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Steve Ballmer admitted the obvious this week, that Google was the first one to get search right and that most people see no reason to switch to Bing, no matter how good it may (or may not) be. He called it the value of incumbency.

Like we told you a while back (well, actually Mark told you), Ubuntu (hopefully 10.04) will get a new theme:

Vermont has become the latest government to enact an open source software policy, after Secretary of Administration Neale F. Lunderville recently signed a policy developed under state CIO David Tucker's leadership. The policy says the Vermont Department of Information and Innovation and other departments should look at open source solutions as part of the procurement process, and are directed to calculate the total cost of ownership for an open source system, including "fixed costs (direct purchases and licensing) and operational costs for support, testing, upgrades, maintenance and training," as part of the procurement process.

Institutional stock holder/Hedge Fund Elliot Associates wants to buy Novell and take it private. Sean Michael Kerner thinks this is a good idea, and a good deal for Novell.

If you're like most Internet-connected people these days, the amount of information you take in from your favorite news sites, tech blogs, and the like is just staggering. The only way to stay on top of everything is with a solid feed reader to help aggregate everything you want to read. Of course, many folks rely on Google Reader to get the job done but if you're looking for an open source option, here are five of our favorites.

Hedge fund Elliot Associates has made a bid to acquire software vendor Novell. In a public letter to the company's board of directors, the hedge fund offered $5.75 per share (a 49 percent premium), placing Novell's value at $2 billion dollars. Elliot Associates is already one of the largest institutional shareholders of Novell, with roughly 8.5 percent of the company's stock.

One new feature in Ubuntu 10.04 that caught my attention is the “Desktop in the Cloud” project. Until now, most of the attention on cloud technologies has been focused on servers in the cloud. If you wanted to use a desktop environment on EC2, you needed to do quite a bit of tweaking and installing of packages yourself. With the Lucid release, the Ubuntu team is making desktop in the cloud much easier.

Stable kernel update announcements posted on LWN have a certain tendency to be followed by complaints about the amount of information which is made available. It seems that there is a desire for a description of the changes which is more accessible than the patches themselves, and for attention to be drawn to the security-relevant fixes. As an exercise in determining what kind of effort is being asked of the kernel maintainers, your editor decided to make a pass through the proposed 2.6.32.9 update and attempt to describe the impact of each of the changes - all 93 of them. The results can be found below.

As companies like Facebook and Google continue to prove, the benefits of using open source software go well beyond cost-cutting. Open source has evolved into an exceptional way to boost productivity and foster innovation. In fact, open source is quickly becoming an essential element of next-generation Web applications. Whether you run a development team for a Fortune 500 company or a software startup, attending OSBC 2010 will help you leverage open source for your greatest competitive advantage.

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple offerings out there, and Google had precisely no track record in this sector: surely it was heading for a fall? The launch of the first Android phone, the G1, seemed to confirm these doubts. Although capable enough, it was clearly not going to carry Android through into the mainstream.

My good buddy Preston Gralla would have it that "Windows doesn't just dominate the desktop, but the server market as well." Eh... I don't think so. For proof, Gralla points to the latest IDC (International Data Corporation) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. This report covers the worldwide server market's factory revenue. But Gralla and other critics are missing that IDC is not measuring what server operating systems are being used; it's measuring what server operating systems people are buying, and those are bundled with their hardware purchases. Specifically, to quote IDC, the researchers are measuring "server revenue includes components that are typically sold today as a server bundle, including frame or cabinet and all cables, processors, memory, communication boards, and OS."

Almost all systems sold nowadays have at least a dual-core CPU, even triple- or quad-cores are getting cheaper and getting standard in the near future. But how to utilize your shiny x-core to it's full potential, with applications that are only utilizing one core? With Linux, which has strong multitasking capabilities as all unixoid operating systems, there is an easy possibility to parallelize tasks which are normally only using one core of an x-core CPU.

Bleach bit is a utility which can free disk space, removes hidden junk, and easily guards your privacy. It can erase cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, remove unused localizations, shred logs, and delete temporary files. It supports around 70 applications and can be installed on windows and linux. On ubuntu bleachbit is available on the repository. However, it is a nice idea to look at the bleachbit website for any new versions.

The details of Apple's patent offensive are now public, and it's clear that while HTC is the target, it's Google's Android that has got Cupertino so annoyed. The patents on which Apple is claiming infringement include obvious things such as the use of a gesture to unlock and rotate the screen based on device orientation, but they also cover deeper concepts such as thread-to-thread communication and interactions between an object-orientated GUI and a procedurally developed OS.

This is part two of a three part series on distributed monitoring. You can use passive service and host checks to allow non-central Nagios servers to collect data from a network of machines and then transfer that information to a central Nagios server. The transfer of information is done using NSCA so that the central Nagios server will receive the data from the External Command File interface and process the information as a passive check.

POSIX IO is becoming a serious impediment to IO performance and scaling. POSIX is one of the standards that enabled portable programs and POSIX IO is the portion of the standard surrounding IO. But as the world of storage evolves with greatly increasing capacities and greatly increasing performance, it is time for POSIX IO to evolve or die.

The success of open-source software raises a tantalizing question: Could the same design philosophy work for tech gadgets? Open-source software is one of the great success stories of the past few decades. The Apache HTTP Server is the world's most popular Web server, Linux has more than held its own against Unix and other proprietary operating systems, and Mozilla's Firefox browser has given Microsoft's Internet Explorer strong competition over the years.

With the Linux 2.6.33 kernel having been released last week where the ATI kernel mode-setting (KMS) DRM code left the kernel's staging area, we knew a new ATI X.Org driver release was imminent. Over the night a new stable DDX driver update has been pushed out for xf86-video-ati as well as a new pre-release for the KMS-supportive 6.13 version that also carries other changes. The xf86-video-ati 6.12.5 is the new stable update that carries bug-fixes and other work...

Somebody better tell Microsoft that it's still March, because the suggestion of an "Internet usage tax" to fight Windows-powered botnets must be an April Fool's joke let out a month too early. According to Robert McMillan's piece on ComputerWorld, Scott Charney (Microsoft's veep for Trustworthy Computing) suggests that one way to fund fighting botnets is to tax users. "You could say it's a public safety issue and do it with general taxation." You could, but let's not.

[This is going to be good.. - Scott]

Orange has given its thumbs-up to the Intel-Nokia Linux venture Meego, the OS formerly known as Maemo and Moblin. The mobile phone network essentially said it would develop its applications, marketed under the Signature brand, to run on the operating system, allowing it to offer customer user experiences on anything from netbooks to smartphones.