The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows. "We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle," wrote OLPC's Arjun Sarwal

Microsoft has dropped two outstanding appeals of European antitrust rulings, following the deal struck with the European Commission at the beginning of this week, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

"This morning I prepared and uploaded a Debian package of mylvmbackup, which provides a quick way to create backups of MySQL server's data files using an LVM snapshot..."

"...The movement towards FOSS usage in government is growing and a number of governments have made decisions on the full utilisation of FOSS for the delivery of services..."

"I am still flabbergasted by an excellent speech I heard from the NZ IT Minister, David Cunliffe about Open Source at the New Zealand Open Source Awards recently. The speech was excellently written and delivered, and included some excellent tidbits including..."

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be in South Africa next month to promote his goal of having Wikipedias in all major languages around the world.

Projity is a company that provides two alternatives to Microsoft's popular Project application. Project-On-Demand is software-as-a-service (SAAS) code that runs in any browser and is available via a monthly subscription. OpenProj is a desktop version of the application that is built on Java and is licensed with the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).

One of the frustrating things about IM networks is that you can’t really choose what networks your friends use and you can end up stuck with whatever they are using. Aside from not talking to your friends on IM, there’s not a lot you can do other than grudgingly get an account on said service and bite the bullet.