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The Net as we know it today first became visible to me in March 1994, when I was among several hundred other tech types gathered at Esther Dyson's PC Forum conference in Arizona.

Today in Open Source: What went wrong with Linux on the desktop? Plus: Will Chromebooks kill Windows? And more Chromebooks coming in 2014. I've run into these Negative Ned stories about Linux failing on the desktop before, and they always seem fixated on the market share of Windows. I reject that kind of thinking as it was never necessary for Linux to "beat Windows" on the desktop to be successful.

There's now mainline Coreboot support for the Gizmo AMD APU development board.

The third development release of the upcoming GNOME Settings Daemon 3.12 package, a daemon run by all GNOME sessions to provide live access to configuration settings and the changes done to them, is available for download and testing via our Linux section on Softpedia.

Wine 1.7.10 is out this Friday as the first bi-weekly development release of 2014.

I grew up in the 1980s in Columbus, Georgia. You needed a car to get around, so I did not work until I could drive. Within months of getting my driver's license, I got my first job as a part-time computer programmer for a stockbroker. It is easy to forget that in the 80s, computers and programming were not nearly as pervasive (or popular) as they are today. I had been interested in computers for a couple of years by then. My prized possession was my Kaypro II with 64K RAM and dual floppies. Part-time jobs using computers were rare, so I felt lucky to find the perfect fit. I was tasked with building a computer program that would perform contact management, tracking interactions with potential and current clients. I wish I understood the value of such a system back then. Good thing Marc Benioff did. (Thank you, Salesforce.com.) I ended up working with the stockbroker for more than two years until I went to college. I learned several very valuable lessons.

Hardware fails, that is a fact. Nowadays, hard drives are rather reliable, but nevertheless every now and then we will see drives failing or at least having hiccups. Using smartcl/smartd to monitor disks is a good thing, below we will discuss how some lesser issues can be handled without actually having to reboot the system – it is still up to a sys admin’s own discretion to judge circumstances correctly and evaluate whether disk errors encountered are a one time incident or indicative of an entirely failing disk.

Now that companies are closing-out their books on the old year, it’s becoming evident that Linux devices were a big hit in 2013.

On Friday, CNET’s Brooke Crothers reported that Chromebooks, those nifty laptops running Google’s Chrome OS that let the cloud do the heavy lifting, accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year. As impressive as that may be, the numbers get even better when Android tablets are added to the mix. According to market research company NPD Group, January to November saw 1.76 million Chromebooks and Android tablets sold, up from only 400,000 during all of 2012.

LinuxSecurity.com: The leaking of classified documents detailing the data collection activities of the U.S. National Security Agency earlier this year reignited some long-standing concerns about the vulnerability of enterprise data stored in the cloud.

As they do every year, unfortunately, the good folks at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke have put together a depressing list of what should have entered the public domain yesterday. As you hopefully know, until 1978, the maximum amount of time that work in the US could be covered by copyright was 56 years (you initially received a 28 year copyright term, which could be renewed for another 28 years). That means, back in 1957, everyone who created the works in that list knew absolutely, and without a doubt that their works would be given back to the public to share, to perform, to build on and more... on January 1, 2014 at the very latest. And they all still created their works, making clear that the incentive of a 56 year monopoly was absolutely more than enough incentive to create.

Terasology is an open-source survival and discovery game with influences from Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, and Dungeon Keeper. The game is in a pre-alpha state, but it's already fun to play!

Linux won, the penguin has achieved world domination, and the usual commentarians completely missed it even after years of predicting it. Because it's not something that happened in a single flashy event, but rather has been the product of years of hard work and steady improvement. 2014 is the year that Linux starts to win the desktop, which is the final Linux frontier. And it is the year of exponential growth in every arena.

Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in memcached, a high-performance memory object caching system. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies a number of issues.

In room-size metal boxes ­secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

Could the Chromebook knock out Windows on the desktop? Don't bet against it. Chromebook sales numbers have come out of nowhere a year ago to challenge Windows.

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas, Google has managed to rope in a large number of hardware vendors ranging from ARM to NVIDIA that will be begin supporting VP9 hardware acceleration in Google's push for VP9 to dominate the Ultra HD / 4K space.

The popular Eschalon Book RPG series is due to get it's third and final instalment this year with a beta test due to start very soon!

An unsafe use of temporary files was discovered in Puppet, a tool for centralized configuration management. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability and overwrite an arbitrary file in the system.

PlayOnLinux 4.2.2 lets you run Windows applications and games in Ubuntu 13.10. Here's how you can install it.

"Why don't academics discuss research before starting the work?" In a recent blog post, Jack Kelly asked this simple question, and it is a striking one for those of us who are familiar with collaborating at high levels as part of an open source community. One of the pillars of the open source way is rapid prototyping and the idea of: release early, release often.