This just keeps getting worse. Please tell me how anyone could think this is a good idea: “Howdy. My husband is Chester Gnull and I’m Laverta Voyd, and I’m the lady to light a way for all you sweethearts out there who do fancy stuff with Linux. Me and my husband’s gonna be bringing you tech tips just about every month now….I don’t know nothing about Linux.

Sometimes events transpire in the software industry that, when tied with other events, take on a much bigger meaning. Such is the case with three different announcements in the last ten days. The first two got a good bit of press; the last didn't. Let's see how they connect.

Today's nascent robotics market has engendered about 10 general-purpose software development frameworks, including nine supporting Linux. This article surveys seven aimed at service robots, and three at industrial robots, concluding with an analysis of market trends likely to shape tomorrow's robotics software landscape.

Few events have created more fodder for the blogosphere, more fuel for Microsoft critics and more emotional responses than the Microsoft patent deals with Novell, Linspire and Xandros. While putting together a list of things people hate about these deals is easy, generating a list of positive aspects is much harder.

Very little, in my opinion. While Matt Asay sees the deal as "a big win for open source... mostly because it pegs the value of an open source company quite high" I'm not sure that's true in this case.

Remember the good old days when to change a screen resolution or driver, you had to edit xorg.conf or reconfigure X.org? Those fine times are now over, or they will be, with the release of Ubuntu 7.10.

Desktop operating systems numbers, even when gathered by top research companies, such as IDG and Gartner, are often a bit fuzzy. When it comes to uncommon desktop operating systems, like Linux, the numbers often amount to little more than an educated guess. Now, a new open-source program, statix, promises to give accurate data on how many Linux desktops are actually in use.