A former assistant professor from Harvard, now at UofW, Dr. William Stein, and several students, have created a new open-source complex math solving tool called Sage. It is an Internet-based graphical tool which allows the user to do basically anything mathematically, from "mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming."

This Christmas I decided to give a few gifts to people in the open source community. I'm making donations to the maintainers of some of my favorite and most widely used software projects. They've earned some payback!

Weeks after Google revealed aspirations of creating a defacto standard operating system for mobile phones, via Android and the Open Handset Alliance, a lesser known, broad-based consortium has published what it hopes can serve as an actual standard for Linux-based phones...
The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS)

"Names convey meanings; our choice of names determines the meaning of what we say. An inappropriate name gives people the wrong idea. A rose by any name would smell as sweet—but if you call it a pen, people will be rather disappointed when they try to write with it. And if you call pens “roses”, people may not realize what they are good for. If you call our operating system “Linux”, that conveys a mistaken idea of the system's origin, history, and purpose. If you call it GNU/Linux, that conveys (though not in detail) an accurate idea..."

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more attention in the press today on the comments made by Martin Bryan, outgoing convenor of the ISO JTC1/SC34 WG1 (the working group overseeing the progress of ECMA 376 - Microsoft Office Open XML - through the ISO standardization process).

International Business Machines Corp is asking the U.S. government to ban imports of some notebook computers made by Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc, alleging that the products infringe three IBM patents.

Opinion -- Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

The first change was the continued maturation of desktop Linux. Today, no one can argue...

"...Firefox and Opera will support a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in Web pages. [...] If video encoded in Ogg Theora plays directly in the browser..."