A little over a week ago I received my Zonbu Notebook. Since reviewing their tiny, silent desktop replacement computer I’ve been interested in Zonbu and their business model. Could they really pull of the subscription model with inexpensive computers? I’ve long held that in the next ten to fifteen years the majority of computers will be inexpensive blocks handed out to anyone who wants one in exchange for subscribing to some sort of service – be it connectivity, online storage or even gaming.

One of the new planned new features of the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, is a fresh new theme. That’s right, no more brown and orange. While for many users just getting some nicer colors in to replace the “ugly” brown and orange is enough (I personally like the brown and orange a lot), I think the Ubuntu team should take this chance to get ahead of other distributions in another way.

SEAGATE'S latest batch of drives, the ironically titled Free Agent series are not compatible with the Open Source operating system Linux.

"It appears that, after a short release candidate period, Rails 2.0 final has now been released. In celebration of such an event, I’ve compiled a list of all the features of Rails 2 that I’ve written about so far..."

The request S4.2500 is the Mercedes S600 of digital music players: big, powerful, built like a tank. And expensive. This music server runs $18,500...It's basically a rock-solid Linux computer coupled to a Lynx Studio Technology sound card of the sort used by professional recording studios.

Is the eBay market the right role model for open source software developers looking to make money from selling support for their products?

It turns out there were two patent cases filed by the Niro Scavone firm on Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Florida. The first was the Scott Harris/James Parker case I wrote about yesterday. The second was none other than the Global Patent Holdings JPEG patent! Adam Heffner again acted as local counsel to Ray Niro. Interestingly, all 7 defendants are Florida corporations. Is Acacia preparing for patent reform by filing in jurisdictions that make sense? Are they planning to sue more companies, in more of the 94 judicial districts?

About a year ago now I made the best computing decision of my adult life. It was a cold and snowy evening at my apartment, and good-ole' XP was ready for its bi-yearly rebuild. It just seemed that every 6-8 months it would be dogging real badly, and the only true fix was to completely rebuild. I had been using command-line Linux for about 5 months but hadn't been comfortable enough to use it as a desktop yet. I had played in some older versions of Ubuntu, a Debian-based desktop OS, but always got discouraged and forgot about it. Since I was faced with a rebuild I decided to grow a pair and just take the plunge...