OSNews

The GNOME foundation and the LiMo group announced a partnership to help push Linux forward in the consumer field. The only notice that anyone has seem to have taken is mockery. So why can someone announce some dedication to promoting open source software in the mobile space and generate no enthusiasm in the mobile space? Android.

GNOME developer Dave Neary has posted the highlights of his work to determine where contributions to GNOME come from. This "Census" is a combination of data mining and surveys that gives a snapshot of gnome activity and the profile of a GNOME contributor. This project's aims were to answer three questions in particular: What does the developer community look like? What companies are investing in GNOME, and how? What does the commercial ecosystem around the GNOME project look like?

During the currently ongoing GUADEC conference in Den Haag the GNOME release team announced that GNOME 3.0 would be delayed for another six months and is now scheduled for March 2011. "We could release in September and have something working that is okayish, but it's not up to the standards we have" release team member Vincent Untz explains the reasoning. There's coverage of this issue at derStandard.at and an official GNOME press release.

An interesting article at Ars Technica takes a look at some compelling data (the longer-than-normal processor update cycles in Apple's personal computer lineup) and speculates that Apple's enthusiasm for its partnership with Intel might be cooling. Like Apple's soured relationship with once-BFF Google, this may be the result of Intel's increasing activities in the mobile computing space.

So, there I am enjoying a nice Gilmore Girls episode after a long day's work, and Engadget's iPhone application brings the good news: the US Library of Congress has added a DMCA exemption for jailbreaking or rooting mobile phones! This is a major blow to Apple, who actively tried to keep jailbreaking a criminal offence, and a major win for everyone who believes that the phone you buy is actually yours, and not the manufacturer's.

India's Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal unveiled a touchscreen tablet that he claims they will be able to produce for just $35. The device is being aimed at students, and seems to be taking the One Laptop Per Child idea and running with it. "Despite the price, users will get a touch-screen, a PDF reader and a webcam for video conferencing. There has been no confirmation of its specifications but reports suggest 2GB of memory, Wi-Fi and Ethernet and power consumption at just 2W. Naturally, the device will run Linux."

Just after 3 weeks of the binary compatible vp8 decoder release, the FFMpeg team still impressing us but this time with a new benchmark of their own vp8 decoder. The new ffvp8 decoder written independently using pre-existent FFMpeg code-base is now the fastest vp8 decoder with margins going more than 30% faster than Google's official codec specially on 64bit machines.

"As a long-time fan of GeoWorks Ensemble (now Breadbox Ensemble), a DOS based graphical user interface and office suite popular in the 80s, I've run it under a variety of operating systems and emulators over the years. You see, Ensemble requires an underlying operating system to provide a DOS compatible file system, not unlike early versions of Windows that required DOS. [...] With the release of eComStation 2.0 I thought I'd revisit the challenge of getting Breadbox Ensemble running under OS/2 again [...] but to add a further twist, since I didn't want to do this on a dedicated machine, I chose to see if I could get things running under VirtualBox."

On July 15th the latest Android super-phone was released by Motorola and Verizon Wireless. All hail the Droid X. The release was not without controversy though. The Droid X, while greatly raising the bar for Android phones in general, does so at the expense of the very power users and community that made the original Droid the gotta-have phone it became. Alienating this group may have far reaching consequences for Motorola.

I'm a couch potato. There, I've said it. I love sitting down and watching sci-fi movies, like any good geek would. And this is an (almost religious) action that hasn't changed for many, many, years. But I feel that we're in for a surprise soon. The way we watch TV and access content is about to change. TV watching will at last arrive into the 21st Century, and the technology giants will be there to duke it out for the reins of this new industry.