I happily run Skype for Linux on my Ubuntu machine. Note, this is a native Skype for Linux client, not the Windows one running under Wine or something

http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/get-skype/on-your-computer/linux/

Still in beta, but hey.

"The motives for the attack, much less its perpetrators, remain unclear."

Perhaps it was because the company is called "sitelutions"? What an abomination of a portmanteau

All he had to do was put "j/k" at the end.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-03-03/

FreeOffice would be a better name. And less confusing to pronounce.

Join your local library and you get free online access via your library membership. I've been using it this way for about 4 years. One of the unseen benefits of public libraries, that the gummunt is trying to close down.

"Bing's biggest additions were online shopping comparison engines such as Nextag, k8yel.com, bestcompare.net, shopwhiz.net, and underpay.biz"

I've never even heard of any of those websites. Moreover, what does k8yel and Nextag bring to mind in terms of comparison price websites? Errr. nothing.

Horse, dead, flogging springs to mind. Get out while you can.

Yep - it runs in Wine.

So instead of encouraging people to leave their cars at home and catch public transport instead, this system will replicate the road system, but a bit higher up, and have travellers boarding little "cars", moving the traffic jams vertically by a few metres. Great.

The biggest cut in emissions would not be if we all drove leccy-tech, but if more of us made those small journeys by foot, cycle, whatever, instead of jumping in the car to drive a mile and a half (what's that - 20 minutes walk?). 25% of car journeys are under two miles

"the software sometimes makes mistakes, labelling part of the image as containing a face or a license plate when in fact it doesn't."

Surely the privacy aspect is where the software *fails* to recognise a face or a number plate, and thus doesn't blur it.

I can't imagine too many people complaining that the slot in a letter box, or top of a Belisha beacon[1] for instance, would be incorrectly blurred for looking like a number plate or a face.

[1] Okay, that'd be a pretty big face!

Clever computer answers Jeopardy questions? I think not - shouldn't take a great deal of processing to map the lexical items and grammatical structures from the given info in order to arrive at a possible answer or at least a range of good guesses.

No, what I would like to see is a computer that can solve a cryptic crossword like The Times, for instance. In fact, if a computer could do that without just using pattern matching, then I reckon it'd be a good candidate for beating the Turing test.

Then again, I don't believe the American press carry cryptic crosswords (in the UK sense), so maybe the IBM boffins just aren't aware of how challenging they can be.

Of course, all the surveys about banning smoking in pubs showed an overwhelming number of the population in favour of the ban. I wonder what the results would have been if they had surveyed just those people who actaully go into a pub now and then, rather than the ones who sit at home reading the Daily Mail and working themselves into a lather over something that will never affect them directly.

I bought the first PC for my business from Evesham in 1994 or 95 - drove there and picked it up (I'm fairly local). I remember the sales guy demonstrating the 4x CD ROM's speed by pointing out how quickly the drawer popped out when you pressed the button... 32mb ram, 2gig hard drive, 17" monitor and a colour printer - all for around £3,500. Bargain.

Mind you, it's still being used by my ex-wife's father for putting newsletters together - not bad for a machine almost 15 years old

If I want to check my University email first thing in the morning, it takes me 7 minutes from powering on a (Vista) PC at college to being able to read the contents of my inbox. It's obvious that Microsoft are aware of these slow boot times if you think about the "power off" icon on the menu, which just hibernates the PC.

As a Linux user at home, I love the way that once you are logged in the disk activity light just stops flashing, and you can get on with whatever you want straight away.

If a company as savvy and well known as Google is willing to start a debate on these issues, then it's all good. Anything that gets sustainability issues into the hearts and minds of the great unwashed is very welcome.

All they need to do now is shut down Google AdWords, which persuades people to buy crap they don't need. The problem is not so much to do with alternative sources of energy or transport, but with a wholescale reduction in the use of both. Move closer to work. Take a holiday that doesn't involve flying. Don't buy that new gadget, or upgrade that perfectly useful one you have in your pocket/desk/office.

I spent two hours this morning trying (and eventually succeeding) to open a simple word document sent to me by a student - my university has recently converted to Office 2007 / Windows Vista. As I run Linux and OpenOffice, this was a bit of an issue, to say the least! As Word defaults to saving in 2007 format, I guess I'm gonna be stuffed at least until OOo 3 comes out in the Autumn.

"It might be possible, Mercuri contends, for a hidden piece of code to be activated, or for a machine to be subverted by scanning a particular bitmap image"

Why is the software not open-source, in that case? This is the public, voting to public officials, after all.