The Emotional Lamp is a WiFi-connected device that can be programmed to respond to real-world events by emanating sequences of gentle color. It can be programmed to respond to various data, such as the health of your stock portfolio or the business of the morning commute. Cost: 790 Euro (about $937). "It's very cool to do a telnet to a lamp!" according to the article.

Open source licensing has been known to be controversial here at OSNews. Simplistic characterizations (Communism, Virus, Utopia) abound which do nothing to argue the philosophy on its merits. A medical researcher notes that there is a parallel with open source development in one of our most important (and most capitalistic) industries: pharmaceutical research.

A new survey of server unit growth and revenue shows that last quarter 1.6 million new servers were put into action, demonstrating that the server sector of the IT economy is growing strong. Linux servers showed the most growth, while Windows servers generated the most revenue. Unix servers showed a decline. Mainframe installations also grew. Our Take: As always these numbers are based on documented sales sales of commercial products, so they should be taken with a grain of salt, as they exclude FreeBSD and Linux servers based on freely-distributed software. Nevertheless, it looks like commercial Unix is in decline, while Linux and Windows move up.

Already available for the Windows and Macintosh platforms, the new Macromedia Flash Player 7 for Linux is available for download and will be automatically bundled with the next batch of Linux systems distributed by Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and Turbolinux.

"In a case that could have forced Linux vendor Lindows to change its business name worldwide, a Netherlands court ruled this week that Lindows' current limited use of the Lindows name does not violate Microsoft's Windows trademark." PC World has the story.

So, there it is, the highly anticipated second release of Fedora Core. Again, I wanted to wait for a few days for things to calm down,and again, I couldn't resist updating my production system within two days after the release. Well, I'm just a Linux junkie, i guess...