Due to a faulty computerized billing system, bills aren’t going out to water customers in Portland, Oregon. The city water bureau estimates it is losing a little over $13,000 a day as they struggle to fix a computer system that has been broken since it was turned on in February 2000.

As complaints about the bureau and its chairman, Erik Sten, pile up, a group of Linux gurus think they can solve the problem. But city hall–through no fault of its own, Sten says–has its hands tied.

“We need to get this thing functioning [in its current state] to stay in business”, Sten said. And that’s just what he and the system’s creator, UK-based Severn Trent Systems, are trying to do: get the thing running.
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Forty-three top students at the Shree Bachhauli Secondary School in Bachhauli, Nepal are learning computer programming, a skill that could keep them out of the child-labor market and rocket them into higher education and a real job after graduation. Their school has 14 teachers and over 600 students, but the computer classes are kept small and staffed by German and Swiss volunteers who work for a group called Ganesha’s Project. They make do with donated machines and focus on open-source software like Linux, a move that cuts the cost of acquiring software licenses for an already impoverished school system.
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Transmeta, the Linus-loving, super-efficient chip manufacturer, this week announced two new mobile devices that knock the socks off of current PDA and laptop offerings.

The devices, OQO Inc.’s Ultrapersonal Computer and Antelope Technologies Mobile Computer Core (MCC), are fully functional, Crusoe-based 1GHz workstations about the size of a deck of playing cards.
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The veterans at New York’s PC Expo were amazed; they remembered years when the exposition floor was jammed with people. “It was hard to get across the room”, I heard someone say. “It was hard to pass people in the aisles.”
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