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Chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. It is one of the most popular games in the world, played by millions across the world, in clubs, by correspondence, in tournaments, and increasingly over the internet.

A podcast is a show that is available over the internet which is divided into parts or episodes. Podcasts include both audio and video files and are often downloaded through web syndication. When the term podcasting was invented back in 2004, this form of broadcasting was regarded as the new face of radio journalism.

Internet radio is an audio service delivered over the internet. This type of service can offer personalized streams of music and is often seen as a promising medium for promoting recorded music.

Google Earth has received so much press coverage that many users will appreciate that it is one of the coolest applications to download. In brief, it is a feature-laden 3D virtual globe, map and geography browser which lets users zoom in on their world with fantastic detail.

Pay-what-you want is a pricing system where buyers decide how much to pay for a commodity. One of the most notable examples of this pricing system being used was when Radiohead allowed fans to choose what price they paid for their album In Rainbows.

Document-oriented databases are particular strong in situations where horizontal scalability is required. As your database grows, additional servers or resources from the cloud can be added thereby avoiding the need to use expensive supercomputers.

There is a market for Linux commercial games which is still largely untapped. This offers a real opportunity for indie developers, who lack significant funding, to generate good sales. The more publicity that indie games receive should hopefully entice their developers to release further titles, as well as encouraging new entrants to the scene.

It cannot be denied that there remains a paucity of games for Linux produced by the large well known gaming companies. It is sometimes perceived that part of the reason rests with Linux gamers themselves. Given the number and variety of addictive high quality open source games, it is perhaps understandable that many Linux gamers might not appear to want to pay high ticket prices for games. Further, it is a fact that the markedly smaller Linux user base means that sales of commercial titles will inevitably be lower than games released on many other platforms, making ports to Linux less financially attractive.

If Linux is to achieve a promiment place on the desktop, we believe there needs to be commercial titles ported to this platform as a matter of routine. For example, many desktop users like to play games. There are thousands of free games available for Linux. Yet there is also a place for commercial games. However, one of the disappointments faced by Linux gaming enthusiasts is the promise of commercial titles from video game publishers that are never released or are continually being delayed. For example, we were particularly looking forward to the port of Unreal Tournament 3 to Linux. Yet this will never see the light of day.

Bioinformatics has been defined in many different ways, but it is common ground to regard this discipline as the application of mathematics, computing and statistics to the analysis of biological information. The objective of bioinformatics is to enable the finding of new biological insights, and to create a broader, more critical view from which unifying principles in biology can be perceived.

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of living things, ranging from microscopic organisms up to the largest known animal, the blue whale. It is divided into many specialized fields including evolution, ecology, zoology, botany, genetics, microbiology and molecular biology. This science examines function, structure, origin, growth, evolution, distribution and taxonomy.

Physics is a natural science concerned with the study of matter and energy applying laws that govern natural phenomena. It encompasses the study of the universe from the largest galaxies to subatomic particles, covering mechanics, radiation, heat, electricity, sound, magnetism and the structure of atoms.

Chemistry is the study of matter and the changes it undergoes. It is an extremely vivacious science which deals with a molecular scale and atomic interpretation of the world we live in, helping us to understand that world. Chemistry is regarded as the central science, given its close links with physics and engineering, with biology and medicine, and with geology and earth science.

Astronomy is particularly well suited to the layperson. It is a wonderful hobby which has almost no age limits, it is open to individuals of all financial means, and there is always the potential for an amateur to discover something that has eluded professional astronomers, or to help monitor stars and track asteroids. Even with the unaided eye, there is much to study in the night sky including constellations, shooting stars, planets, and of course the moon, the Earth's only natural satellite.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation satellite system consisting of a network of satellites which provide positioning, navigation, and timing services in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth.

Linux has an ever-expanding library of tens of thousands of free games, many of which are released under an open source license. Of course, a significant proportion of these titles are still in an early stage of development.

The plethora of free games available for Linux makes it time-consuming for gamers to randomly try even more than a small fraction of them. A good proportion of these titles are entertaining, highly addictive, offer captivating gameplay, and are challenging. Whilst there are a variety of both printed publications and online resources which point gamers to the hottest Linux gaming titles, there are still many free games that receive little or no promotion but which exhibit real promise and merit publicity.

There are not many people that are immune from the charms of computer games at some stage of their life. Even the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, is reported to have been hooked on playing a single game for a month.

Data mining (also known as knowledge discovery) is the process of gathering large amounts of information, analyzing that information and condensing it into meaningful data. It brings together the fields of computer science, statistics and artificial intelligence.

In computing terms, a cache is a collection of temporary data that will be required to be accessed in the future, and can be retrieved extremely quickly. The data stored within a cache may be a simple reproduction of information held elsewhere or it may have been the results of a previous computation. Where data stored in the cache is requested, this is known as a cache hit. The advantage of a cache hit is that the request will be served considerably faster. The flipside, a cache miss, occurs when information has to be recalculated or retrieved from its original location, consuming more system resources and slower access. If 20% of data is accessed 80% of the time, and a system can be utilised which reduces the cost and time of obtaining that 20%, system performance will dramatically improve. Fine tuning a system to improve the cache hit rate speeds up overall system performance.