"There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners. But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company. "It's funny - even if I write a generally positive piece about Apple, I still get more complaints from Apple partisans" than from opponents, Mossberg says. He has even coined a term for the effect. "I call it the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation."

A few months ago Nokia released the third iteration of their Internet Tablet N-series, the N810. This model has some new hardware characteristics, and a brand new version of the Maemo interface. Update: I designed a clean background for you, to be used with the "Echo" theme. Download it here, check out how it looks like here.

"I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?"

Ivan Krstic, the director of security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child Project, has resigned in response to recent changes in management within the organization. His resignation comes at a difficult time for OLPC, which has suffered from numerous setbacks in recent months. The price has increased from USD 100 to USD 188 during development and demand for bulk sales has been slow. OLPC faces other problems as well, including numerous delays, a dubious USD 20 million patent infringement lawsuit from Nigerian keyboard maker LANCOR, and a rocky relationship with Intel."

"Newly available open source software could significantly increase Linux's utility in industrial computing applications. The Xenomai/SOLO project aims to provide VxWorks and other RTOS emulation in user-space on most any Linux kernel, and to deliver short, bounded application latency on kernels with built-in real-time capabilities."

Kelly Wilson has ported Squeak to Syllable. Squeak is a multimedia environment based on the Smalltalk programming language. There are no video and sound drivers yet that interface between Squeak and Syllable, so the Squeak graphical environment is not available yet. However, headless Squeak programs that don't need a graphical user interface run, and this screenshot shows a web site in the ABrowse WebKit-based browser, produced by the Seaside web application framework.

The next version of Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server will focus on migration technologies and virtualisation, in order to entice users from Unix and take market share from Red Hat, according to a roadmap announced at the company's BrainShare meeting in Salt Lake City. Version 11 of SLES is not due until the middle of 2009, but Novell has announced six main 'themes' for the release, including mission critical servers, virtualisation, interoperability, green IT, Unix migration and desktop Linux. Speaking of SUSE, openSUSE 11.0 alpha 3 has been released.

Apple has released the first version of its browser, Safari, for Windows. Safari 3.1, which was launched on Tuesday, will run on Windows XP or Vista and, of course, Mac OSX. Apple released a beta for the Windows-supporting version in June last year. Apple has claimed that the browser is the fastest available for Windows. In a Tuesday statement, Cupertino said it "loads web pages 1.9 times faster than 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2 runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers". Don't think you have Safari for Windows installed? You might want to check again.

NEC AND the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed the technology for a ten-Petaflop supercomputer. The foundation of this beast is a network of optical interconnections between nests of chips. The Japanese government says it could be ready by 2010.

Comic: "Heaven".

Free OS pioneer NetBSD marks its fifteenth birthday tomorrow. The first commits were made to the NetBSD source code repository on March 21, 1993. In addition to the robust OS it is, NetBSD code has contributed to countless other projects. Congratulations to NetBSD contributors past and present.

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.

Red Hat has open-sourced its identity-management and security system to promote its assertion that open-source software provides the most secure infrastructure. The Linux vendor said Wednesday it has released the entire source code for the Red Hat Certificate System, its security framework for managing user identities and transactions on a network. Red Hat acquired the system from AOL three years ago, but only parts of the system, which uses the Apache Web server and the Red Hat Directory Server, were open source.

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.