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Sick of Apple and Microsoft flaunting themselves about constantly with their "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" advertisements? Had a vision for the first Linux commercial you've been wanting to put into place? The Linux Foundation is calling you. Not literally, of course. Beginning January 26th, 2009, the Foundation will be accepting 60-second video offerings from budding directors worldwide to begin their own "I'm Linux" advertising campaign. The winner takes all with "a flight to Narita in Japan from the airport closest to your home plus three nights at a hotel in order for the winner to attend the Linux Foundation Japan's symposium in October next year." Start those rusty creative gears turning-- it's certain that plenty will enter, and only one will win.

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.

Right after the recent news that Red Hat is offering a new subscription for mission critical deployment that extends the life-cycle for up to 10 years, Red Hat has announced another, that allows the customers to stay in a single point release for up to eighteen months and continue to get updates and support that point release. Matt Asay writes: "Red Hat has set the standard for world class software support, consistently earning top marks with CIOs for its efforts. On Thursday, however, Red Hat outdid itself, introducing a new product support plan called Extended Update Support. In a nutshell, Extended Update Support enables customers to run their mission-critical systems for longer stretches of time without having to take production systems offline to update them."

Microsoft and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge demoed their nifty NanoTouch, a small device fitting in the palm of one's hand, boasting a 2.4 inch screen and a touch pad on the back so as to utilize the small screen without having to block it with one's fingers. The developers say this technology could develop into electronic jewelry and high-tech clothing, though that NanoTouch looks an awful lot like one of those iPods or Zunes we keep hearing about. Anyone up for a touch-t-shirt with customizable images on front and back? You'd never have to buy another shirt again.

Palm recently announced over $500 million in losses, but then we all knew Palm wasn't too hot on the market these days despite their efforts to sell Windows Mobile devices. Palm is hoping to make a comeback, however, with new smartphones sporting Nova in 2009.

It was recently announced at the Android project website that the said mobile system would be receiving an update bringing to light many new features and various bug fixes. The Android team has already begun putting the new code on the public repositories under the "cupcake" branch. Some of the more notable new features and fixes include plentiful email and browser fixes, new video support, and even "basic x86 support," though we're not quite sure just where they're headed with that one.

Though this technology isn't incredibly new (the video is dated June of 2006, and OSNews has covered it before), it's still not publicly available; however, it'll supposedly have a beta out for subscribers to test someday. Branded "BumpTop," this new interface builds off of the idea of organization done on traditional desktops-- I mean the wooden, metal, or glass ones. People naturally organize papers and other items into piles that make sense to their own ways of thinking. This kind of organization is limited on operating systems today, but BumpTop makes an old idea new by turning your virtual desktop a little more real.

In Japan at ATR Computational Science Laboratories, the first thoughts in history were successfully read via a computer -- and not just by guessing or even educationally guessing. Scientists began by showing test subjects the six letters that spell "neuron." Afterwards, by measuring the subjects' brain activity, they were able to reconstruct the six images and display them on a monitor. The images were fuzzy, of course, but obviously spelled neuron. ATR said that it's very possible that one day this technology will be able to read our dreams.

Smolt is a hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project to enable users to submit their hardware profiles during installation. Smolt, like PackageKit from Fedora is also a distribution neutral tool and collects stats anonymously and sends it to a central database . The tool is also completely opt-in and guarantees your privacy. While openSUSE has been including Smolt in their repositories for sometime, they have now taken next step and added installer integration to it. There is also a call for other distributions to participate in this effort instead of reinventing the wheel. "Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that - if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promises the most."

Anand Lal Shimpi, founder of Anandtech.com, had the opportunity to sit down with Carrell Killebrew, Eric Demers, Mike Schmit and Mark Leather, collectivley known as the designers behind the current crop of AMD graphics chips, and quiz them about how the RV770 graphics chip came about. In the article, Anand recounts the history that influenced the chip's design and the obstacles that were overcome from his two hours meeting with the design team.

Arjan van de Ven from Intel Open source centre has posted the news that http://kerneloops.org has recorded its 100,000 oops. An oops in the Linux kernel is a deviation from correct behavior of the Linux kernel which produces a certain error log. kerneloops is a client side software that helps record oops more automatically on the website with the same name and is available as part of many distribution repositories and even included by default in Fedora. This is part of the QA efforts in the Linux kernel and when posting the news, Arjan has noted that Linux kernel developers have been fixes most of the top oopses quickly

Royal Pingdom blog has posted with a comparison of home page load times and uptimes and concludes that various Linux distributions and Apple, both beat Microsoft's record.

• 13/16 Linux distributions (and Apple) had less downtime than Microsoft's homepage.
• 5/16 Linux distributions had less downtime than Apple's homepage.
• Four homepages had NO downtime: Red Hat, Mepis, Knoppix and Fedora.
• Five homepages had more than an hour of downtime: Gentoo, Mandriva, Mint, Arch and Microsoft.

Red Hat has announced a new program where customers would get higher service level guarantees and updates for up to 10 years for a new release instead of the usual 7 years for every release. "The targets for this are the most conservative companies currently on Unix-based systems and with a need for unusual levels of support," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's Platforms business unit.

Linux Devices writes about Intel's Moblin effort. Moblin is a environment for netbooks. Originally based on Ubuntu, Moblin recently switched to Fedora citing RPM and a completely Free and open source base as among the benefits. As Linux based netbooks continue to grow rapidly, efforts like Moblin are interesting to watch.