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Free software is famously close to its users, drawing on them for warnings about bugs (and sometimes fixes), as well as ideas and sugges...

Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for LXer called " A Brief History of Microsoft FUD ". This ran through successive attempts by Micr...

"Think of the children" has become the rallying cry of politicians around the world trying to push for ever-increasing Internet ...

One of the first PCs that I bought was a Dell. It came with 8 Mbyte of memory, 230 Mbyte hard disc, and cost a mere £1479 (the HP Laserjet I...

One of the most embarrassing features of the dotcom era was a habit of putting “cyber” in front of everything to make it look hot and trendy...

This looks huge: Глава правительства Владимир Путин подписал план перехода властных структур и федеральных бюджетников на свободное ПО. Сог...

A Microsoft researcher offers an interesting medical metaphor : Just as when an individual who is not vaccinated puts others’ health at risk...

Remember IdeaStorm – “Where Your Ideas Reign” – Dell's brave venture into the scary world of crowdsourcing? Amazingly, it's still go...

I've been writing for a while about Russia's on-off idea of creating its own GNU/Linux distro. It looks like Ukraine is following...

There's a nice piece of work by Charles Arthur in The Guardian today that puts a fascinating post from one of Microsoft's top PR peo...

One of the pardoxes at the heart of computing is that for all its power to improve the world, in one respect it is doing the opposite, thank...

If the first era of free software was about the creation of the fully-rounded GNU/Linux operating system, the second saw a generation of key...

It is well known that an old PC, underpowered for ever-more greedy Windows versions, will generally run GNU/Linux without a problem. This m...

Look, those nice people at Microsoft Research are saving science from its data deluge: Addressing an audience of prominent academic researc...

The fact that GNU/Linux totally dominates the top 500 supercomputing list is hardly news, but the fact that it has managed to *increase* its...

News is breaking that the Chinese government will insist on censorware being shipped with all PCs: China plans to require that all personal...

...because it hasn't got that horrible unfamiliar environment , which has all those bizarre features like: * freedom * zero cost * stabi...

Remember OQO ? It was a really innovative machine, well ahead of its time. Essentially it was a netbook before they existed, but it made ...

I've always been a huge fan of live CDs/DVDs: effectively, they let you try out distros before you install them - and try out multiple o...

There's been a lot of sound and fury flying around about the split between GNU/Linux and Windows XP sales on netbooks, and what that mea...