"Hardware recycling in Richmond took a leap forward last weekend. A small group of Richmond volunteers toured Free Geek Columbus. We learned much from visit. One valuable detail I’ll focus on today is that they run their organization on web-based, database-driven software system called “fgdb.rb”.

Often I said that Compiz was an evil hack as it was replacing the native and eventually well tested desktop windowmanager with a new code unstested and unstable. Now Compiz is at an important point of its life, and some decisions may make it become irrelevant in the future.

When perusing my local dead tree Sunday newspaper's Business section, I came across the headline, Frugality pays off: Avoiding debt looks smart for area firms and thought, "Hey, this looks like something that my readers would enjoy." They've done exactly what I've said that companies should do: Be frugal during the good times and the lean times won't seem so lean.

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006.

Our esteemed editor, Tim Danton, recently ran a thought piece wondering whether Linux would ever hit the mainstream, his ten cents worth clattering down on the side that says “probably not.” It’s an intruiging point of view, but one predicated on a fallacy.

Brilliant Brainstorms is a (usually) weekly summary of some of the best/most interesting brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site as well as various other Brainstorm-style sites. This week: icons representing the state of a task; utilizing the desktop background image; easier file conversion; displaying commonly visited folders in the left sidebar of the file manager.

Recently the tubes have been ablaze with chatter of where the somewhat popular topic of community management should fit into an organisation. When the coin is flipped, said chatterers have been debating whether to place their bets on either Marketing and Engineering as an apt destination for the reporting line.

Here are a few things that are good for everyone but tired old monopolists who have lost their way, and have only bullying and propaganda left...