The BBC reviews the Raspberry Pi. "The device may inspire a new generation of computer programmers or it could leave children used to smartphones and tablet computers baffled and bewildered. A great experiment with the way we teach computing has begun and we can't be sure how it will end." Mine's coming the week of May 21.

"Sir Jonathan Ive has been crowned British Visionary Innovator in a competition, run by the Intellectual Property Office. Ive won by a large margin with almost fifty per cent of the vote (46.6%). In second place was Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) with 18.8 per cent of the vote. James Goodfellow OBE (the inventor of PIN technology and the cash machine) was in third place with 15.2 per cent of the vote." Alan Turing was also nominated. If you ever needed an illustration of everything that's wrong with the technology industry today, it's this. Guy who designs the exterior of mass-market gadgets wins over guys who actually really contributed to technology. Telling.

As I already said yesterday - a bit colourful to get me point across - this older article of mine has proven not to be as accurate as I thought it was, in light of a heap of new information. I want to offer some more background to all this.

The Canonical team has released Ubuntu 12.04 - a new long term support release. The biggest new feature is the HUD, an addition to the traditional application menu system, where you can search for the actions you want to perform instead of having to hunt for them in menus. Unity overall has been improved, and I must say that even though this new release is simply not at all ready for Asus ZenBooks, Unity runs perfectly well on it, and to my own shock and surprise, I'm slowly warming up to it. It's starting to make sense, it looks nice (especially after some custom tweaking), has become a lot more configurable, and it's really, really, really fast.

"I am still struck by just how interested Valve is in Linux as a platform; it is certainly beyond my original expectations. This Linux work just is not some half-assed attempt by them to make it look like they are a Linux-friendly organization. Gabe's vision to support, embrace, and promote Linux are amazing, assuming they execute, which looks to be very high probability at this point." Nice scoop from Phoronix. Seems to all tie in quite well with the prospect of a Steambox running Linux.

I wasn't just wrong, I was being an idiot. "When Google was in the thick of Android's development in 2006 and 2007 - long before the platform ever reached retail - it was a very different product, almost unrecognizable compared to the products we used today. Documents dated May of 2007 and made public during the course of Oracle's lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android show off a number of those preliminary user interface elements, prominently marked 'subject to change', and you can see how this used to be a product focused on portrait QWERTY devices." I'm hoping I can dive into this a little deeper tomorrow; since it's the busiest period of the year for my little company right now, I don't have the time to do it today. Just to make sure nobody thinks I'm just going to ignore this, I figured it'd be a good idea to post a quickie today. I'll get back to this tomorrow, or Friday at the latest.

Well, this has been a very, very long time in the making. Google has finally unveiled its big Dropbox competitor: Google Drive. You start with 5GB for free, and you can go all the way to 1TB for $50 per month. This is a big deal for many (if you were to use rumouring as a gauge), but all I can think of is this: why on earth would you entrust your files to a company - any company - whose sole interest is extracting money from you, and who, to boot, is subject to crazy American laws?

Google is taking a new stab at selling devices directly: the Galaxy Nexus is now available in the Google Play devices section. That is, if you happen to live in the appropriate country - I can't see the page (as usual), so for all I know, they're selling fake Rolex watches in there.

So, we'll be getting our hands on the Windows 8 Release Preview in the first week of June. I'm interested in what they've done to improve the Metro experience for boring old mouse and keyboard users, and if they've managed to include applications that work (as opposed to buggy preview applications).

The SOPA and PIPA laws were defeated in the U.S. just months ago, and already the forces for internet control are back. Up for vote this week, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would override all privacy laws so that private companies (like ISPs) can share all information with the U.S. government. No warrants or other authorization required. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) points out the problems with this law. Like SOPA and PIPA, the privacy issues and monitoring could reach far beyond U.S. borders.

"The increase is a sign that the search engine can no longer afford to operate in a Silicon Valley vacuum. For years, Google had a reputation for indifference inside the Beltway. It took Google until May 2005 to set up a presence in Washington and even then, its headquarters consisted of a one-man lobbying shop in suburban Maryland." Do the Americans among you just accept this? Is this normal? Why aren't you guys turning to the streets when your country is quite clearly being bought left and right? I mean, I'm sure this happens everywhere, but on this scale? Gives me the creeps.

AnandTech puts Intel's new Ivy Bridge through its paces. "While it's not enough to tempt existing Sandy Bridge owners, if you missed the upgrade last year then Ivy Bridge is solid ground to walk on. It's still the best performing client x86 architecture on the planet and a little to a lot better than its predecessor depending on how much you use the on-die GPU."

Adam Fields and Perry Metzger have been investigating the serious performance issues people are experiencing with Lion. "Frequent beachballs, general overall slowness and poor UI responsivness, specific and drastic slowdowns on every Time Machine run, high memory utilization in Safari Web Content, mds, and kernel_task processes, large numbers of page outs even with a good deal of available RAM, and high amounts of RAM marked as inactive which is not readily freed back to other applications, with page outs favored." Apparently the issue is that the "virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk". I won't make myself popular with a certain part of our readership, but really, is this considered a new problem? Mac OS X has always had terrible memory management, and where Windows has continuously become better at it, Mac OS X seems to have been stagnant and even getting worse. This is what happens when the company earns 2/3s of its revenue somewhere else.

This is kind of a big deal for me. No, this shouldn't be on OSNews, and no, at this particular moment, I really don't care that you're right about that. All our silly stupid pointless discussions about Windows iPhone Galaxies and patents and whatnot - no matter how angry it sometimes makes me, how much energy I spend on it - it all becomes so trivial and meaningless the moment I realise this beautiful world still produces things like this. I'm going to enjoy the sunshine for a moment. And I'm leaving my phone on vibrate in the kitchen.