Popular open source news - Random or Offbeat

A pretty cool pic of a circuit board business card.

How many of us leave our PCs running all day long, even when we're not using them? Despite the fact that today’s desktop and laptop PCs and their OSes provide extensive power management functions, most PC users don’t bother to use them to shrink their systems' carbon footprints.

The suit, filed last Thursday in Alameda County Superior Court, the day before Reiser was sentenced to 15 years to life for the murder of his estranged wife, charges the Linux programmer with inflicting “severe emotional distress and psychological trauma” on the children, who were in the house when he strangled her.

The program can trace the relationships between organisms as varied as bacteria and HIV, producing an tree detailing the evolutionary "distances" between each. It compares every single pair of sequences, and without the subjectivity (not to mention boredom) of human experts performing the same task.

Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife.

You know the results of FOSS communities are making a lasting impression when other groups try emulate their success by using the same concepts. The charitable organization Architecture for Humanity says they can bring about an "architectural revolution" by pairing the principles of collaboration and open source with needs of millions of people worldwide living in poverty today.

Setting up a home server running an open-source operating system is a popular and useful activity. Useful in what ways, you may ask. You could use it to run a website, collect and send e-mail messages, store your OpenID credentials or serve your music around the home.

Louis Hodes, shown with his great-niece, Madeline, studied and worked with computers for more than 50 years. While at MIT, he helped develop the programming language LISP, used in artificial intelligence research.