So why do Microsoft advertise so aggressively re the whole server issue? This is an interesting opinion piece about their strategy.

I call it the $0 Laptop, because that's what I paid for it. The dead Gateway Solo 1450 I got a few months back now runs.

I don’t mind a little cynicism — it’s a natural and only mildly toxic byproduct of paying attention. So last week, when Microsoft’s Office Open XML file format was rejected as an international standard, I wasn’t bothered that Microsoft said it was “extremely delighted” by the result.

"Syndicated content has become an expected part of any regular news source. Users don't want the bother of checking sites every day, and mailing lists don't allow the user enough flexibility when dealing with a large amount of news. Regular publishing formats are also notoriously unfriendly to robots, providing barriers to indexing and searching..."

"Hence, if we can wrap C++ libraries threaded using TBB, then the Parrot NCI should make it possible for all the languages that have Parrot support to call those libraries. Then, high level scripting languages such as Ruby, Python, and Perl will have convenient access to computationally-intensive libraries that have been threaded for optimal performance on multicore processors."

"I’ve been doing Ruby on Rails for more than 2 years now. Over a year ago, I went Java and .Net free, throwing myself head first into Ruby and Rails.

I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.

"After several years of development, the first beta release for Ogg Theora 1.0 - a free video codec - is now available. Now all we have to do is to get some content in the Theora format."