Over the past few years, any Linux developer you ask would quickly recommend buying computer hardware with an Intel chipset. When it comes to Linux support, especially in the mobile realm, Intel had the best support hands down. In fact, even my first generation Asus EeePC with the tiny 7” screen supported Compiz acceleration out of the box!

UC Berkeley Extension will start offering a course (1 credit) titled "Open Source Fundamentals and Strategies". LJ contributing editor Ibrahim Haddad developed the course for UCB and will be teaching it.

Course Description:

Last year at LinuxWorld Expo, I had the opportunity to speak with Cliff Schmidt, the Executive Director at Literacy Bridge. At that point, Cliff was showing off an audio recording device with the eventual plan of being able to distribute sub-$10 gadgets that would allow for education and collaboration in struggling third-world countries.

I was pricing a low-end desktop computer the other day. When configuring it, I noticed that if I added a four-year warranty, it would cost more than the entire system! We've really come to the point where computer hardware is like a plastic fork. If a tine breaks off, it gets thrown away. Sadly, although throwing away plastic forks is rough on the environment, used computers are so much more so.

I was pointed recently to Zappos as a near-perfect example of a company that brings the principles of open source to business. Its site is inventive and fancy (as you'd expect a clothing retailer to be), but not a triumph of design over utility. What's more, it's fast.

From the Linux (and Linux Journal) perspective, there's an issue with clouds—those back-end Web services that compose Utility Computing. They're proprietary. Amazon owns AWS (Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2 and a growing number of others). Google, Microsoft and other companies own theirs as well.

The Readers' Choice Awards take the current pulse of the Linux Community year. Vote for the tools you use every day in your work and play.

It's time for New Year resolutions and what better than to resolve to not purchase media 'protected' by DRM? Many of us already follow this rule but by pledging this publicly we can educate the masses.

Usually, when I write articles for Linux Journal, they are of a patently technical nature. This article is going to be quite a bit different. As we head into the Holiday Season and the start of a new year, I've begun to think about what I want to do in the next year, and what I wish I had done with this year.

I was celebrating Leap Day (February 29) at a London pub with Mark Antony Kent, Head of Technology Strategy at British Telecom, hoping also to pump his brain for insights to follow up on a contentious FCC hearing at Harvard earlier that week—one convened to visit issues around Comcast's valving of BitTorrent traffic.

Creative Commons is surveying people on what they believe constitutes "non-commercial use".

More from the SuperComputing '08 floor. Editor Shawn Powers talks about RAID, ethernet, power conservation, InfiniBand, global super computing networks, programming tools, storage and more.

More from the SuperComputing '08 floor. Editor Shawn Powers talks about Mathematica, CUDA, quiet, efficient servers and more.

Continuing at the SuperComputing '08 floor, Editor Shawn Powers talks with exhibitors about everything from spaceships to clusters to virtualization.

We're here at SuperComputing '08 in Austin, Texas catching up with a few exhibitors. If you can't be here with us, we'll bring a little of the show to you. We're searching the show floor for the coolest Linux stuff (besides Linux Journal of course) and bringing it to you.

The Dell IdeaStorm site was an inspired move by the company, providing a way for the market to tell a major supplier what to do, rather than the reverse, which has been the default for the whole Industrial Age.

Linux Journal's Flickr pool regularly brings in fun photos from readers around the world.

Google phrase searches can produce results that seem like random answers to a Rorschach test—only more amusing. Here are the top results (on a day in July 2008) for “The Internet is like...”:

• “a vast uncataloged library”

• “a vagina”

• “Joey Bishop”

• “a series of tubes”

Operating systems drive devices. Linux is driven by open-source imperatives. So, naturally, Linux's kernel developers have a problem with closed-source kernel modules. And, just as naturally, they've hacked up a statement they hope will discourage the closed and encourage the open.

Michael Anti is an engineer and journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Huaxia Times, 21st Century World Herald, Washington Post, Southern Metropolis Daily and Far and Wide Journal. He has been a researcher, a columnist, a reporter, a war correspondent in Baghdad (in 2003) and more—and achieved notoriety in 2005 when Microsoft deleted his blog.