"And if you have free software, you can make the business decision to give a thousand people in your company, all experiencing the same problem, you can make the business decision to fix that problem, send that fix back, and make it work. I'm not saying we can get rid of the whole $5 gap. But if we can get it down to $2, that means we save as a world economy $3 billion a day. That would almost pay for the war in Iraq. Thank you very much."

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I have a confession to make. There's no software on earth I can't make dance and sing... except for photography programs. Whether it's Adobe Photoshop CS4 on a Mac or GIMP 2.6.3 on Linux, I'm a klutz. So, when I need to make my holiday photos look halfway decent, I try my best with easy to use photo programs like Photoshop Elements 7 or Google Picasa. While I'd like to see more Adobe programs, on Linux with Google's new release of Picasa 3 for Linux now here, I'm in no hurry to see Photoshop Elements on Linux.

Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company's search software for the Apple iPhone.

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like "Where's the nearest Starbucks?" or "How tall is Mount Everest?" The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google's servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.