"Earlier this year, Chong Yidong and Stefan Monnier took over Emacs maintainership from Richard Stallman, and they successfully completed the Emacs 23.1 release. I asked them a couple of questions about the process, Emacs-development and some of the plans for the future..."

San Francisco bookstore Green Apple Books has put together a series of humorous videos that point up the advantages of paper books over Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.

In September 2006, an article titled "Debian and Ubuntu: uneasy coexistence" appeared in these columns, outlining why these two projects were not exactly the best of bedfellows. Nearly three years later it is evident that nearly as much bad feeling and suspicion still exists.

You may have noticed the odd bit of celebration around the magic billion downloads milestone for Firefox. Of course, as Mozillans themselves point out, that figure doesn't tell us very much. How do we get the *next* billion downloads – and why do we want them?

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with Dell. On one hand, I appreciate that they occasionally sell Ubuntu machines, but I am really sick of their avaliability games. The number of avaliable computers, and the options that go with them, changes randomly from day to day. For new readers, I am not a fan of these variations. Today, the selection has moved from annoying to almost comical.

Amazon's recent remote deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm struck a nerve. There was something so undeniably creepy about a company entering hundreds of virtual bookshelves in the middle of the night and deleting "1984" (of all books!).

Buried deep within a "bits from the release team" posting to the Debian development community is this text: "Based on feedback of the community we are revisiting the decision to freeze December 2009."

Media FUD about CentOS is refuted. Boycott Novell runs on a CentOS server, so it is painful to watch The Register and some other publications spreading FUD about the project.