Linus Torvalds, the guy who started the Linux project some 17 years ago (and whose autobiography I recommend), now has a blog. He talks about it in this interview.

Until now, the easiest place to find words of wisdom from Linus has been in the quotes between entries at Kernel Trap.

However much you understand about the mechanics of the Linux (or any other kind of) kernel — and I understand very little, Linus is a compelling figure by any stretch.

I found it interesting to read this Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols post about Wikipedia moving its servers from a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

It's hard to see exactly why they didn't opt for the free CentOS version of RHEL, so it's not just about the distro being free and having long-term support.

Some say it's the easier upgrade path for Debian-based distros like Ubuntu, the difference in package management between apt-based Debian-like systems and RPM/Yum-based Red Hat-like systems.

Whatever the reason, it's a big win for Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical. I've never really thought of Ubuntu as a server OS because they seem to be all about the desktop experience, and I figure that Debian is a way more popular choice on the server.

But there must be something (or a combination of somethings) from an operational standpoint, whether it be installation and maintenance, long-term support, hardware compatibility, remote/automated management options, reliability or performance that is driving a company/entity like Wikipedia to adopt Ubuntu on the server.

The blogospheric din is rising about Apple's supposed $800 laptop, which if it ever happens (and I have my doubts) will really hit hard on the Windows-based laptop market.

With Linux starting to eat away at the very low end of the laptop market on the ASUS EeePC and other netbooks, Apple dominating on the high-end (where it's share is considerable), the mushy middle is where most of the action is.

Having an $800 Macintosh laptop hits the bulk of the market and would steer plenty of people away from Windows and toward OS X. And like the iPod and iPhone's tendency to get their users to think about going all-Apple with an expensive desktop or laptop machine, a relatively inexpensive laptop is a hell of a game-changer.

Should this actually happen, Apple will have what looks like the right product at the right price — and at the exactly right time.

Let's see: Windows Vista not doing so well, and certainly not driving PC sales. Economy in the tank. The holiday season upon us.

If anything, it's a good time to buy some Apple stock.

Update: Debian Project leader Steve McIntyre expects Debian Lenny to go Stable at the end of October.
...

The Debian Project neither sets nor adheres to defined release dates for its GNU/Linux distribution.

Basically, they have the "we'll release when ready" philosophy, and given that a version of Debian that has been designated as Stable actually does mean something to users, I'm fine to wait.

According to an entry on Linux Pro Magazine's site, while some are pushing to get Lenny
to Stable sometime in 2008, others think it will take until mid-2009.

I've been using Debian Lenny — currently Debian's Testing distribution — for quite a few months now. And while I have my issues with Lenny on my Gateway laptop, just about everything works. As far as features go, Lenny represents quite a leap from Etch, especially on the desktop.

One thing about Testing, as opposed to Stable, is that there are lots of updates to download and install. If you are OK with that, it's not annoying, but it's nice for me to boot my current Etch box (a Power Macintosh G4) and know that I won't have 50 packages that need updating. Usually there are no updates at all.

As a kind of bonus, a longer wait for Lenny to go Stable means an equally longer period of support from the Debian Project for both Etch and Lenny.

Going backward for a minute, it took me quite a while to figure out that when a particular Debian distribution goes Stable, the former Stable distribution goes to Old Stable status, after which it will get an additional year of support in the form of security and bug patches from the project. So if Lenny does in fact go Stable in June '09, that means Etch will be supported until June 2010. Since Etch was designated Stable in April 2007, that would give it a "Stable/Old Stable" life of three years and two months, which I think is about right, especially for a server OS.

More on the run-up to Lenny:

• Debian Linux needs your help, by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

OK, so the bar is fairly low when it comes to pages about how to deal with the Gateway Solo 1450 and Linux. This page is the only place I've seen a sane way to deal with the CPU fan (besides my mentions of it). Here at least you can find out how to set the trip points.

The page is fairly old (2004), and I reproduce the fan section here if only because I fear the page disappearing:

Turning off the Fan
If you were wondering why I made this page despite the fact that there are several already out there, it was for this section right here. The general solution to this problem is to make some stupid shell script that checks the temperature and manually activates/deactivates the fan. This is the wrong way to do it. You see, since you already went through the hassle of installing the latest ACPI patch, you can make use of the kernel's ability to do this for you!

Add this to the earliest boot script you can find, like rc.sysinit under Redhat. The idea is that you want to turn off the fan before you start fsck'ing your disk so that you can squeeze the most out of your battery life.

echo 100:90:85:80:80 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points
echo 30 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency

# It's safe to turn the fan off now.
echo -n 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

WARNING These numbers represent the temperature in Celsius at which each state should be triggered. The numbers you should inject into "/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points" may be different for your computer. Before you set these numbers, check what the current values are set to by using cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points. Note that while some fields may be omitted when you read this file (on my machine the Hot field is not shown), all fields must be set when you write to it. The correct order is Critical:Hot:Passive:Active0:Active1 (note colon seperation).

Alternatively, you can use this shell script which I wrote to do the same thing in a more user friendly manner. This script only changes the fields which you mean to change, and not any others. I highly recommend that you use this script (below) because it has the least chance of melting your processor.

function reset_trip_points
{
if [ -f /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points -a -f /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency ]
then

ifs=$IFS
IFS="
"
for i in `cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points`
do
j="${i%% C*}"
j="${j##* }"
i=${i%%[ :]*}
i=${i//[][]/}
case "$i" in
critical|hot|passive|active0|active1)
eval "[ \"x\$$i\" = x0 ] && $i=\$j"
;;
esac
done
IFS=$ifs

echo $critical:$hot:$passive:$active0:$active1 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points

# Activate the kernel's temperature control system
echo 30 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency

# It's safe to turn the fan off now.
echo -n 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state
fi
}

# Set the new value for the temperature you would like to change, or leave it
# at zero to get the default.
critical=0
hot=0
passive=0
active0=0
active1=80

# Make the Kernel handle CPU temperature management.
# Do this before the filesystem checks so that the fan will turn off and stop
# draining the battery.
reset_trip_points

I haven't made a secret of the fact that I've never really delved into Google's Gmail, even though I automatically have an account due to my much heavier use of Google Docs and previous use of Google Groups.

All that changed in recent weeks due to my ISP DSL Extreme's decision to transfer all of its mail accounts from its own servers to Gmail.

I mainly use my DSL Extreme e-mail address for mailing lists. I have my OpenBSD and Debian mailing list traffic — which can be considerable — on that e-mail address just to keep it separate from the rest of my mail.

I never did like the DSL Extreme Web mail interface, and the fact that it's going away in a week doesn't bother me one bit.

But since DSL Extreme allowed users appropriately extreme flexibility in handling their mail, I've used it consistently, just not in a Web interface.

Instead I've used external mail clients — particularly Thunderbird in Windows — to process the mail, accessing it via IMAP and filtering it into folders that live on the server.

Since the connection to the mail servers can be fully encrypted and of the IMAP or POP variety, I've used my account fairly regularly.

My "lifestyle," whatever that means, makes IMAP work way better for me than POP, which downloads mail to a single computer, and since I'm in front of a half-dozen different computers in different places, POP doesn't work for me at all.

I was worried that the transition to Gmail for my DSL Extreme account would mean that POP and IMAP access would be gone, and I would be limited to the unfamiliar Gmail Web interface only.

But that is not the case. I can read the mail via POP or IMAP with any mail client software, and now I have a lot more space — about 7 GB, even though I can't ever see needing that much.

And I've discovered a few rudimentary things about the Gmail interface that just might have me using it more and more — and dumping traditional mail clients entirely.

Right now, the reason is organization. I've relied on the folders and filters of Thunderbird to bring some semblance of order to the heavy volume of mailing-list traffic I receive.

I'm limited only by the folders themselves. A message can only be in a single folder at a time, and that makes finding things difficult in some instances.

But Gmail uses labels instead of folders, and an individual e-mail message can have as many or as few labels as I wish. So I can, for instance have a message from the debian-user mailing list begin its life with the labels INBOX and Debian. I can delete it if I don't need it, and that's what happens most of the time. But if I want to save that e-mail, I can remove the INBOX and Debian labels and effectively archive the conversation by giving it a Debian Saved label.

The other way Gmail helps me with mailing-list messages in specific, and the rest of my e-mail in general, is by grouping messages that are replies to each other together when I read one of the messages in that particular group. I think this is what Gmail refers to as "conversations," but again, I'm so new at this that I'm unsure of the terminology.

What I am sure of is that this labeling and grouping, which at first looks more than a bit forbidding, is in fact quite useful.

Another thing Google does with Gmail is bring together all of the Google services I use (and many I don't but just might try).

I'm already using the Google Chrome browser to access Gmail, and when I click a link called Sites, I have the option to create secure Web pages, gather information on them and control who has access to them. In short, it's a great, free tool for collaboration over the Web. In that way, it's a valuable extension to Google Docs (also easily navigable to from the Gmail interface), which is already performing very well as a collaborative tool used by many of us at the Daily News.

I'm trying to use Google Docs to bring some kind of order to my own documents. I'll have to get back to you on that one. I finally do have offline access to Docs (via the Google Gears API), and I'm less than impressed with its reliability and speed on my Gateway 1.3 GHz/1 GB RAM laptop. Gears and offline Docs are both still relatively young, so there's plenty of room for improvement.

One more thing: Chat.

Since I've been guesting in the Op-Ed department for the past week and a couple days, I'm not on my own PC, and as a result all my usual apps, from Pidgin to Thunderbird to Notepad++ and Filezilla are not installed.

I did add Google Chrome after Firefox 2 started acting up on me. And on this PC, Internet Explorer 7 has actually been less of a dog than I remember. I did get the installer for FF 3, but I've yet to do the install.

I said I was going to get to chat ... and I am.

Since I didn't have Pidgin, which I use to bring my Yahoo!, AOL/AIM and Google chat accounts under one app, I switched from the "Classic" Yahoo Mail Web interface to the "All-New" version of Yahoo Mail, which is designed to look and act like a traditional local mail client, with drag-and-drop capability.

The reason I haven't been using the "new" interface until now is that its relatively large graphical load doesn't play well with some of my, ahem, older hardware, and the speed of the "old" Yahoo Mail is very much needed on those creaky laptops and desktops.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, I opted for the "new" Yahoo Mail so I could use the integrated Yahoo Messengher client. When you want to chat with one of your Yahoo contacts, all you do is click on their name, and a chat window opens in your mail interface. That way, you can use Yahoo Messenger without needing to have the application installed on your computer.

Now I'm bringing things around to my point, which is Google. Google's chat service — Google Talk — has a "gadget" that mimics a standalone IM applications but can be used on any PC with a compatible Web browser. That way you can use Google Talk from just about any Web-connected PC without worrying about individual clients or Pidgin.

I only have one person who I use Google Talk to IM, so I'm probably better off using Pidgin if I can, but it's nice to see so much innovation in chat from Google and Yahoo. For all I know, AIM has the same capability, but since I've probably checked my AOL mail ... maybe once or twice ... since I first signed up for AIM a few years ago, I know nothing about it. I also remember AOL Mail as offering IMAP and POP to its users, and for that reason alone it might be well worth investigating as a mail solution.

Note: I remember hearing that Google was "rolling out" IMAP access to Gmail users and not granting it to all at once. Since my DSL Extreme account is not part of the regular Gmail throng, I appear to have both IMAP and POP as part of the deal between DSL Extreme and Google.

Summing up: A bit long and rambly, don't you think? I'm just trying to think out loud about how deep I'm getting into the world of Google and its services.

There's been a loud, long argument in the free, open-source software community (and at LXer in particular) about what cloud computing means for open-source software, users, freedom and all of that. For me, the freedom to have my files live in the cloud and be accessed from anywhere I'm networked is trumping almost everything else.

I'd love for the Google Docs interface to get more sophisticated about things like indented paragraphs and smart quotes — two of my typographical pet peeves. The technology is there, since Docs is based on HTML and CSS and can do anything that those two sophisticated technologies allow (and that is quite a lot).

And as I've said more than a few times recently, having the option of working with my cloud-based files either through Web interfaces or via the same kinds of locally based applications we all use today is something I'm very interested in seeing happen. It's kind of ironic that the company I see buying into this concept (although their plans and offerings are presented in such a cryptic way that I can never really tell just what they're planning) is Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft's dependence on traditional apps like MS Office and the billions it brings them has profoundly affected the company's strategy for cloud-based data and apps. At the end of the day, a melding of local client apps that are not necessarily Web browsers could very well be more efficient than doing everything through the browser. (Or not; it's too early to tell at this point).

The more data we have, from text files to images, audio and video, is increasingly hard to get a handle on. We need help storing, backing up, categorizing and utilizing all of this data. In my mind, it all points to the cloud.

Depending on how you look at it, it's a little "Matrix"-y, "HAL 9000"-ish, "Neuromancer"-like

All I know is that Sun's "The Network Is the Computer" mantra is becoming more true every day. Some of that will be good, some not. And that goodness/other will differ from person to person, application to application and entity to entity.

We won't be limited to the huge cloud providers. There will still be traditional servers everywhere, along with clients in more shapes, sizes and guises than you could imagine. And the lone-PC-in-the-wilderness won't go away, just as paper itself has survived in this most computer-infused of ages.

But the cloud model is real. And it's growing.

Companies that understand this will prosper, others not so much.

Make Tech Easier is one of the best how-to blogs I've seen in a long time.

It features tips for both new and experienced users on how to maintain your PCs and make them run better.

Taking a look at the first couple of screens, I saw plenty of tips for everything from Ubuntu to OS X, the iPhone to Vista.

In short, it's not confined to any one platform. But the tips I've seen are detailed and very, very useful. The site won't win any awards for design, but the content is extremely good. Take a look.

Both Ubuntu and the Debian distribution on which it's based use the GNOME desktop. Many applications appear in both systems, but there are differences.

Debian is primarily installed with a network-install image of about 150 MB, and most of the 700 or so packages that make up what's called the Desktop installation come over the Internet.

Ubuntu is primarily installed via a live CD, and all of its packages must fit on a 700 MB CD that the user either burns themself from an ISO image or gets pre-made from another source. There is an alternate install image available that works much like Debian's text-based installer, but it still pulls all of its packages from the CD and not over the network. Pulling all packages from the CD means a network connection isn't needed for the install, but many packages will need to be updated once a connection is established. In Debian, since the majority of packages are pulled from networked repositories, there are fewer that mus be upgraded immediately following the installation.

And the Ubuntu philosophy doesn't call for packing as many things into the installation by default. The menus are more spare, and there is no equivalent to the "Debian Menu," through which just about every application on the system can be started.

So whether you call it clean and logical or sparse and lacking, the Ubuntu GNOME desktop starts out quite a bit more lean than the equivalent in Debian.

I use both systems on many different boxes, including i386 and Mac Power PC, and I see good reasons to use both.

At this moment in time, I'm seeing the wisdom in the leaner Ubuntu menus, which can be fleshed out with the exact apps the user needs.

But both systems have a whole lot of applications in their repositories, so it's equally possible to make a Ubuntu system act and look just like a standard Debian system, just as it's possible to make Debian look like Ubuntu -- in terms of application choice and placement in the menus, anyway.

I've advocated in the past for a Debian installer and/or live CD that installed the exact same applications as Ubuntu, but in the Debian environment. It'd would be a great way to get Ubuntu people to try Debian, and I think the relatively stripped-down menus in such a version of Debian would be attractive to a great many users.

I got the great "Essential System Administration" by Æleen Frisch via interlibrary loan this week. It was published in 2002 and is really not all that useful in 2008. I've been keeping an eye on publishing company O'Reilly, and it looks like when it comes to system-administration books in general, and Linux books in particular, things have slowed down quite a bit.

There's Carla Schroder's networking book, yet another Ubuntu book about to come out, "Linux System Administration," but little else, especially in the year 2008.

Is there no market for Linux system books? Especially ones that don't focus on Ubuntu? I'd like O'Reilly to put out some meaty books, but they seem to be all over the place and not doing OS books at all.

I ran the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) all day today and didn't have a single crash, a single problem with X, or any other kind of problem.

Among the things I did today:

• I used rsync to bring the /home file from my previous Ubuntu 8.04 installation into the new one (which now has /home on its own partition). It only took me three tries to get the right rsync command to a) work and b) put everything in its proper place. Rsync is too geeky, but I was able to muddle through.
• I somehow managed to get Google Docs working offline with Gears. While the Docs/Gears offline thing came together immediately for me in Wolvix Hunter a couple of months ago, getting my documents to show up offline with Firefox 3 in Ubuntu 8.04 has been a bit of a challenge. Something happened today — I can't say what — but it appears to be working fine. We'll see what happens when I fire up the laptop later. P.S. Google Docs offline is still a bit too slow for comfort.
• Debian Lenny's X problems (artifacts on screen) persist. I remain unhappy in that respect.
• Three geeky cheers for Ubuntu, eh?

We have a Mac at home, and we have a digital camera, too.

Nothing unusual there, right?

So we use iPhoto, part of the often-free-with-your-Mac iLife suite, to download and manage our digital photos.

OK, Ilene does it. Truth be told, I look to her to help me with most things Mac since the iBook G4 is her main computer, which she uses for everything related to the classes she teaches, from research and preparing PowerPoint presentations to delivering those presentations, creating tests and assignments, logging grades, blogging and way more.

I did rescue the iBook from an ailing hard drive, an operation that took more than a couple hours of sweaty, painstaking work to complete.

Once I set up a backup drive with SuperDuper for this 10.3.9-equipped laptop (which doesn't have and won't be getting OS X 10.5's Time Machine), I figured I was done with Mac crises for the time being.

Then iPhoto "forgot" how to display our many thousand photos.

Upon starting the application, the screen would read "Loading Photos ..." forever. Yet the photos, in their many iPhoto-created folders, were right where they always have been. A check of iPhoto in a smaller account with only a few hundred photos revealed that iPhoto, the application, was working.

It was just the database holding our 3,000+ photos that wasn't working.

I did everything recommended in David Pogue's excellent "iLife '05: The Missing Manual." I threw out Preferences files, ditched database files, relaunched iPhoto a half-dozen times.

Nothing worked.

Finally I resorted to the last remaining tip from "iLife '05: The Missing Manual": The iPhoto Extractor application.

I installed iPhoto Extractor, turned it loose on my "damaged" iPhoto database, extracted the 3,000+ photos, then reimported them into iPhoto.

Sure, any changes we made to individual photos (including rotating them so they were right-side up), any albums we may have created to organize said photos (and yes, we had many) were gone.

But the photos themselves were all there.

I have my idol David Pogue to thank for that (any tech journalist with his own book imprint richly deserves idolatry — and gets it from me, big time).

I also have the people behind iPhoto Extractor to thank for dragging all of those photos out of the many, many folders created by iPhoto in which they're stored and allowing me to see them all, back them up without all that iPhoto baggage and then reimport them into iPhoto, something I did but am not very happy about at all.

I'd be more happy just creating my own system of folders and files which wouldn't be compromised by the application that created them.

For the time being, I'll keep using iPhoto (although I should probably upgrade to a newer version than the Version 4 we have now), but I'll be very, very interested to know what my non-iLife options are for managing and archiving photos in OS X.

I'm giving this a try. Having the screen blank when I close the laptop lid in Ubuntu hasn't worked out so well. That usually hangs the system with the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I went into the Power Management settings in GNOME and changed them. Now when the lid is closed, the laptop should go into suspend.

So far that seems to be working. Upon opening the lid, I hit the power button to resume the computer.

I'm wondering if my freezing-cursor problem (from which I can only recover with a hard reboot) is somehow related to suspend/resume. That would be logical, since I don't have suspend/resume turned on in Debian Lenny due to that feature not working in that distro.

Irrespective of the cursor-freezing issue, having the machine suspend with lid closing is better than having the screen blank. At least this way X doesn't crash.

I still might be in a position to heap praise upon Ubuntu 8.04 for its performance on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) since I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago with a separate /home partition and a not-screwed-up UUID scenario.

But I keep getting these freezes in which ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete won't save me. I have to do a hard reset with the power button.

Now this could be due to the shaky nature of my power connection (the power jack from the laptop's brick doesn't quite meet up with the hacked power plug I installed to make this laptop work after I first acquired it). Having a dead battery doesn't help.

I need to figure out whether my freezes in Ubuntu are due to the OS itself or due to the flaky power situation.

I finally got a replacement power jack at Fry's that I could use on the power brick to make a foolproof connection.

It could be chance, but this freezing problem never happens in Debian Lenny, which has problems of its own (related to X refresh, and chronicled in agonizing detail on this very blog).

I will confirm that suspend/resume continues to work, as does everything else. Except for this cursor-freezing.

Again, I'm not ready to blame Ubuntu and am more inclined to blame the power jack/plug situation. I am keeping an eye on the problem.

Another 150 or so updates rolled into Debian Lenny recently, including new Xorg and Intel video driver packages. For the upteenth time, I'm hoping for the miracle of properly refreshing X. It didn't do so well yesterday just after the updates, but there were some "enhancements" to the Debian login screen, principally the word "Debian" appearing in the upper left portion of the screen.

Again, my hope is that this X problem somehow solves itself and I can continue using Debian on this laptop. Again, no breath being held.

Remember my fit-PC post of a few days ago, in which the announcement of an ultra-small, somewhat-reasonably price, Linux-running PC wasn't accompanied by a working link on where and how to buy it?

Well, reader ludovicus came through with a working link at which to purchase the fit-PC in the U.S. and Canada. (Click here for worldwide shipping).

With the AMD Geode LX800 processor (500MHz), 512 MB of RAM, built-in WiFi, a 60 GB hard drive and preinstalled with Ubuntu 8.04 and Gentoo 2008.1 in a dual-boot configuration, the fit-PC Slim is $295 plus $20 shipping, also known as $315. (I'm not sure why more than a few users would want to dual-boot Ubuntu and Gentoo; I'd rather have one or the other.)

When compared to other small-PC offerings, the fit-PC comes out rather well, given its specs. Having the hard drive, half-megabyte of RAM and WiFi certainly puts it ahead of the competition. The Linutop 2 (pictured at right) has a faster AMD Geode processor (800 MHz), and 1 GB internal flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive (which one is preferable depends on your application). No WiFi, either. Linutop does its own Ubuntu-based distro which fits on the 1 GB flash chip and gives you 400 MB to spare for your files.

The problem with Linutop: It costs 280 euros, which is well north of $500.

The fit-PC is small and fanless, but some might be cautious about running a full Linux (or Windows) desktop in 500 MHz of CPU. Having the 512 MB of RAM (as opposed to 256 or 128 MB) will really help speed things up, but a test of this box is definitely in order. If the overall hardware (including video and sound) is good, performance should be acceptable. The problem with more CPU is the need for more power — and the generation of much additional heat.

In regards to what will and won't run on the fit-PC, start here. As far as what will run and how well, I'd love for Debian to be farther along.

The fit-PC box:

More fit-PC:

• fit-PC slim specifications
  
• The fit-PC Forum
  
• OpenBSD runs on the fit-PC

You might wonder why President Bush is scheduled to address the nation at 9 p.m. EDT (watch here on AP's live feed if you have Internet Explorer).

My guess? It's because "Dancing With the Stars" starts at 8 p.m., when we find out who's getting dumped from the show (aside from Jeff Ross, who I've never heard of and who already got booted, the ABC Web site tells me) in its first week:

What will the president be up against at 9 p.m. Eastern? On ABC, "David Blaine: Dive of Death," in which the quirky magician/illusionist/nutcase presumably dives to what could very well be his death. Quite the metaphor for President Bush.

Luckily (or not), the speech starts at 6 p.m. on the West Coast, so watchers of "Dancing With the Stars" and "David Blaine: Dive of Death" have absolutely nothing to worry about.

President Bush is going up against a plethora of death at 9 p.m. On Fox, the Brad Garrett sitcom " 'Til Death" airs. CBS has "Criminal Minds," and no, I'm not going there, but you are welcome to do so. NBC has "America's Got Talent," where I presume they're not looking for the nation's best CEOs, and the CW has a repeat of the not-old-enough-to-be-in-repeats "Beverly Hills, 91210" remake.

Why the AP's live video plays in Internet Explorer only: Microsoft developed the application for the Associated Press. Can you tell? The whole AP video service used to be IE only, but now the prerecorded videos can be played on any computer with Flash. But the live videos are still IE only. I'm not happy about it, but there it is.