I'm currently reading Jerry Kaplan's excellent book "Startup: a Silicon Valley adventure". In this book, Kaplan, founder and CEO of GO Corp., details the founding, financing and eventual demise of his highly innovative company, including the development and workings of their product. What's so surprising about this book is just how timeless it really is - the names and products may have changed, but the business practices and company attitudes surely haven't.

"Adobe has been dropping preview links to its upcoming version of Photoshop CS6 for months now, even hyping it up with a Rainn Wilson cameo at MAX 2011. Photoshop CS6 marks one of the app's most drastic visual changes, with a darker visual redesign and streamlined toolbars, and it has all sorts of changes to cursors, filters, video editing, and more in tow. We got some quick hands on time with the app, so read on for our take on Adobe's next-gen installation of Photoshop."

Are you one of those lucky bastards who own a Nokia N9, yet are suffering from the mother of all first world problems - beautiful smartphone, but want a different operating system? Your prayers have been heard: an alpha release of Android 4.0.3 for the N9. Here's a video, and here's the instructions on how to get it working.

As I made very clear in my thorough review of Mass Effect 2, I'm a huge BioWare fan. This relationship got very, very cloudy when BioWare released Dragon Age II, a rush job with no story and atrocious gameplay. Mass Effect 3 looked like redemption - until I hit the terrible, terrible ending. The criticism of the ending has been so immense and consistent, BioWare is contemplating changing it. Of course, this story is riddled with spoilers, so be warned.

Some people (you know who) predicted the Oracle-Google lawsuit would spell doom for Google and Android. Well, turns out this was all a huge fuss over nothing. Oracle's damages claim started at an idiotic $6 billion - but the final claim is less than $100 million. Oracle's patent trolling is turning into a huge failure of epic proportions.

"If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6000 square foot home just north of Portland's tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow - his favorite color - and so's the Mercedes. But he's not really like any of his neighbors. He drives his Mercedes fast, slamming the car into gear and flooring it. There's no coaxing, no hesitation. Either the hammer is down, or the car is at rest. And he has an abnormal number of stuffed penguins on his mantle." Yup, sounds like the to-the-point Fin we all know and love.

"In the world of hard drives storage, density is king and Seagate has just achieved a major breakthrough that guarantees major storage gains for the next decade. That breakthrough is managing to squeeze 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) of data into a square inch or space, effectively opening the way for larger hard drives over the coming years beyond the 3TB maximum we currently enjoy. How much of an improvement does this storage milestone offer? Current hard drives max out at around 620 gigabits per square inch, meaning Seagate has improved upon that by over 50%. However, that's just the beginning."

It's been a while since we caught up with Stallman. But a couple months ago we took a look around at what's happening with law, politics and technology and realized that he maybe perhaps his extremism and paranoia were warranted all along. So when we were contacted by an Iranian Linux publication and asked if we would like to publish an English translation of a recent interview they had done with Stallman, I thought that it was a particularly rich opportunity.

Linux 3.3 has been released. The changes include the merge of kernel code from the Android project. There is also support for a new architecture (TI C6X), much improved balancing and the ability to restripe between different RAID profiles in Btrfs, and several network improvements: a virtual switch implementation (Open vSwitch) designed for virtualization scenarios, a faster and more scalable alternative to the "bonding" driver, a configurable limit to the transmission queue of the network devices to fight bufferbloat, a network priority control group and per-cgroup TCP buffer limits. There are also many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here's the full changelog.

Rob Schmitz, the Marketplace reporter who uncovered Daisey's lies, stated: "What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about seeing are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by Hexane. Apple's own audits show that the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple." It's what I'm already seeing in the Apple-verse (and beyond): the actual issues that have truly and honestly happened are being shuffled under the carpet because some no-name dude I'd never heard of lied, as yet another way to soothe people's conscience. The west is exploiting workers in the east for a few percentages of profit margins. This is a reality, whether some dude lied about it or not.

"Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, and Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, will host a conference call to announce the outcome of the company's discussions concerning its cash balance." Interesting. They have $100 billion on the bank - any guesses? Dividend payout? A large acquisition?

This past week and this weekend I've finally found the time to enter into the colorful world of custom Android ROMs. After figuring out just how insanely great and awesome ClockWorkMod Recovery is, I set about to figure out what the best Ice Cream Sandwich ROM is for the Galaxy SII. While the answer to that question became clear quite quickly, this answer also gave rise to a whole bunch of other questions.

Due to their very nature, custom Android ROMs have root enabled by default. Up until relatively recently, installing custom Android ROMs was a thing geeks did, and as such, this wasn't much of a problem. However, over the past few days, I've found out just how easy installing custom ROMs and modifying them really is (I'm running this one until CyanogenMod 9 is ready for the SII), and it seems like more and more regular users are engaging in the practice as well. Suddenly, having root enabled becomes a security liability.

"In an unexpected turn of events, one of the key committees in the European Parliament voted recently to weaken a reform of the copyright monopoly for allowing re-publication and access to orphan works, pieces of our cultural heritage where no copyright monopoly holder can be located. There's a problem with this. There are 24 seats in the committee, and one group (non-inscrits) was absent, lacking deputies to fill that person's vote. So, there should have been 23 votes at the most. But we just counted 12 votes for reform and 14 against. That's 26." Sometimes, people complain that the EU has a democratic deficit. It looks like we had a democratic surplus this time.