THURSDAY was a very important day. Glyn Moody called it "A Day to Remember" and not just because of the release of Ubuntu 9.04. As we explained before [1, 2, 3], Microsoft reported a huge drop in earnings which shows, as Moody puts it, that "the Microsoft money machine is faltering." This is not particularly shocking.

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope doesn't show the update icon in the system tray when there are updates available. This is because the update system was changed in Ubuntu Jaunty:

Tomboy does not fancy Gnote; Jo Shields keeps promoting Mono in Debian and Ubuntu

When Microsoft employee, Brandon LeBlanc announced that Microsoft ruled the netbook world, he was exaggerating, shall we say, just a wee bit. I was going to stomp on him but Chris Kenyon of Canonical, the business that stands behind Ubuntu, beat me to it.

Brandon Le Blanc from Microsoft posted an interesting post about Netbooks and Linux last week. While we agreed with his comments about customers wanting choice and looking for outstanding hardware options, we disagree with much of his analysis and unsurprisingly the overall ’spin’ of the post.

Last summer, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu distribution and of Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, challenged the free and open source software (FOSS) to deliver a desktop experience superior to Apple's.

Ubuntu Server has one of the cleanest and easiest Linux distribution installers. However, in many cases, its designers choose to ignore security in favor of ease-of-use. The result? An install that is not secure by default.

Barton George caught up with Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth in this podcast to discuss Ubuntu and cloud computing. George is a Sun Microsystems veteran who now works at Lombardi Software and also maintains his own blog, BartonGeorge.net.