The reason the United States lags many countries in both speed and affordability, according to people who study the issue, has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it is an economic policy problem - the lack of competition in the broadband industry.

Linux has a good range of open source software which helps users to organise their e-book collection, catch up on a novel, and to create, validate and publish their own e-book.

China’s Xiaomi only sells its smartphones and other devices in a handful of markets… but they’re big markets with large populations including China and India. So even though you can’t easily buy a Xiaomi phone in the US or Europe, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the company is selling a lot of phones. In fact, with Xiaomi shipping 18 million phones in the third quarter of 2014, two different reports suggest the company just became the third biggest smartphone company in the world.

You can now run the latest version of Internet Explorer on your Android, iOS, OS X or non-Windows 10 Windows machine. Microsoft has built and released something it calls RemoteIE, which allows developers to run the company’s browser preview builds without requiring them to be on the most current version of Windows.

Those who are eager to try out OS X Yosemite on any compatible Intel-based PC can follow a simple guide to install the same using UniBeast tool. The UniBeast tool creates a bootable installer via downloaded version of OS X Yosemite.

The Warpstock annual conference was held on Oct 24 to 26 on St. Louis, Missouri. These conferences are related to the OS/2 and eComStation platform. Currently there are two reviews of the event online at OS2World and at WarpCity2 blog. Between the relevant news there is a new company called "Arca Noae" that will focus on software development for the platform. They are working on ACPI, USB, Network and other drivers for the platform. Additionally Mensys also gave some light why there haven't been activity on the last year. Arca Noae announced driver releases and software subscription products for the users of this platform.

It's got a built-in GPS, so you can wear in around and don't have to take your phone. It's svelte and stylish. The display is small (keeping the device small) but it's high resolution and touchscreen. In addition to all the standard quantified self stuff, it supports mail, messaging, calendar, and alerts. It costs $199, and it's on sale now (for preorder). Most importantly, you can load it with Starbucks credit and use it to pay for lattes. Looks like a winner.

The FTDI FT232 chip is found in thousands of electronic baubles, from Arduinos to test equipment, and more than a few bits of consumer electronics. It’s a simple chip, converting USB to a serial port, but very useful and probably one of the most cloned pieces of silicon on Earth. Thanks to a recent Windows update, all those fake FTDI chips are at risk of being bricked. This isn’t a case where fake FTDI chips won’t work if plugged into a machine running the newest FTDI driver; the latest driver bricks the fake chips, rendering them inoperable with any computer.

Visopsys is an alternative OS for PC-compatibles. Version 0.75 is the third update this year, and is particularly focused on hardware, adding USB 3.0 (XHCI) and APIC interrupt controller support, as well as improved USB 2.0 and hub support. Downloads are available from here, and details are available in the change log

Asm.js deserves closer inspection for two reasons. First, it's the one "native browser VM" that doesn't massively reinvent wheels. Second, it's the only time a browser vendor's "next-gen JS" attempts have actually gotten everybody else to pay attention. But what are we transitioning into exactly?

Ars tells us The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that oversees the development of the specs used on the Web, today announced that the fifth major version of the hypertext markup language specification, HTML5, was today given Recommendation status, W3C's terminology for a final, complete spec.

Cnet interviews Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai, who's in charge of both Android and Chrome OS, and asks whether the two Google OSes will work more closely together or eventually merge. Merger is apparently not on the roadmap. The interview covers operational housekeeping among the Google OS teams, seriously moving into the "phablet" space, anti-theft mechanisms for mobiles,

I guess today's the day that people finally got around to trying to make Handoff work, because both Time and Gizmodo published short articles outlining the finicky steps it takes to get your Mac and iOS device to recognize each other. The key step seems to be to log off and back on to iCloud in both devices, because as with everything dealing with iCloud, it's a bit of a crap shoot. But when it does work, it's pretty nifty. The best part of the read was one of the comments on the Gizmodo with a classic quote from Anchorman: "60% of the time, it works every time."

Mozilla is hoping its Firefox OS can capture the interest of developers building media players and robotics with Raspberry Pi boards.