A recently-filed patent from Microsoft gives us a glimpse into a possible future strategy from the software giant, wherein people buy a computer, but only pay for that portion of the computer's performance and capabilities they actually use. There's a pretty detailed summary of the plan in a Cnet article that's worth a read. It actually sounds a lot like a "cloud computing" strategy for the consumer, and it all seems to make sense, until you start to really think about it.

A long time ago, when Windows was busy crashing into walls, when the Mac OS was running around naked in the woods looking for someone to protect its memory, and when Linux was frantically jumping up and down with a lollipop in its mouth, we were blessed with the BeOS. It was new, free of legacy nonsense, fast, and designed from the ground-up to make sense (which it didn't, but at least they tried). It could do all sorts of fancy stuff that the other operating systems could only dream of, but at the same time, trivial things like actually getting networking and the internet to work brought it to its knees. Sadly, it didn't make it because Windows and the Mac OS were bullying BeOS, and of course it didn't help that BeOS' parents didn't really know anything about the real world either. The community around BeOS, however, never really died out, and the central hub, BeBits, weathered all storms. It found a new owner today.

The folks over at Engadget found some edible nerdiness. You've seen gingerbread men, gingerbread houses, but why not a classic gingerbread Mac?. While you're there, check out the edible laptop, Wii, and Kindle.

Large multinational software companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, rarely - if ever - initiate patent infringement lawsuits against other software companies, probably because they themselves infringe on lots of patents too. However, they do get sued themselves by smaller companies. Even though the Christian part of the world is all about forgiveness and love and pink ponies during the holidays (or, at least, they ought to be), Apple, Google, and Microsoft have been struck by a patent infringement lawsuit started by Cygnus Systems.

Last week, Phoronix' annual Linux Graphics Survey ended. There were over 14000 submissions this year to the eleven questions they asked pertaining to X.Org, Linux desktop usage, and graphics hardware. In this article are all of the results from this year's survey.

The creation and management of user-space processes in Linux have many principles in common with UNIX but also include several unique optimizations specific to Linux. Here, review the life cycle of Linux processes and explore the kernel internals for user process creation, memory management, scheduling, and death.