The first of three Fedora project GNOME 3 Test Days is taking place tomorrow (Thursday 2011-02-03) in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC. Join others and the GNOME development team to test out GNOME 3 and help make sure it's stable and polished. The testing is easy, can be done from a live image, so there's no need to have Fedora installed or to be a Fedora user, and you can help out with just ten minutes of your time. This blog post has more details on the event and how you can get involved.

Go is a highly hyped (last year) new programming language by Google. Thanks to ongoing community effort, its Win32 compatibility constantly improves. This week's rolling release should be considered a major milestone. In the somewhat dry words: "implementation of callback functions for Windows" and "cgo: windows/386 port", it introduces two major breakthroughs for this platform: WinAPI GUI support, and the ability to easily wrap and link external (non-Go) libraries. Note that there's an unofficial compiled build for Win32 available for download.

"Chrome's usage share for January has made it into double digits: the browser was used by 10.7 percent of Web users last month, up from 9.98 percent in December. It was a good month too for Safari, up to 6.30 percent from 5.89 percent the month before. The WebKit-powered browsers were the big winners: Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the big loser. Internet Explorer reached a new all-time low of 56 percent, down 1.08 percentage points from last month. Though Internet Explorer 8 continues to perform well - up 1.15 points from December - defections from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to other browsers continue to dominate, with those versions losing 1.63 and 0.47 points respectively. The beta of Internet Explorer 9 made minor gains, rising to 0.50 percent share. Firefox continues to hover between 22 and 23 points; its January share was 22.75 percent, erasing the small gains it made in December. Opera made small gains, up to 2.28 from 2.20 percent a month ago."

"Apple is further tightening its control of the App Store. Some application developers, including Sony, say Apple has told them they can no longer sell e-books within their apps unless the transactions go through Apple’s system. Apple rejected Sony's iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books from the Sony Reader Store."

There is a falling out between governments & ISPs on the one hand and consumer groups and companies like YouTube and Netflix on the other. Lately more punitive measures affecting these companies and consumers have emerged that include increased throttling, greater per-usage billing and lower internet caps. The internet as whole is struggling to find a self-sustaining business model that supports the rising speed and bandwidth requirements of consumers and online media purveyors. The conflict boils down to who should pay and to what degree they should pay.

"Researchers in the field of microprocessors are always looking to the future to see what new materials are available as our chips get ever smaller, faster, and closer to the limits of current component manufacturing. While graphene is seen as a material of the future, it has recently been revealed that it may not be a suitable replacement for silicon in CPUs. This is due to graphene having a very small energy state gap, meaning when it is used as a transistor it cannot be turned off. There could be ways around such a limitation that haven’t been formulated yet, but we may not need graphene for processor manufacture after all. EPFL's Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) has discovered that molybdenite (MoS2) may be the perfect replacement for silicon."

"Processor design company ARM has today unveiled two new updates to its Cortex-R range of processors: the Cortex-R5 MPCore and the Cortex-R7 MPCore. While the Cortex-A processors can be found in mainstream consumer products such as cell phones and tablet devices, the Cortex-R chips are meant for deeply-embedded and system-on-a-chip duties. Notably you can find the last generation Cortex-R4 in hard disk drive controllers, wireless baseband processors, and automotive systems."

"Intel just announced that it has identified a bug in the 6-series chipset, specifically in its SATA controller. Intel states that 'In some cases, the Serial-ATA ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives'. The fix requires new hardware, which means you will have to exchange your motherboard for a new one. Intel hasn't posted any instructions on how the recall will be handled other than to contact Intel via its support page or contact the manufacturer of your hardware directly."

Well, most of us knew this moment would come, with the only debate left being when this moment would come. Market analyst firm Canalys keeps track of worldwide smartphone shipments, and has concluded that in the fourth quarter of 2010, more Android smartphones were sold than Symbian phones. After a decade of supremacy, the Symbian dominance has been toppled (according to these figures, of course).

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the most prestigious and critically acclaimed directors in cinematographic history. He directed, among others, the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, and has won so many awards it's hard to keep track. In an interview with 99%, he touched on the subject of art and making money, and his musings are fascinating, and yet another indication that the times are changing in the content industry. "Who says artists have to make money?" Coppola wonders.

ChibiOS/RT 2.2.0 has been released. The new release of this open source embedded Real Time Operating System (RTOS) includes support for multiple compilers (Cosmic, GCC, IAR, Keil, Raisonance), drivers and demos for new hardware, internal optimizations and documentation improvements.

The BSD licensed Portable C Compiler (PCC) is steadily on the road for a 1.0 release and is now able to compile a FreeBSD/amd64 CURRENT system with almost no changes. The current version of PCC has evolved from the original PCC developed at Bell Labs during the 1970s and has been maintained by Anders Magnusson and a small team of developers during the last decade. It has received more attention during the last few years, especially by OpenBSD and NetBSD people seeing it at as a viable option as a GCC replacement.

"Each time a new version of Windows is released, many computer users find that their hardware is suddenly outdated. For cash-strapped schools, upgrading to the latest hardware with each major software release is simply impossible. A New York startup called NeverWare is offering a possible solution - a server that lets even decade-old PCs upgrade to the latest Windows 7 operating system."

"The drought of those who speak without depending on slides has ended at the 12th Australian national Linux conference. Last evening, Marshall Kirk McKusick, a well-known BSD hacker, took those assembled down a slightly different track - after all, this is a Linux conference - with his narrative history of BSD. And what a rollicking ride it was! And the venue for his talk could hold only 100 people. He based his talk on notes he had made while travelling through Australia on a train in 1986 - he was a keynote speaker at the now-defunct Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group conference in 1986."