Sometimes, you have to respect someone for sticking to an opinion and a vision. Other times, you have to wonder if a consistent vision becomes a fatal flaw. A case in point: In a New York Times article, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst (pictured, right) once again dismisses speculation that Red Hat will pursue the consumer Linux desktop and smart phone markets. Here's why.

Apple believes it has a patent that could potentially throw a wrench into an effort to develop a Web standard for updating widgets.

FINANCIAL OUTFIT Morgan Stanley has confirmed that it is a big user of Linux.

"Emacs and Vim both provide facility for extension. But as they represent divergent philosophies — Vim following the “small is beautiful” and “do one thing well” precepts of Unix, Emacs coming from a belief that the editor is an operational hub — they have different objectives here..."

Parted Magic, one of the best stand alone partition editors, is back once again with a new and updated version. But what's so special about this version, considering the narrow scope of things that Parted Magic is designed to do?

I promised I’ll answer shawn42’s challenge in the first mailbag edition that I will explain and outline a business model for the future, usually involving free software or copyfree software. As it turned out, I acutally did this already for Space Fighter Ace, an upcoming online shoot-em up game. Unfortunately the business plan for the Space Fighter Ace project is lost in the shuffle.

Reader Chris writes in with an excellent tip that changes the prompt to red when using the root account from the terminal—as a reminder to be more careful.

The announce came on April 1st, but was NOT an April fool. Ubuntu PPA available !