At the recent Linuxcon Conference in Portland, Oregon, there were hints of new Moblin-powered hardware being announced at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum. Normally, this would be moderately interesting news, but some of the ambitious comments made by Linux luminaries at Linuxcon merit further examination. People from the Linux Foundation, Intel, and IBM spoke at the conference, and it's evident that they see the netbook market as the epicenter of the movement to raise Linux's profile in the consumer space, and whittle away marketshare from Windows. Update: Intel has also announced Moblin 2.1 for phones.

Can computers win the Turing Test? Imagine a day when a machine will say, "Move over Turing! You can no longer consider machines to be less smart than humans! After all, we can think too. We do all the thinking and processing and you take all the credit, just because you are our creator! ". That would be an awkward and exciting situation. To be honest, there is a valid argument here in this imaginary conversation. As naive as it may sound for now, let me assure you that such a scenario is not far away. Applications are becoming more and more logic-oriented and increasingly intelligent.

When the news broke that Oracle wanted to buy Sun, a number of eyebrows were raised over what would happen to Sun's open source portfolio. While the US Department of Justice gave the green light for the deal to go through, the European Commission was among the eye brows raising crowd, and they were quite worried about the future of specifically MySQL.

For a couple of months, the french speaking NetBSD advocacy group, NetBSDfr has started a series of interviews called "Discussing with a NetBSD developer". The first developer that has been interviewed was Soren Jacobsen, NetBSD 5.0 release engineer, shortly after NetBSD 5.0 was released. In July, we had the opportunity to talk to Adam Hamsik, known for porting LVM and ZFS to the NetBSD OS. S.P. Zeidler was our third victim, one of the Project's admins and member of the pkgsrc-releng team. This month, we had the chance to interview Alistair G. Crooks, actual president of The NetBSD Foundation. Alistair gave us a unique historical point of view as one of NetBSD's early hackers. He also shared with us his thought about the future of NetBSD and explained what makes this operating system so special. The interviews can be read in english at blog.NetBSD.org by clicking on the links above, and in french at www.NetBSDfr.org.

In some sense, home security systems suffer the same fate as mobile phone handsets. Most people, if they have one, have the one that a security monitoring company installed, and their only interaction with it is to turn it on or off. But some people want more than just a security system. Some people want a security system that can be expanded to perform almost any kind of home monitoring and automation task. You know, lunatics. Lunatic geeks. Enter the Elk M1.

Drobe.co.uk, the premier RISC OS news website, today announced that it has entered archive mode and will no longer function as a news reporting source. The site was founded by Peter Price in 1999 and editorship was taken over by journalist Chris Williams in 2001.Chris first broke the sad news on Monday morning via usenet:"Drobe's RISC OS news service, which launched in October 1999, will sadly cease from Monday. Running the site has been so much fun over the years and the experience has been very rewarding - from the investigative pieces and tabloid tomfoolery to the libel writ threats and meeting up with users after shows. However, all good things must come to an end - if you'll forgive the cliche - and it's time to formally move on."