"As the Raspberry Pi started to ship the Sinclair ZX Spectrum turned 30 years old, and comparisons were being made between the two and their role in providing access to affordable computer hardware. Given the phenomenal advances in computing since the birth of the ZX Spectrum, I thought it might be fun to compare the Raspberry Pi with a computer that was closer to the state of the art at around that time, and to see if the Raspberry Pi could fill its shoes..."

One million copies sold in 5 days, $20 million in sales. People have already sunk 5.2 million hours into the game, including 2.4 million hours in 4 million multiplayer games. Minecraft on the Xbox 360 is yet another massive success. Pretty amazing. Coincidentally, I'm kind of done with Minecraft single player (on the PC, that is). Anybody here running a decent survival multiplayer server with mods (levelling, economy, etc.)?

"I think that Apple could be just as strong and good and be open, but how can you challenge it when a company is making that much money?", Wozniak told a crowd in Sydney, according to ITNews. They'd score so many brownie points the internet would explode.

"This week yet another court order was handed down in Europe with the aim of censoring The Pirate Bay. The ruling forbids the Dutch Pirate Party from not only running a direct proxy, but also telling people how to circumvent an earlier court ordered blockade. However, according to Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge, the judge in the case has a history of corruption relating to another file-sharing case he presided over in the Netherlands." This news has knocked me off my chair in disbelief that something like this could happen in The Netherlands. Yes, that was quite obviously sarcasm.

"The intent is to switch on this option by default rather sooner than later, so we can start preparing for shipping 10.0-RELEASE with Clang as the default system compiler, and deprecating gcc." Good to see Clang/LLVM continue to gain as much steam as it does. This will only make GCC better.

Lennart Poettering, the author of systemd, has announced: "I just put a first version of a wiki document together that lists a couple of easy optimizations to get your boot times down to 2s. It also includes a list of suggested things to hack on to get even quicker boot-ups."

I may not be particularly enamoured with how badly Windows 8 handles mouse, keyboard, and window management right now, but as far as under-the-hood improvements go, Microsoft is packing. They're redone much of the chkdsk utility, but they forgot to fix one important thing: rename the darn thing to checkdisk already!

Baidu, the Chinese search engine, will launch its own smartphone operating system next week, according to Reuters. It's an Android fork, but with all the backend services handled by Baidu, obviously. The first leaked shots of a supposed device look remarkably like a Nokia Lumia - but not bad, really.

"The new changes include several new lock-screen images, the Windows Store tile is now green, and the small magnifying glass in the bottom right corner when you scroll has changed to a simple square. While nothing major, they are representative of the across-the-board tweaks we expect to see when the Release Preview hits the digital shelves in June." So, nothing to address the core issues with Windows 8's mouse/keyboard-hostile environment. Sad.

"Between 2009 and 2011, Apple acquired three mapping companies in quick succession: Placebase, in 2009; 3-D mapping outfit Poly9 in 2010; and in 2011, C3 Technologies, a second 3-D mapping company. Three mapping-company acquisitions in as many years. But for good reason: Apple has been hard at work developing its own in-house mapping solution for iOS, and now it's finally ready to debut it." I'm probably crazy, but I've never used the map applications on my mobile phones, so it's difficult for me to get excited about this.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini on Windows 8 x86 and Windows 8 ARM: "We have the advantage of the incumbency, advantage of the legacy support. Not just in terms of applications but devices." Yes, because the lack of their favourite Windows applications was really a massive hurdle for Apple and its ill-fated iPad effort from a few years ago. Anyone remember that thing?

The partnership between Nokia and Microsoft deepens. Updates to Nokia Lumia devices change the Marketplace tile to a specific Nokia tile - unheard of for Windows Phone, which is governed by strict rules. This is part of the Tango update. Is this an innocent change, or the prelude to fragmentation, or worse - a fork? While that's probably a little dramatic, this probably does worry the other Windows Phone OEMs.

Both Mozilla and Google have expressed concern over Windows 8. Microsoft's next big operating system release restricts access to certain APIs and technologies browsers need - only making them available to Internet Explorer. Looking at the facts, it would seem Mozilla and Google have a solid case - coincidentally, the responses on the web are proof of the slippery slope we're on regarding ownership over our own machines.

Since The Pirate Bay blockade (which is easily circumvented) has just been extended to all other ISPs in The Netherlands (logically, court orders fall outside net neutrality), here's a link to a landing page which automatically redirects Dutch visitors to a valid The Pirate Bay proxy, circumventing the blockade. The more resourceful among us can always alter their hosts file, add a redirect in their router software, change DNS servers (any pros and cons from people who actually do this?), and about a gazillion other things. The Dutch copyright lobby's next step? Blocking websites that detail how to circumvent the blockade. Hey Kuik, we're right here!