Google announced the participating Open Source Projects this Monday. Following that, students are encouraged to select projects they are interested in and submit their work proposals from March 24 to 31. Among the participating projects are: Debian, DragonFly BSD, ES operating system, FreeBSD, Gentoo, GNU Hurd, Haiku, Linux, NetBSD, and openSuse. Overall, projects range from kernel hacking to web applications. Last year, 900 students were accepted, with Google paying them and their mentoring projects up to USD 4.5 Million.

The sixth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release includes support for easy synchronization of Windows Mobile 5+, Blackberry and Nokia devices, the Codeina multimedia codec installation system, support for Radeon HD 3xxx series graphics cards, more improvements to the Mandriva software installation tools, the finalized 2008 Spring theme, a new metapackage for easily installing a complete LAMP setup, and available KDE 4.0.2. See here for download information.

The technologies we rely on, both new and old, are now very effective tools that both governments and private firms are using to gather, analyze, store, and sell information about our private lives, habits, purchases, whereabouts, and even thoughts and beliefs. But some of this invasion of privacy pays a welcome dividend in convenience and power in our own lives. Where do we draw the line, and how can we use this potentially-invasive technology for our benefit, without sacrificing our private lives to commerce?

"Perhaps it's a sign of how desperate some sites are to get linked by the big aggregators, or perhaps it's a sign of how disappointed people are with Windows Vista - or both - but the endless stories about Windows 7's 'official launch' are silly and (more importantly) quite misleading."

If you are sticking with XP - and plenty of us are - and you're planning to miss the upgrade to Vista read this article on the Australian PC World. It looks at big questions like: will Windows XP still be properly supported by Microsoft and, as a primary development target, by third parties? Is there something we've missed, some hidden gotcha that's going to trip us up?

"You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. This upcoming battle will be presided over by Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft veteran currently running the team that's going to bring you the next version of Internet Explorer, 8.0. The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decision that lies perfectly, exactly, precisely on the fault line smack in the middle of two different ways of looking at the world. It's the difference between conservatives and liberals, it's the difference between 'idealists' and 'realists', it's a huge global jihad dividing members of the same family, engineers against computer scientists, and Lexuses vs. olive trees. And there's no solution. But it will be really, really entertaining to watch, because 99% of the participants in the flame wars are not going to understand what they're talking about. It's not just entertainment: it's required reading for every developer who needs to design interoperable systems. The flame war will revolve around the issue of something called 'web standards'."