If you have been following my live tweets today you will know that day 1 of the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" taking place here in Vienna at the moment was really interesting. The opening session led by people from the Austrian Ministry of Education introduced some of the projects that the Ministry has been working on in Austria.

Does GNU/Linux need a cult figure like Steve Jobs to spread the word and convert the doubters? And does FOSS lend itself to the development of such egos, where technical merit alone does not count?

Being 39 years of age, Linus Torvalds was born on the 28th of December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. Though the fact that he graduated the Helsinki University with a Master's degree in computer science may not seem very interesting, you should know that the University's decision to hold a UNIX course during his years there was one of the things that led to the creation of Linux.

"So. This week it seems to be about privacy. Not so much me, but the fabulous workings of my government's leadership, who by the way, I did not vote for. [...] Finally, this week is the likely the week that the Canadian version of the DMCA, Digital Millenium Copyright Act, is to be tabled..."

I grew up with Microsoft operating systems. I’ve been through MS-DOS 5.0, Win 3.1, Windows 95, 98, Millenium Edition, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP. Notice how I stopped there. After over a decade of Windows, I decided to give Ubuntu a try and now have no reason to install Vista. Here are nine reasons why I chose Ubuntu:

What will they think of us when they find our garbage in the future? ;)

We, the Helia Linux Club in Helsinki is having a free bike trip through the town of Helsinki.

In my grumpier moments their relentlessly positive, cult-like Kumbaya-or-else approach makes me want to turn the hose on them. But I don't remember them attacking anyone else the way they've been attacked.

I had a moment or two's identification with Caitlyn Martin, who blogged about fallout from a distro review. Yes, I, too, have noticed that there's a cult of sacred-cow-worshippers who take "Linux advocacy" to a dark extreme.