I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone, Nov 05, 2007

Mr. Rubin is one of the primary architects behind another product that also smacks of potential über-coolness — the Google Phone.

In a decision that may finally settle one of the most bitter legal battles surrounding software widely used in corporate data centers, a federal district court judge in Utah ruled Friday afternoon that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.

Virgin America calls their new in-flight entertainment system “Red,” but it is really a gigantic sociological experiment in airborne distributed computing.

The Zonbu PC also uses a Gentoo version of the Linux operating system and will come with a range of software applications like the Mozilla Firefox browser, Skype voice-over-Internet service, OpenOffice software suite and many games.

When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?

The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008.

Microsoft certainly understands the problem, the need to change and the potential long-term threat to its business from rivals like Apple and the free Linux operating system, and from companies distributing software as a service over the Internet like Google.

... in the year since Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, unveiled his prototype for a $100 laptop, he has found himself wrestling with Microsoft and the politics of software.