If you haven't picked up a Chromebook just yet, you might want to wait a little longer. Intel has just announced plans to roll out as many as 20 new Chromebooks by the latter half of this year. This new set will be thinner, lighter, more powerful and generally more diverse in terms of design. It's clear that Google is making a play for the mainstream.

When a federal jury two years ago clobbered Samsung with nearly $1 billion in damages for violating Apple's iPhone and iPad patent rights, the jury foreman emphasized that the verdict was meant to send a strong message about copying in the tech industry.

But there was no such deliberate message in the verdict in the latest patent showdown between Apple and Samsung that drew to an end on Monday, according to jurors who spoke outside the federal courthouse after finishing their role. In fact, the jury foreman said the mixed verdict in the trial sequel was not intended to send any broader message in the smartphone wars.

"Ultimately, the consumer is the loser in all this," Dunham said. "I'd like to see them find a way to settle. I hope this (verdict) in some way helps shape that future."

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It's a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

This file is Good Code.

The jury found Samsung's gadgets infringed Apple's '647 patent, but not the '959 patent or '414 patent. Results were mixed for the '721 patent, with some Samsung devices, such as the Galaxy Nexus, found to infringe, and others not.

The jury awarded Apple only $119.6 million for the infringement.

Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

I deeply, truly, desperately want Apple to add a Files app and DocumentPicker controller to the iPhone and iPad in iOS 8. I've wanted it going on 4 years, and every year more than the last. It is, in my very humble opinion, one of the biggest, most frustrating holes remaining on Apple's mobile operating system, and all the more so because it seems like a model for fixing it has been in successful use for years already. Right now we're saddled with the complexity and frustration of iOS documents locked in app and iCloud jails. We're driven to outdated filesystems like Dropbox because Apple hasn't yet provided a next generation alternative. It needs to happen and so I'm once again asking for it this year and for iOS 8.

The Android Silver project, which was rumored earlier this month, has today been corroborated by four fresh sources, all of whom point to a major shift in Google's mobile strategy. The Information reports that the current scheme of offering Nexus-branded handsets with Google's unadulterated vision of the best Android user experience will be scrapped, to be replaced by a set of high-end Silver phones that will closely adhere to it. The change is both expansive and expensive, as Google is said to be planning to spend heavily on promoting these devices in wireless carriers' stores and through advertising, essentially subsidizing the development and marketing costs for its hardware partners.

In exchange for this new contribution, Google will gain tighter control over the software shipping on the selected phones. The promise is that the company will clean up third-party bloatware, ensure prompt and reliable software updates, and introduce a real standard and consistency to the user experience across Android Silver devices. LG and Motorola are identified as the likeliest candidates for taking part, with the first phones anticipated as soon as next year, while Samsung, HTC, and Sony might need a bit more convincing. Then again, all three of the latter companies already offer Google Play Editions of their leading phones, which might be the closest analog we have at the moment for what an Android Silver device will look and act like.

Whether newly appointed president Rick Osterloh's team can navigate the shifting targets that now lie before it is anyone’s guess: it’s no secret that companies not named Apple or Samsung have a hell of a time squeezing money from the brutal and fickle smartphone market. That dynamic alone precipitates enough stress, but Motorola is also in the midst of being traded from a comfortable home with Google to Chinese giant Lenovo, the biggest maker of PCs on the planet. And through all of this, it needs to keep delivering world-beating smartphones at a backbreaking pace without skipping a beat.

And then there's the Moto 360.

As part of some maintenance here, I did a little research as to how to set up NetBoot for various different Macs. For this piece, interchange 'NetBoot' with 'NetInstall' if you're being pedantic - I'm NetBooting the install disc for a particular OS. NetBooting a full install should also be possible using the same techniques.

Mavericks Server (an app free to all developers) has a built-in NetBoot (NetInstall) server GUI, but it only supports a handful of modern versions of OS X. Thankfully, if you follow the instructions in the bootpd manpage you can manually build NetBoot images supporting both PowerPC and Intel Macs going back to OS X v10.2.

Microsoft has already made Windows free to OEMs for tablets with screens below a certain size. Making it free to everyone but without the desktop would be a logical extension of this. It gives Microsoft the tools to compete with both Android on tablets and Chrome OS on laptops, while still not cutting it out of the revenue loop entirely. Desktop-less Windows should provide Microsoft with some amount of revenue through applications bought in the Store.

To this, add a couple of levels of unlocks: one tier for regular Windows desktop features (offering parity with the feature set of Windows 8.1 today), and a second, higher tier for Windows corporate features (offering parity with Windows 8.1 Pro). These could be both persistent unlocks or periodic subscriptions. Microsoft has already had persistent operating system unlocks since Windows Vista's Anytime Upgrade feature, so none of this would be hugely different from what's gone before.

The PC-BSD project is developing its own desktop environment from scratch! The ultimate plan is for Lumina to become a full-featured, open-source desktop environment that may ultimately replace KDE as its default desktop environment.

A Phoronix reader, Ryan Bram, wrote in to share word on this new desktop environment being developed by the PC-BSD crew, the popular desktop-focused derivative of FreeBSD. This new desktop is called Lumina and is being developed as a home-grown desktop environment catered toward this BSD operating system.