Recent and controversial benchmarks for Windows 7 leave an important question unanswered: ‘Is it faster than GNU/Linux?’ Here, at last, is a benchmark that pits Ubuntu, Vista and Windows 7 against each other on the same modern hardware.

From install time to GUI efficiency, Ubuntu beats Windows and is often twice as fast. Where Windows 7 is competitive, the difference is something the average user would not notice. The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user.

While most children his age sketch on paper with crayons, nine-year old Lim Ding Wen from Singapore, has a very different canvas — his iPhone.

Lim, who is in fourth grade, writes applications for Apple’s popular iPhone. His latest, a painting program called Doodle Kids, has been downloaded over 4,000 times from Apple’s iTunes store in two weeks, the New Paper reported on Thursday.

The program lets iPhone users draw with their fingers by touching the iPhone’s touchscreen and then clear the screen by shaking the phone.

“I wrote the program for my younger sisters, who like to draw,” Lim said. His sisters are aged 3 and 5.

Lim, who is fluent in six programing languages, started using the computer at the age of 2. He has since completed about 20 programing projects.

His father, Lim Thye Chean, a chief technology officer at a local technology firm, also writes iPhone applications.

In a move that may throw a bit more revenue toward distressed news organizations, Google on Tuesday said that stories culled from its news aggregation service, Google News, can now be embedded on any Web site.

Paul Martino, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge, talks about the company’s “online discovery” tool, which essentially looks across hundreds of millions of Web sites and recommends content, products, and services to users in real time.
“The world is a quickly changing place and it’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of the news,” said Google’s Adam Feldman in a blog post. “With this in mind, we’ve just released a Google News-based element for Webmasters and developers. This makes it easy to integrate headlines and previews from Google News into any Web page, and for newspapers to reach new audiences across the Web.”

Google is providing an online form that it’s calling a NewsShow Wizard to help site owners generate the HTML code required to embed Google News on their Web pages. The generated code displays a slide show of Google News headlines based on chosen keywords. Here’s an example of how it works using the keyword “teleportation”: