mariocki writes "Steve Jobs' go-to design man Jonathan Ive, the creator of modern computer design classics such as the iMac, MacBook Pro and iPod/iPhone/iPad, has been awarded a knighthood in the New Year's Honours list, taking him from plain old 'Mr' straight to 'Sir' in one fell swoop. This now puts him in the same league as Paul McCartney, Michael Caine, Bob Geldof and Bill Gates. Ive said 'I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design' and even for Apple haters his designs have done more for personal computer design than the mainstream PC manufacturers could imagine, taking the PC from the geek den into the living room of even the most painfully trendy fashionista."

An anonymous reader writes "The Hugo Award is the leading prize for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy writing. Named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine, the awards have been given out since 1955. This year's winners were announced Saturday during the Hugo Awards Ceremony in Reno, Nevada."

alphadogg writes "When Nobel Prizes are dished out each fall, the most accomplished professionals in computing, telecom and IT have usually been left out in the cold. That's because there is no Nobel Prize for these fields, and it's unlikely there will be one any time soon. According to the Nobel Foundation: 'The Nobel Prizes, as designated in the Will of Alfred Nobel, are in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Only once has a prize been added — a Memorial Prize — The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, donated by Sweden's central bank to celebrate its tercentenary in 1968. The Nobel Foundation's Board of Directors later decided to keep the original five prizes intact and not to permit new additions.' So, if IBM, Google, Apple or some other deep-pocketed tech company wanted to make a big donation along the lines of what Sweden's central bank did in 1968, maybe it could sway the Nobel Foundation to add a prize. But it most likely wouldn't be officially called a Nobel Prize."

Velcroman1 writes "Having trouble breathing? Try riding a roller-coaster. Really. A pair of Dutch researchers who discovered that the symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride are among this year's winners of the Ig Nobel awards, the infamous annual tribute to scientific research that seems wacky — but also has real world applications. FoxNews.com has interviews with several award winners, who are all ecstatic to win, despite the fact that they're all gently being poked fun at."

Well, last Thursday evening we announced the Beanie award winners at the Slashdot/Andover/VA shindig at The China Club. For those of you not able to attend, I've written a synopsis below, otherwise you can watch the whole deal at TheSync. You can grab the awards in both streaming and downloadable format. And, if you'd like to see some pictures from the show, check out Brian Hawkins' online-pix as well as Kurt Gray's pix from the Andover booth.

With LinuxWorldExpo just around the corner, and thus the time that we'll actually give these awards away, I wanted to tell everyone to go out and vote for who you like. You can check out the initial story for more information on the awards. Vote early, and vote often...er. Scratch that last one. Anyway, voting goes until 8 PM EST tonight.

Another 2000 bucks is on the table, and you get to decide who gets it. The nominees for 'Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application' are Pine, Lynx, Mutt, Emacs and Midnight Commander. Go vote to see who gets the money.

So the 2000 Beanie Awards have now entered phase two: Intense Voting. The nominees have been chosen in each category by you readers, and now you get to choose who wins the money in exciting catagories like 'Best Designed Interface in a non graphical application' and 'Best Newbie Helper'. Each category has a discussion so you can talk about your choices all you want. You may change your vote whenever you like. And the final winners will be announced at LinuxWorld in NY in feb.

This is the big one. $30k to project that has improved the most. The project that is making Open Source dominate. The nominees are no surprise: GNOME, Mozilla, KDE, LiViD, PHP and Wine. Go Talk about it. Vote. Repeat until satisfied.

The kernel always gets a lot of credit... but we decided to create an award for the most improved module to try to give some creds to those little components that make it all worthwhile. The nominees you selected were USB, ALSA, ReiserFS and Video4Linux. Discuss the nominees and feel free to change your vote until you have it right.

This is a tricky category. Advocacy is hard, and everyone has a different way to address the problem. Each of the nominees has a different viewpoint on Open Source/Free Software. And each has a different way of being an advocate for their ideals. Vote for the guy who has done the most to advocate this stuff: Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Richard Stallman, and Linus Torvalds.

Open Source can be a charity just as much as it can be a business model. And several charities have sprung up to help fund the effort. The nominees you selected for this category are the Free Software Foundation, Software in the Public Interest, The Apache Software Foundation and the XFree86 Project. Vote for the one that you think deserves it most.

We were all a newbie once, and each day there are more of them then there were the day before. These are the guys that are doing the most to turn the newbies into competent Linux users. They answer questions on IRC. They write documentation. And they are as important for the future of Linux as the hackers who write the code. The nominees in this category are Sensei, Matt Welsh, Havoc Pennington, and Tom Christiansen. You know what to do.

The Unsung Hero is the guy that has done so much work to help make this Open Source thing great, but he just doesn't seem to end up getting his share of the spotlight. The nominees are Alan Cox, David Dawes, Donald Becker, Jordan K. Hubbard and Brian Paul. Vote for that you think hasn't got the credit he deserves for all his hard work.

The GUI has revolutionized the desktop. It made computers accessible to the masses, and even today it keeps getting cooler. Our nominees areeach carving out new territory in the realm of the graphical user interface. You can Vote for the best interface between The GIMP, Mozilla, XMMS and Enlightenment.

A wise man once said that graphics are just bloat anyway. A real man can survive quickly and efficiently using nothing but a VT100 terminal. And why not? With applications like Pine, Lynx, Mutt, Emacs, and Midnight Commander to choose from, its a wonder someone even bothered inventing X. Vote for the best.

So I admit it, I'm a perl junkie. This wonderful little scripting language is the duct tape of the Internet. So the question is which module can you not live without? The leaders are DBI, CGI, CPAN, and LWP. But in the end there can be only one!

Theming was where I got started. Of course back then you didn't have nearly the flexibility that todays modern window managers allow. You had to edit dotfiles, or even hack the code itself to make it look 'just right'. But these days themes like BlueSteel, Blueheart, AbsoluteE, BrushedMetal and Cyrus each help to make your desktop a cause of significant drool from our coworkers. Which one is the best?.

A good desktop has a voice too these days. This is the software that makes your desktop sound good. Your nominations revealed the following contenders: XMMS, mpg123, ALSA, and EsounD. Discuss the nominees and vote.

In all honesty I just thought it would be cool to have a category that had no real point except to give some money away. Of course the most popular entry in this category was 'Me'. Apparently everyone seems to think that they were the most deserving... but a few wise guys took it seriously and nominated Alan Cox, Debian, Linus Torvalds and LiViD. Who deserves $2k?.