maddog reflects on some of the many souvenirs from his long career in computing.

Science fiction authors and high-tech visionaries dream of a future where humans and computers communicate in ordinary English. A new cloud-based tool brings that future a little closer.

The last few years have been troubled for the Gnome Project. Once a premier desktop environment for Linux, it has seen its market share diminish amid user dissatisfaction over Gnome 3 and accusations that the project was ignoring users. Yet, over the last six months, something important has been happening: Slowly and quietly, the members of Gnome have started trying to turn the situation around.

A recent report highlights some advantages as well challenges for implementing free software in developing countries.

• Red Hat Releases RHEL 6.4 beta and Enterprise Virtualization 3.1
• Amazon Announces Redshift Data Warehouse Service
• Ceph on SUSE 
• XtreemFS 1.4

As these pages go to print, I notice that we have reached issue 147. The number 147 might not seem particularly noteworthy to the rest of the world, but I noticed it. You see, the first issue with my picture on page 3 was issue 48, and if you count by ones from the beginning of the issue 48 cycle to the end of the issue 147 cycle, you get to 100 issues. This number 100 is always good for a milestone moment in our base 10 universe. Celebrating a numeral is not so important on its own, but having these reasons to look back can provide some context for looking ahead into the future – or looking around at the present.

• OpenShift for data centers and clouds
• MariaDB non-profit foundation launched
• Fedora 18 to include Mate desktop
• Oracle repository for kernel changes
• NVidia GeForce R310
• Android OS leads the smartphone market
• Microsoft contemplating yearly major release cycle
• HP writes off US$ 8.8 million on Autonomy
• Stallman alleges “surveillance code” in Unity

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.