Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."

An anonymous reader writes "ZeroPaid has an interesting take on the story of Nicolas Sarkozy being accused of copyright infringement. The irony, of course, is Sarkozy's pushing of a 3-strikes law — disconnecting from the Internet those accused of file sharing — in France and across the EU. The French president had apparently offered to settle the copyright infringement accusation for one Euro, but the band rejected the offer, calling it an insult. The article notes that each year since 2006, a high-profile anti-piracy entity has been on the wrong end of a copyright infringement notice. In 2008, Sony BMG was sued for software piracy. In 2007, anti-piracy outfit BASCAP received a cease and desist order related to pirated software. And in 2006, the MPAA was accused of pirating 'This Film is Not Yet Rated'."

Reader RoundSparrow sends word of a contest, with big cash prizes, being mounted by a commercial vender of open source Open-WRT routers. You have 10 months to come up with "the most impressive User Interface/Firmware for Ubiquiti's newly released open-source embedded wireless platform, the RouterStation." Entries are required to have open source licensing and will all be released. First prize is $160,000, with four runners-up receiving $10,000. RoundSparrow adds: "Could be built on top of existing X-WRT or LuCI OpenWRT web interfaces. OpenWRT Kamikaze 8.09 was just released. Now is perfect timing for OpenWRT to get some kick-ass interface and usability ideas. I'm not affiliated with the contest vendor."