It's this simple: All the current instant-on solutions involve packing the computer with a flash memory chip, one that contains a downsized operating system. Guess what operating system? Dell and SplashTop both use Linux. For Microsoft, bundling Linux into a Windows computer is still unthinkable. Okay, they can think about it, but the survey makes sense. Microsoft will either need to accept Linux as part of the product, or much more likely spin off yet another mini-Windows, as the company did for PC games and cell phones. Can you see Steve Ballmer's face? I'd rather be the senior vice president who tells him we can all relax about Instant On — nobody wants it.

That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour.

Of course, in the US there are also much wider social, educational, religious and economic differences between people, and issues range all over the map. Which then means that it's hard to bring up any nuances in politics, since either people won't care about them (not relevant for that group), or they simply won't understand them (what does "foreign policy" matter to somebody who has likely never been outside the US unless you count things like day-trips to Tijuana?).

So you couple a polarizing voting system with a campaign that has to make simplified black-and-white statements, and what do you get?

Ugly, is what you get.

(Photo by tobo)

Most security scare stories are about potential problems. This was a real, successful break-in at the open source movement's most high-profile brand. So here's the big question: Why did it take Red Hat a week to acknowledge the problem? Because I can imagine the reaction if Microsoft did that.

(Photo by Eric Skiff)

Eygptian civil engineer Mamdouh Hamza offered to pay a hired killer $100,000 to assassinate an Egyptian government minister and three other government officials. Hamza called his plan "the final solution." The hired killer — actually an undercover British police officer — arrested Hamza, who went to trial in 2005.

In 2006, prosecutors charged Chinese national and Canadian citizen Xiaodong Sheldon Meng with 36 felonies, including economic espionage to benefit a foreign government. Meng's crime? Stealing code his former employer, Silicon Valley-based Quantum3D uses in fighter-pilot training software. A judge sentenced Meng to 24 months earlier this summer.

In 2007, Lan Lee, 42, of Palo Alto, and Yuefei Ge, 34, a Chinese national living in San Jose also faced charges of economic espionage after prosecutors accused the pair of stealing computer chips from Mountain View-based NetLogic Microsystems with plans on selling them to the Chinese government. Their indictment alleges the pair formed a company, Sico Microsystems, in order to create new chips based on stolen designs.

In May 1995, Silicon Valley engineer Bill Gaede rushed into a New York Times office and told a reporter: "I'm a spy, and I think they're going to kill me, so I want you to know what has happened." Gaede claimed he'd stolen computer chip designs from Intel and tried to sell them to Cuba, China and Iran before the CIA got onto his case and began hunting him down. The Times reporter didn't believe it at first, but it all turned out to be true. Gaede began serving a 33-month sentence in July 1996.

Richard Wade Farley goes by three names in the newspapers — never a good sign. In 1988, Farley was fired from Sunnyvale-based ESL, accused of sexual harrassment. Not long after, he returned with a shotgun. Seven of his former coworkers died. He barricaded himself in the office for six hours before police dragged him out.

In a way that reminded some of Farley's rampage, recently fired NEC Electronics employee Kenneth M. McMurray came back to his old office and forced Maria Elizabeth Lualhati, his ex-girlfriend and an associate systems programmer, into a lab where he shot her and then himself.

Aptix founder and ex-CEO Amr Mohsen faced charges of perjury, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice after prosecutors said he forged engineering notebooks in a failed attempt to sue a rival for patent infringement. When that case started to go against Mohsen, he allegedly told another inmate he wanted the judge to "disappear." The plan failed. Mohsen was sentenced to 17 years on January 5, 2007. According to AmrMohsen.com, "Amr and the family believe the 17-year punishment to be excessive."

Legendary Linux developer Hans Reiser, a hero to the open-source community, murdered his wife, Nina. He swore to his innocence almost up to the very end — until a judge agreed to reduce his sentence if he led police to her body. He eventually did. The reaction from Reiser's most ardent defenders: "Whoops."

(Photo by AP)

Scott, Scott, Scott: Negroponte has never been in the business of doing anything. His core competency is talking. The sooner you learn this, the happier you'll be at One Laptop Per Child. Negroponte's goals with One Laptop Per Child are admirable and visionary. As with many visionaries, his contact with reality is infrequent and tenuous. The best way to get OLPC's hardware and software built: Send Negroponte on another worldwide goodwill tour, keeping him as far from the labs as possible.

Smartphones running Symbian, Linux and Palm OS all fall behind Apple's iPhone. This is ever more stunning because the iPhone is only available via one carrier, in contrast, the other platforms can be procured from various cellular networks. This dramatically increases their market penetration. From the perspective of a business model, these figures are simply astronomical. Who's running scared? Apparently, Symbian is:

Every year, Symbian publishes detailed figures demonstrating how they are the biggest, baddest platform in the world. Guess what? This year, they didn't release the detailed figures on their Symbian Fast Facts webpage. Why not? Take a look at the image—the numbers are no longer working in their favor.

All in all, things aren't looking too perky for Apple's competitors. Sure, RIM may be flying high at the moment, but if this growth continues even at a fraction of the rate it is currently, RIM won't be high and dry for long. Android, in you we trust. For a fantastic run through the figures, and a more detailed look at the likely ramifications of Apple's impending dominance, checkout the full report by hitting the link. [Roughly Drafted Magazine]

If you're truly looking to save your cash, Dell's entry-level Windows model is a third cheaper than the Penguinmobile — $499 versus $774. Its Windows Vista Basic is hardly the "stripped-down" operating system Times writer Larry Magid claims — see this checklist. It'll run iTunes. It'll play DVDs without choking, unlike Magid's Ubuntu test unit. Spring for the cheaper laptop and your savings will more than cover an upgrade to Vista Home Premium ($30), a gigabyte of RAM ($50), a legal copy of Office 2007 ($149), and a double cappuccino for me as a reward for saving you from this sort of alterna-chic foolishness.

While Microsoft has been known to try just about every tactic in the book to undermine the competition, this paranoid theory mischaracterizes the open source community's beloved Mono. True, Mono, in theory, weakens Windows. But only in theory. In practice, Mono is not a threat to Microsoft — rather, it's spread the popularity of .Net far beyond Microsoft's Windows-developer base, and thereby tied the open-source developers who use it to Microsoft's software-development roadmap.

No, rather than a devious and elaborate ploy concocted in Microsoft's legal department, the right way to see Microsoft's Shared Source program is as a feeble attempt to mask its inability to move its business to the open-source model, as rivals IBM, Sun, Novell, Adobe, and Apple have done to varying extents. Sure, Microsoft could start suing developers — with the result, of course, that they'd simply drop .Net and move to other development tools untouched by Microsoft's hands. (Photo by BotheredByBees)

This ad is completely unoriginal. Linux Journal ran an almost identical ad seven years ago, in its November 2000 issue. And the 1.0 version stirred up just as much controversy — so much that the magazine apologized for and promised to pull from any future editions of the magazine. Promises, promises.

Obviously QSol ran the ad to titillate and shock, and get talked about — and from that perspective, the company has succeeded. But then there's the quality of the ad itself. Leave aside the broken promises, and the ad's tiresome execution. Why would you want to buy servers from a company that clearly hasn't had a new idea in seven years?

–Video by Sarah Meyers