"'Terrified' by Amazon's Kindle e-reader and discounted e-book pricing, five major publishers allegedly acted together to increase e-book prices and compel Amazon to abandon its discount sales strategy. That's the gist of a new class action antitrust lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by the Hagens Berman litigation group. The five book sellers named in the suit are HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Penguin Group Inc., and Simon & Schuster Inc, plus one more defendant: Apple. 'Fortunately for the publishers, they had a co-conspirator as terrified as they were over Amazon's popularity and pricing structure, and that was Apple,' charges Hagen Berman attorney Steve Berman. 'We intend to prove that Apple needed a way to neutralize Amazon's Kindle before its popularity could challenge the upcoming introduction of the iPad, a device Apple intended to compete as an e-reader.'" I'm starting to see a pattern here.

"Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. Today we present another point of view from a gentleman who has created the Super Nintendo emulator bsnes. He wants to share his thoughts on the most important part of the emulation experience, accuracy."

KDE is working on some interesting stuff. Wayland support for one, but they're also going to work on the frameworks for... KDE 5.0. Yes, I'd say KDE 4 still is far, far from done, but 5.0 is already on the horizon. This time around though, they're not going to pull a KDE 4.0, since this is mostly going to be about lower-level changes.

There are two reasons for this news item. First, I want this issue resolved. Second, it allows me to post the most awesome picture ever and ever. The story is simple. Mojang, the company behind the immensely successful Minecraft, is working on a second game called 'Scrolls', which has been in development for a while now. As it turns out, Bethesda has sent a cease and desist notice to Mojang - they claim 'Scrolls' infringes on 'The Elder Scrolls' trademark. As a fan of both Minecraft and Bethesda, this is just silly.

Mona OS 0.3.4 has been released. Screenshots (1 | (2 | (3 | (4). Added Facebook application written in Scheme, Ported w3m text browser. Now you can tweet and check Gmail from Mona OS., Ported mg (Emacs clone), Kernel and core components become more stable and faster, New simple shell written in Scheme. They're considering porting webkit on the next release.

A couple of days ago I read a blog post by Stephen Ramsay, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In it, he mentions that he has all but abandoned the GUI and finds the command line to be "faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps." I found this very thought-provoking, because, like Ramsay, I spend a lot of time thinking about "The Future of Computing," and I think that the CLI, an interface from the past, might have a place in the interface of the future.