"Team SOAK (Smart Operational Agriculture Kit) from Australia have been announced as the winners of the 2008 Imagine Cup!!! This is simply an amazing achievement, SOAK members Long Zheng, David Burela, Ed Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya have all come together from different Universities across Australia to create and complete their fantastic project, SOAK ."

Awesome work guys!

"A group of Australian University students, including one of Australia’s most well-known technology bloggers, has progressed to the finals of the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup software development competition in Paris. Students David Burela, Long Zheng, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya, collectively called Team SOAK, showcased a solution that helps farmers moderate the use of water on their crops."

Pretty cool... all the best guys!

"They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don't recognise: proprietary software. Microsoft's software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don't have the source code that programmers can read and change."

Surprisingly reasonable, but there still isn't an particularly viable alternative business model. Support puts the focus in the wrong place, as do services often. Why is software different anyway; do we expect Coke to provide their recipe publically? Maybe our economic system is the issue...

"Microsoft announced on Wednesday it will support ODF version 1.1 in the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), scheduled for the first half of 2009. The company will also support PDF and XPS in Office 2007 SP2. OOXML is partially supported in the current version of Microsoft's office productivity suite and, according to Microsoft's announcement, will not be fully supported in Office until the release of "Office 14", which as yet has no confirmed release date."

Yet to be see how well it'll support ODF and keep supporting ODF, but definitely a step in the right direction.

"According to an email sent last February by Microsoft general manager John Kalkman, the software giant lowered Windows Vista's minimum hardware requirements to ridiculous levels only because Intel needed to sell more graphics chipsets... "In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded," John Kalkman wrote to Scott Di Valerio, who oversaw Microsoft's dealings with PC partners."

Pretty explosive allegations if they're true, although Microsoft will still take the fall, just that now they'll drag someone down with them.

"It wasn't all Zune gaming at Microsoft's GDC keynote this morning -- a lot of time was spent discussing Community Games, the new official name for XNA-based games. Amateur devs will get "creator identities" along with their gamertags, and Live members can rate, grade, and discuss your efforts. Of course, as we've heard, games can move from the 360 to PCs to second-gen Zunes, which is definitely pretty cool..."

Been a long time in the making. The 3 platform trick is pretty neat too. Gonna go try it on my 360 now...

"The move could make it easier for many projects to work well with Microsoft products and potentially replace them -- for example the Thunderbird e-mail software could communicate better with Microsoft Exchange servers and also displace Microsoft Outlook on PCs. But Microsoft also made it clear that a pledge not to sue open source programmers only applied in "non-commercial" contexts, so open source fans didn't get everything they want."

Never thought they'd actually do this. About time. Now if only they have the guts to open up their specs completely so they'd face some serious competition, and hence be forced to release creative and innovative products. It'll only make them better I reckon.

"Lately a lot of you have said you really like OneNote but don't see any reason to use it beyond its tablet ink capabilities... so I sat down with Mike Tholfsen (who from now on we'll refer to as the OneNote Ninja) who talked about his dream of "OneNote Next-Gen Learning" and got some cool demos of the stellar features that you don't even need a tablet for but are must-haves for students today."

Nice short-ish video on the cool things you can do with OneNote in an university study context, even without a Tablet PC.

"Apple's been hit with antitrust lawsuits over the dominance of the iPod / iTunes system before, but there's a new case brewing down California way that argues not that Apple has illegally tied the iPod to iTunes, but that Apple has abused its dominant market position by not supporting WMA. That's right, we've come full circle -- Apple is now being accused of locking Microsoft out of the market. The case, brought by San Diego attorney Stacie Somers..."

Can't we all just get along? :)