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.

Since we're on a CLI kick today, here's an "attempt at presenting some of the most important guidelines for CLI design."

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.

Linux on the desktop seems to be the perennial second class citizen, but with Adobe's upcoming 64 Bit Flash 11 beta, Linux is getting a seat at the adults' table. It's being released for Windows, Mac, and Linux simultaneously.

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.

The Google-Microsoft patent war of words is continuing. Yesterday, Google (rightfully so, in my book) accused Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle partaking in an organised patent attack against Android, instead of competing on merit, claiming that they bought up Novell's and Nortel's patents solely to attack Android and its device makers. Microsoft struck back, claiming Google was offered to join in on the bids for the Novell patents, but rejected the offer. Google has now responded to this accusation - and to make matters even more confusing, Microsoft responded back. A public shouting match between two powerful parties? Count me in!

In a blog post, John Luther, the Project Manager of Google's WebM Project, has announced that Skype now supports the VP8 codec. The VP8 support is already available for Windows users who are using Skype 5.5. VP8 will be used to encode and decode the Skype video call if both the caller and receiver have clients that support the codec.

Debian developer Robert Millan talks about recent improvements with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD in the past few weeks.

This I didn't expect. While we've had individual people high up Google's chain of command speak out, there wasn't yet any form of official response to the patent shenanigans surrounding Android. For the first time, the company has posted on the official Google Blog about the issue, and the company is clear. Several companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, are working together to attack Android through patents. Google is not going to sit back and take it, though. Update: Stuff just got real. Popcorn! Or better yet, coffee!

Microsoft seems to be "all in" with its virtualization strategy these days: back in June we heard word of a client-hypervisor (Hyper-V 3.0) built into Windows 8 and in mid-July, Hyper-V for the upcoming Windows Server 8 was publicly unveiled. And I've dug up evidence of a much bigger presence of MinWin in Microsoft's upcoming OS. So how is this fitting together? Is this the ultimate virtualization trio?

Some highlights: PC-BSD 9 supports multiple DEs (GNOME2/XFCE4/LXDE) instead of being KDE4 only desktop, new revised PBI system that allows sharing of files and libraries between applications for reduced disk space, new AppCafe to allow easy browsing, installing and managing applications in PC-BSD system. Also the PC-BSD Control Panel has and one-stop access to a variety of system-configuration options.

The first BETA build of the 9.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. One of the many new features in 9.0 that needs thorough testing is the new installer, so fresh installs on test systems are being encouraged. Ivan Voras has taken the time to thoroughly document all the 9.0 changes at his web site.

Even though most games wont run natively on Ubuntu there is still a sizeable number that run flawlessly on it thanks to the almighty Wine. The Wine app database lists a few games that run flawlessly on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution for that matter and assigns a rating for them based on precious metals.

Xbox celebrates its tenth birthday this year, having launched in the US on November 15, 2001. In this four-part special, Patrick Garratt talks to members of the console’s original team and tells its release story.