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.

We all have our most favored machines of yesteryear; in this I assume that most people are like me, anyway. Breaking away from the mundane every-day news of boring (I jest) new technologies such as touchscreens the size of a wall and upcoming operating systems that support graphics cards with 1.5 GB of vRAM, take a walk down memory lane-- or "Neurological Alley" as I like to call it-- and take a look inside, outside, and in all of the nooks and crannies in between the circuits of the Macintosh Plus and its accompanying System 6, fresh from the splendor of 1986.

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.

"BeRTOS is a real time operating system (RTOS) suitable for embedded platforms. It runs on many microprocessors and microcontrollers, ranging from 8-bit to 32-bit CPUs and even PCs." Version 2.2.0 has been released.

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."

Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, today laid out plans to enforce net neutrality upon the internet. While the FCC is a US-only entity, fact of the matter is that "control" over the internet lies within the US, so whatever the FCC decides, it will affect the rest of the world.

Ubuntu patron and founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has detailed plans for the distribution's April 2010 release, codenamed Lucid Lynx. Citing the Lynx deodorant namesake, Shuttleworth said: "This year's Ubuntu Developer Summit is going to be the sweetest smelling Ubuntu Developer Summit ever, despite the fact that it's happening in Dallas."

There are several options out there if you wan to run Mac OS X on your non-Apple labelled computer, but one of them appears to be in serious trouble. It has been uncovered that the EFI-X module is nothing more than a USB stick with a DRM chip, with code from the hackintosh community on it - without attribution. On top of that, its firmware update utility uses LGPL code - again, without attribution.

You all know that I don't particularly like Opera. I find the product to be lacking polish, over-complicated and without the marketing pizazz that has made Firefox a household name. That's just my personal opinion, and that opinion has garnered many complaints of unjustness. To that end, to present a fairer discussion I would like to put a simple question to the community: "What should Opera do?".

There are several things which take quite some getting used to when switching from any platform to the Mac. There are things like the universal menubar, the dock, Expose, and many more. One of the things that often leads to confusion for new users is the installation process for applications. Mozilla developer Alexander Limi talks about the problems Mozilla runs into when it comes to Firefox' installation process on the Mac, and a possible solution. Update: A possible solution?

"Apple's rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone went all the way to the top - the bad news was personally delivered to Google by none other than Apple's Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller. New details of the controversial decision came to light today when the FCC released an unredacted version of Google's own confidential letter to the agency. Google replied to a set of FCC questions about the Google Voice app rejection on August 21, but requested that the letter be kept private due to the 'sensitive nature of commercial discussion'. Interested parties immediately filed Freedom of Information Act requests to get at the juicy tidbits that might be found in such a letter; rather than fight the request, Google waived its confidentiality."

This week in Greece Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor shared the latest Eurobarometer (a series of surveys regularly performed on behalf of the European Commission) findings that show that 2/3 of European Union citizens are very concerned about the security and privacy of their information. The figures are even higher in Austria and Germany, with over 90% respondents sharing their concerns on these important topics. Countries like the United Kingdom do this kind of research on a yearly basis and the results show the same trend in awareness of data security and privacy issues.

This is an article which discusses the increase in storage capacity while performance and hard error rates have not improved significantly in years, and what this means for protecting data in large storage systems. "The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable."

Palm has announced the financial results of the first quarter of the 2010 fiscal year (ending August 31 2009), and the company has beaten estimates and has seen a strong increase in sales (but only quarter-over-quarter). However, Palm is still seeing losses, but these losses were less than expected. During the conference call following the presentation of the results, Palm CEO Rubinstein also announced that Palm will completely abandon Windows Mobile in favour of the webOS.