Hopefully public pressure (e.g. the ideas on the "Your Freedom" Government run website for suggesting laws to scrap: here and here) will cause the Digital Economy Act to be scrapped.

Aside from public pressure, there is also a possible review in the Lords so there are a few chinks of light in the sky.

I don't understand why Apple or Google (Or Nokia) would want Palm. At least if the main asset was WebOS - none of these companies would ditch the mobile OS they are backing in favour of it.

So my wild arsed guess is that Palm had enough patents that the various companies thought would be useful in the court battles that are just beginning. But at the price a company like Palm would fetch - the patents must be valuable!

It would fit with HP paying more - they get the patents and WebOS and they weren't previously backing a mobile OS.

I think this XKCD cartoon about correlation vs. causation is one of my favourite.

My Rogers iPhone works just fine for tethering. All I have to do is turn Internet Tethering on in the preferences, then plug it into the sync cable. Leopard pops up a dialog box which says something like "Hey! New Ethernet Interface found; would you like to use it?" -- click Ok, disable any other active network interface (or tweak your routing table) and bam: you're surfing on 3G.

Hmm... you made that sound fairly complicated. A cable? This is the 21st century! With my phone (an N900 but it works with many other phones including Symbian ones), I enable the internet sharing via a little app on my phone (Joikuspot) and then my laptop sees a new wireless access point.

Well Symbian has Nokia behind it, and they aren't a small company.

But I'm not persuaded it's all about the companies backing it. The soon to be released, MeeGo phones have Nokia backing too (as well as Intel) but I'm much more excited about that than Symbian. Having a fairly standard Linux stack on my phone is something I love about my N900 and I'm looking forward to its successor.

As a developer who works on (closed-source) enterprise software which runs on Linux (amongst other platforms) I'm nervous about Novell being sold. Though I develop on Fedora and primarily use RHEL for informal testing (we do formal testing on all the platforms we support) I'm glad that a solid, serious alternative to RHEL exists.

Obviously a sale of Novell doesn't necessarily imply any change for their Linux business (esp. as I understand it's one of their more profitable divisions) but it is likely (in the short term) to introduce some uncertainty.

The Linux market seems very healthy at the moment and I hope it continues to be at least a duopoly. Red Hat are a very cool company but I wouldn't like to see any company have a (virtual) monopoly in Enterprise Linux.

I think that you have to give Alex Brown a lot of credit for this article. He effectively "sided" with Microsoft in the massive controversy that was the OOXML standardisation. In that position many people would convince themselves they had done the right thing and turn a blind eye to Microsoft's failings.

That he's prepared to publicly do what he has make me have a little more respect for him and people like him (Rick Jelliffe) for the part they played in the mess that was the initial standardisation.

The fine article points out that Tim Bray was pretty accurate with his prediction of Microsoft's behaviour:

"I suppose they'll probably show up to the meetings and try to act interested, but it's going to be a sideline and nobody important will be there. What Microsoft really wanted was that ISO stamp of approval to use as a marketing tool. And just like your mother told you, when they get what they want and have their way with you, they're probably not gonna call you in the morning."

I'm guessing there are a few more people around here who might not have been surprised by Microsoft's approach to the standard.