Apple held its keynote speech just now, kicking off its developer conference. The company announced minor refreshes for its laptop line, introduced a stunning new laptop with a Retina display, and gave a sneak peek of iOS 6, which will launch in the Fall.

So, Google has made it very hard to install Chrome extensions outside of the Chrome Web Store - out of security concerns. In addition, they sprung this on users and extension developers without much consultation or consideration for their concerns. As always - understandable to protect users, but the handling has an almost Apple-like bluntness to it. Next up: how to jailbreak your browser?

Two weeks ago, my grandmother passed away - the last grandparent I had left. As those of you with experience in dealing with deceased family members know, the funeral is only the start; the next part is taking care of the deceased's affairs, which includes going through all their belongings to determine what to do with them. I took care of my grandmother's extensive book collection, and while doing so, I hit something that fascinated me to no end: a six-volume Christian Encyclopaedia from 1956. In it, I found something I just had to share with OSNews.

LinuxQuestions.org has an in-depth interview with Patrick Volkerding. "The goal back when the project was started was to make it easy, and to keep things simple. But to paraphrase Einstein, you want to make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. There's a point of diminishing return when adding additional layers and interfaces, especially when it comes to system configuration. I've seen automated configuration do things like strip out all the comments in a config file, or worse just completely rewrite the thing because you had the nerve to try editing it outside of the approved system. And I do feel like Slackware has been shafted in some of the reviews over the years, largely because there's a tendency to review only the installer and not the system itself. There is certainly a learning curve, but that's true for all versions of Linux. We've never tried to make things hard, but perhaps we also haven't tried to prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot. Things like aliasing rm to 'rm -i' don't help the user learn to be careful." Patrick gets it.

Exactly six months ago, Eric Schmidt made a remark that in the near future, developers might want to focus on Android first, instead of iOS. While developers haven't moved to Android-first, iOS-later en masse, there's no denying that we're seeing more and more former iOS exclusives move towards Android.

Five US carriers, nearly identical devices, millions and millions of pre-orders, virtually simultaneous launch - and that's just the US. The Galaxy SIII might be hideous, Samsung is still doing something right here. No surprise, then, that Apple has, once again, decided to compete in the court room instead of on the shelves: they're asking for a US import ban on the SIII .