Stories about: Inspiration

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.

Hype is the coin of the realm in the technology business. If you listen to vendors and the media, it may sometimes seem as though every new product, service, concept or even security threat will be the Next Big Thing. Some live up to all the fuss, but many don't -- and some fail spectacularly.

Good news: You don't have to be a sorcerer or even a genius to come up with brilliant ideas or inventions. According to Professor R. Keith Sawyer at Washington University in St. Louis, the latest research shows that you have a much better chance of being creative than previously thought.

Dr Andrew S. Tanenbaum is a Professor of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit in Holland. He has worked extensively in writing and teaching about operating systems. He wrote compilers for the original UNIX operating system, and then authored the MINIX operating system in 1987, which subsequently became the inspiration for Linus Torvalds to develop his own MINIX clone, called Linux, in the early 1990s. Dr Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. This January his makes his first visit to Linux Australia's linux.conf.au where he will be speaking about his latest metric. Before that he talks to Computerworld about microkernels, MINIX 3, why he would still fail Linux Torvalds if he was a student of his, and more.

Professional video editing software may cost thousands of dollars but one open source project, Jahshaka, is aiming to change the game by providing all the features in a real time, networked environment. Jahshaka is a video and film compositing, editing and special effects system that uses hardware rendering to give users real time interactivity. Computerworld spoke with the project's founder, Jah Shaka, about the little application that could change the content creation game for good.

The JBoss World expo and conference in Berlin last week was something of a celebration of the continued growth of open source in EMEA over the last 12 months.

Opera Software has not been approached by Google about a possible acquisition, an Opera spokesman said Friday, dismissing rumors that Google is eyeing a takeover of the Norwegian browser company.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, developer of the open source fire transfer tool rsync, Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell has every reason to smile as Microsoft announced a similar utility will feature in the next Windows server release.

If you've got US$10,000 to spare and know someone with an extremely large bookshelf, you may be in for some interesting holiday shopping this December on Amazon.com.