a fistful of samachar

The original Alien (with a remastered soundtrack and additional footage -- the dreaded 'Director's[sic] Cut'?) is slated to hit cinema theatres come Halloween {ScifiStorm | FilmJerk}

Apanaa President Kalam makes it to slashdot with his speech at the I4T in Pune. cOdEgUru, who posted the article, made a slight (yet understandable) gaffe by writing "at the famous Indian Institute of Information Technology (India's foremost academic institution equivalent to MIT)". The venue was the I4T (or I2IT, to be polite and cool), and not one of the IITs (aka the I2Ts). The relevant extract of interest: I would like to narrate an event that took place in Rashtrapati Bhavan a few months back when I met Bill Gates, the CEO of Microsoft. While walking in the Mughal garden, we were discussing the future challenges in Information Technology including the issues related to software security. I made a point that we look for open source codes so that we can easily introduce the users built security algorithms. Our discussions became difficult since our views were different. The most unfortunate thing is that India still seems to believe in proprietary solutions. Further spread of IT which is influencing the daily life of individuals would have a devastating effect on the lives of society due to any small shift in the business practice involving these proprietory solutions. It is precisely for these reasons open source software need to be built which would be cost effective for the entire society. In India, open source code software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people. I2IT has to play a major role in this national mission.

Germany goes Linux, leaving MSFT behind. This deal is especially notable, because it involves desktop computers, not networked server computers, where Microsoft doesn't have as strong a presence in the market.