Since the drought broke last year, it’s mostly been too rainy and cloudy for the modest solar installation to keep my laptop charged, so, more of my evenings have been spent drinking plonk with a neighbour, from further down the track, than mastering the command line and working towards my LPI certification as I’d planned to do. The results of all this are that the neighbour is now developing a belated interest in computers and we are now looking for a cheap computer to get him set up with Kubuntu.

Caroline is a 2006 Volkswagen Passat, converted by a team from the Braunschweig University of Technology to be an autonomous vehicle.

IDC is reporting that Windows server growth hit 6.9 percent in Q4 2007, bringing it to 36.6 percent market share. Linux trounced Windows' growth at 11.6 percent to hit 12.7 percent market share. Microsoft owns the market, but Linux owns the future.

Latest on the RIAA front: Using a French SPPF lawsuit to take the domain name, an industry authorized and 'liaised' iMesh subsidiary has rebranded their 'legal' paid P2P/spyware under false pretenses with Shareaza's copyrighted material, wrongly registered for Shareaza's trademark, and threatened it's volunteers for opposing.

You may recall that a team from Sun devoted a great deal of time to the process of drafting the GPLv3. Our engagement was not just the monitoring exercise that I suspect it was for many of the corporate participants.

A California startup is working with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot project to create an open-source robot. The demo version can do some neat stuff, but the real payoff will come once the AI is perfected and it leaves the labs.

Mike Masnick writes an article about the issues of the term "Intellectual Property". This article is part of his series on Intellectual Property http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080228/003450379.shtml .

I'm totally tortured with agonizing over Microsoft's Singularity. See, I have a standing moral obligation with myself as follows: If Microsoft ever released a purely Open-Source or Free Software system - as defined by the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, or common conventional wisdom - I have said (and will repeat here) that I would download it, try it out, review it, and possibly adopt it, to be treated no different from software from, for example, Red Hat Inc. or BSD.