you purchase a kindle, you must agree to use the Digital Restriction Management (DRM) system. Since all of the Kindle ebooks you purchase from Amazon are in their proprietary DRM format, you are also promising to not share them with friends. And, because you promise to not circumvent the DRM, there is no way to move them to another device or a computer. You are locked into the Kindle and you are locked into Amazon. If you try to move them to a new ebook reader or a computer, Amazon can end your service and remove access to the books you have already purchased..."

via http://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/1096 (instructions on tagging - Kindle Swindle )

"I wanted to recover data from a failing hard drive, and asked on IRC if any good tools existed for Ubuntu. Someone pointed me towards GNU ddrescue (named gddrescue in Debian and Ubuntu), which is designed for rescuing data from any file or block device..."

Today I read an interview from the KOffice developers where they imply that they will not support the ooXML file format. This sparked a slashdot story, the gist of which was that KDE is principled and GNOME has gone over to the dark side because of their sponsership of Jody Goldberg's attemts to improve the ooXML specification. ie KDE supports ODF (Yay!), GNOME supports ooXML, (boo hiss!)

This whole discussion is rather a rather clueless storm in a teacup and misses many different points.

Three cheers for the developers and management of the K Desktop Environment. They have taken a principled stand on the divisive issue of OOXML, the Microsoft Office Open XML document format. And for this the KDE folk deserve a round of applause.