The Mono discussion may be tiring, but the fact of the matter is that thanks to this discussion, various major Linux distributions are now making official statements detailing their position in the Mono/C# debate. The latest to do this is Ubuntu, which reiterated their position yesterday.

"Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even though on a slightly smaller scale. In July 1974, exactly 35 years ago, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson published the first version of their seminal paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System in the Communications of the ACM."

"Snow days are great, but generally you still have to wake up to find out if it is a snow day. decided to make a system to solve this problem. He made an alarm clock that would automatically de activate if school is cancelled. What a pleasant surprise it would be to just wake up and find that you had been allowed to sleep in. It is using an Arduino and a python script to control the state of the alarm based off of an online school closing announcement. You can download the software from the instructable." Via Hack-a-Day

"The Pirate Bay has been urging users not to abandon ship following yesterday's announcement that a Swedish internet cafe software firm planned to buy the BitTorrent site for $7.8m. The site has been flooded with account deletion requests from angry users griping that TPB had sold out to Global Gaming Factory X."

The stream of news around the Palm Pre and its webOS just keeps on flowing. Since Palm's survival more or less depends on the success of the Pre and any possible future webOS phones, it's very interesting to know just how well the Pre is selling. According to an analyst, Palm has already sold 370000 Pre phones in May and June; he also stated that the company will ship 1 million phones to Sprint in the first quarter of production. Not bad. We've also got news on the GSM version of the Pre.

We've had a lot of debates recently on the merits - or dangers - of Mono. We've had troubles with how Microsoft views Mono and whether or not everyone is safe using it, but we also had a public back-and-forth among Debian maintainers. During all this, Richard Stallman remained pretty mum on the issue, today he broke the silence on the FSF website.

As was anticipated, the boys and girls at Mozilla have released the final build of Firefox 3.5 today. Firefox 3.5 - originally supposed to be 3.1 - comes with many welcome improvements, chief among which is support for HTML5 audio and video tags.

A couple of days ago kvm-87 was released featuring bug fixes, performance improvements, a preview of irqfd, new support for http protocol using curl version 6., and additional support for port redirection. The most notable of these from the end user perspective is the new http support. A good use case for this new feature is booting a livecd over http with a command like "qemu-kvm -cdrom http://www.sample.com/linux.iso". Awesome!

A known and usual problem with alternative operating systems is getting them on normal users' desktops. OEMs won't take you seriously until you gain massive traction, and even then your chances are still pretty low. So, iXsystems, PC-BSD's parent company, decided to take matters into its own hands, and has unveiled a PC-BSD workstation, with a PC-BSD laptop under way.

Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments have agreed to standardise their smartphone chargers in Europe using micro-USB. "The European Commission announced today that 10 mobile phone producers, which represent some 90 percent of the mobile phone market in the European Union, have signed a voluntary agreement to use standardized chargers for mobile phones using a micro-USB connector. The agreement addresses the EC's concern that mobile phone chargers create needless electronic waste." A single charger for everything! It almost brings tears to my eyes. Honestly. Even Apple. There it is. The tear.

The video proceedings of the 2009 FastOS workshop are being made available as a video podcast rss feed (also available for subscription directly from the iTunes store). The first three talks are now available with new talks being posted every week. The complete schedule of talks along with the slides which were presented are available here. FastOS is a Department of Energy/Office of Science funded program focused on exploratory work in operating systems and runtimes for petascale and beyond supercomputers.

With all the talk about Moore's Law, and doomsday predictions of the industry hitting the ceiling of what's possible with regular transistors, you'd almost forget that a lot of people are already thinking about the next revolution in computing: quantum computers. Researchers at Yale have succeeded in producing the first working solid-state quantum processor. Highly intriguing, but way over my head.

"Intel has created a new network management and configuration system for Linux called ConnMan - but not everyone is pleased to see it challenge NetworkManager. Ars looks at the pros and "conns" of the decision to create the new software."

"The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS."