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'."

Since there is absolutely nothing going on in the tech world today (really, we checked the internet), we figured some off-topic lightness might be a good idea for this Saturday night (it's night already in The Netherlands). The question we pose to you today has absolutely nothing to do with operating systems, computers, or technology: what albums are you most looking forward to in the coming one, two years? I blogged about my five most-awaited albums for 2008/2009, and this is my list (all albums are yet to be named): Fiona Apple's 4th album (I kind of really like Fiona Apple), the 7th studio album by The Cardigans, Garbage's successor to "Bleed Like Me", A Camp's coming second album, and Garbage front-woman Shirley Manson's first solo album. Post your favourites in the comments!

"When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu. You can imagine how slowly it boots, even with Linux installed, and GNOME runs so slowly that it's quite irritating. I didn't want to reformat and install a lightweight Linux distribution like Fluxbuntu because the mini PC doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, and I already had 10GB of data that would have taken a long time to back up. Instead, I found and installed some lightweight software to improve her computing experience."