Sure, "no va" means "no go" in Spanish. Yet, "Nova" seems to be either the name or the codename for a Linux-based smartphone and device OS stack that handset maker Palm is expected to launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

Freescale on Monday is expected to announce a new processor for netbooks that may challenge chip maker Intel on price in the low-cost computing space.

Web surfers deserted Internet Explorer in favor of Safari, Firefox and Chrome in December, according to Net Applications.

Google's Android OS has been pretty well received thus far, and the presence of the Market, where users can download applications, has fared pretty well except it has missed one thing: paid-for apps.

I remain perplexed by the state of OpenOffice.org. After years of using Word 2 (yes, you read that correctly - by far the best version Microsoft ever produced), I jumped straight to OpenOffice.org as my main office software.

While 2008 has been a bleak year for the financial markets and the global economy, it has been very kind to open source, at least based on market share. A review of Net Applications data suggests that there has never been a better time for open source; however, as Google Trends data suggests, it's no longer enough to rest on one's open-source laurels.

Bless Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for his optimism. Writing for Computerworld, Vaughan-Nichols suggests that we don't need to wait for the Year of the Linux Desktop, because we've already had it. Somehow, I missed that. Vaughan-Nichols points to HP shipping Linux, Dell shipping Linux, etc., but come on: a trickle of retail activity does not a "Year of the Linux Desktop" make.

Over the past few years, scheduled releases of open source projects have become the norm. Projects tend to release new versions according to a regular schedule as opposed to releasing when the developers consider all the work proposed, has been completed.