Stories by: Liz Tay

Liz Tay speaks with Kathryn Moyle, an Associate Professor at the University of Canberra and a former teacher who has worked in the South Australian Department of Education and Children's Services, about the role of open source in the education sector, and how policy makers, teachers, students and parents might overcome what she calls the hegemony of proprietary software.

In response to student demand for more flexible learning options, the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) is investigating the use of online technologies to supplement, or replace, lectures of the future.

Spreadsheets are a tool commonly used by businesses to track everything from payroll to accounts receivable. However, experts claim, there could be erroneous code, programming or formulae in spreadsheets that is costing businesses billions of dollars.

The measurements of a person's ring and index fingers may come in handy in the early identification of developmental disorders, career paths, and behaviourial issues such as technophobia, psychologists claim.

Tiny, spiral-shaped carbon tubes and fibres could give way to new kinds of components for nanoscale electronics, say researchers who are studying what has been dubbed "nanoscale spiral pasta" in the hope of developing nanoscale switching and memory storage devices.

Twenty-one year old John Leung was awarded a $US25,000 first prize by Bill Gates himself last week, in Microsoft's annual Next-Gen PC Design Competition. An undergraduate architecture student at the University of Melbourne, Leung's MADE in China submission took a novel approach to computing products and services, with the aim of bringing PCs to the emerging Chinese market.

It took three years of legal debate before Hew Raymond Griffiths, an Australian resident and British citizen, was surrendered to the U.S. for his involvement in the international software piracy group Drink or Die (DoD).

Plans to create a true .NET compiler for Ruby source code are well underway, with developers in Queensland last week announcing the release of version 0.7 of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET software.

Researchers in Japan have developed new circuit technology touted to be the vital next step towards the realisation of a practical quantum computer.

New peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has been designed to speed file transfers through the sharing of non-identical files. The system promises to make online file sharing up to five times faster, and could potentially add to the efficiency of software updates and data transfers to and from portable storage devices.

The long-anticipated Debian 4.0 may only just have made its debut this week, but it's never too soon for the developer community to be making plans for its successor.