I have to admit I've been struggling with this one for a while, most importantly because I haven't used GNOME 3 yet; I'm setting up my own little company right now, so time's a little short. As such, all I can do here is cover the arguments given - which, in my book, have both their strong as well as their weak points. Yes, GNOME 3 will not have buttons for minimising or maximising windows.

"How long have you been using FreeBSD. Months? Years? Decades? And you love using it because of whatever reason but at the same time you're feeling a bit guilty to use it all for free without giving anything back? Well now you'll have the chance to change that. We at FreeBSD are always in need of new people who are willing to spare some of their time and effort into FreeBSD development."

HP recently posted new videos of their developer sessions at Mobile World Congress. As it turns out they aren't just interesting for developers - in particular, Part 3 offers a glimpse of the TouchPad UI that's a bit more in-depth than what we've seen so far. For developers, there's also an overview of the development environment(s) (part 4) and an introduction to the new SDK "Enyo" (part 5).

Ever visited the website of famed iOS and Playstation 3 hacker Geohot? Or watched his video on YouTube? Or read his Blogspot blog? Well, you're now part of a criminal investigation. A US judge has given Sony complete and unrestricted access to all IP addresses which ever visited his website and blog, or watched his YouTube video.

"In this post I show step-by-step how you can setup your own "Super computer cluster" using Ubuntu MPI Cluster from multiple machines with the goal of bruteforcing strong encrypted passwords with John the Ripper for academic purposes. Owners of quad core machines will also benefit from this setup as the "john" binaries found in the Ubuntu Repositories are compiled to run on only one core. I managed to decrease the time required to crack password hashes using this setup."

It's not the return of the OSNews comic, but it was too good to let pass. Our coverage of the Apple event was minimal this week, so I decided to round the key points up in an illustration...

Well, this rumour, coming from the reputable Wall Street Journal, isn't entirely unsurprising. Apparently, the omnipotent people familiar with the matter have told the WJS that the US Department of Justice and the California State Attorney General's office are investigating the MPEG-LA for possible anti-competitive practices regarding VP8.

IDC's newest survey of server vendors shows boxes running every kind of operating system -- except Unix -- sold more during the last three months of 2010. Sales of Linux servers rose 29 percent; Windows rose 16.8 percent, but most surprisingly, sales of mainframes shot up 69 percent – the highest growth rate IDC ever found on mainframes.

Later this year, Oracle will begin requiring people interested in gaining Java and Solaris certifications to attend "hands-on" training courses, at an additional cost of thousands of dollars. The new rule goes into effect Aug. 1 and regards Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification paths, according to a notice on Oracle's website.

If you had asked me, I would have guessed that this wouldn't be possible. One intrepid OS explorer has made a video wherein he not only installs every version of Windows since 1985's Windows 1.0, but proceeds to upgrade from one to another. The video, titled Chain of Fools: an Exploration of Windows upgrade procedures, shows how DOS and Windows are installed in a VMWare VM, and how a couple of DOS games were installed to see how newer versions of Windows handle backward compatibility. Similarly, various customizations were made to the Windows preferences to see how they survived the upgrades. Video embedded after the break.

"The conflict between Banshee and Canonical over what should be done with Banshee's Amazon Store revenue stream, while it was finally resolved, was not Ubuntu's most shining moment. At the matter's conclusion, Banshee developers were not happy with the results. This is not how open-source communities should work together and no one knows that better than Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, who wrote, "We made some mistakes in our handling of the discussion around revenue share with the Banshee team.""

The new Windows Embedded website just announced the official release of Windows Embedded Compact 7, featuring SMP support for multicore CPUs, Flash 10.1, updated Silverlight for Windows Embedded technology based on Silverlight 3, and more. Update: And here's a demo, for those interested.

"Many well known bloggers, analysts, journalists and customers alike most probably have valid arguments to back this belief, but there are even more that believe otherwise and foresee a success in this partnership. But for Nokia's upcoming Windows Phone-based smartphones to succeed, Microsoft and Nokia need backing from the worlds mobile operators and Vodafone in Germany seems to be on their side, for now - Jan Geldmacher, managing director, enterprise business at Vodafone Germany, said in an interview with PC World at the Cebit trade show in Hanover."

Ubuntu Linux has millions of fans. What's not to like? A free operating system with ten thousand free applications, websites covering everything you might ever want to know, tutorials, active forums, and more. Yet for all these benefits, situations pop up when you want a faster, lighter operating system. Perhaps you have an older computer, or maybe a netbook or a mobile device. Wouldn't it be great to have a lightweight Ubuntu? That day has finally arrived. Lubuntu offers a way to stay in the Ubuntu family -- with a product that performs better and uses fewer resources.