It took him only three hours, but here we are: Microsoft's Kinect motion controller thing for the Xbox360 has been hacked, and a preliminary open source driver has been made available for Linux. According to the hacker in question, it was surprisingly simple.

"This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular) from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop. The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4."

"This release builds upon the work done for the 2.5 series, and delivers many new drivers for internal MCU peripherals, USB support, Atmel SAM3N support, and a new API for block devices. New supported CPU: Atmel SAM3N Cortex-M3. Atmel ATmega1280 and Arduino Mega code. New module: USB support for STM32. New drivers: usb-serial, USB keyboard, and USB mouse. A new interface for block devices: KBlock. A new module: generic event completion infrastructure. A new and more flexible I2C API."

Following a number of delays, the Mozilla Project has confirmed that it plans to ship the seventh beta for version 4 of its open source Firefox web browser on Wednesday, the 10th of November. This seventh beta for version 4 of Firefox 4 is the first beta to include the new Jaegermonkey javascript engine for Firefox.

"LLVM 2.8 was released last month with the Clang compiler having feature-complete C++ support, enhancements to the DragonEgg GCC plug-in, a near feature-complete alternative to libstdc++, a drop-in system assembler, ARM code-generation improvements, and many other changes. With there being great interest in the Low-Level Virtual Machine, we have conducted a large LLVM-focused compiler comparison at Phoronix of GCC with versions 4.2.1 through 4.6-20101030, GCC 4.5.1 using the DragonEgg 2.8 plug-in, LLVM-GCC with LLVM 2.8 and GCC 4.2, and lastly with Clang on LLVM 2.8."

"Last week, critics hammered Adobe over a report showing that Flash drained the new MacBook Air's battery life by several hours. It's not the first time Adobe has been in fisticuffs with Apple: the companies have been duking it out ever since Steve Jobs began ridiculing Flash and touting its alleged-killer, HTML5. Today, in an interview with Fast Company, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch answered critics who might say HTML5 is somehow more efficient than Flash."

In an industry dependent on intellectual property, Microsoft's fight against "theft" has implications beyond the bottom line. "Intellectual property is a critical engine of economic growth," says Microsoft's anti-piracy chief, "That's not just for large companies, but also for small businesses and entire countries. We work with governments that are realizing this is in their best interests."

Symbian has had a bit of a string of bad news lately, but starting today, things might just start looking up again. Major changes have been announced with regards to the Symbian Foundation and Nokia's involvement with the platform, which all basically come down to this: Nokia is taking over development of the platform, while the Foundation focusses on licensing.

SweClocker has just posted what might be the first video of the anticipated Bios replacement UEFI .

"I had reduced the size of my ongoing Z80 project down to something more wieldy by using CPLD chips, but it was still a bit too bulky to fit into an acceptably sized case. The next step was to look into FPGAs and see where they could take it. One thing led to another and I ended up building a self contained post modern home computer laptop.. thing." Kroc: Can I haz port of BBC BASIC plz?

"The first person who figures out how to build an open-source driver for Microsoft's much-hyped new Kinect motion controller could win a USD 2000 bounty offered by a leading open-source hardware developer. Kinect is currently available solely for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and may well someday be extended to the Windows platform. But for New York-based Adafruit Industries, that's not enough. And that's why Adafruit - led by MIT Media Lab alum Limor Fried and Make magazine Senior Editor Phillip Torrone - is offering two grand to someone who can figure out how to decouple the hot new device from Microsoft's gaming machine." Bah, motion controllers. Evolutionary dead end. A shiny object already on its way out. People play games to unwind, not to look like idiots flailing their arms and legs around.

Finally. Finally the leader of a major distribution who has the guts to stand up and say what a lot of people have known for a long time, but didn't dare to say because it usually leads to a storm of criticism. Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will be moving away from X.org, opting to go with Wayland instead.

Steve Jobs recently told a Mac user, enquiring about the probability of USB3 on Macs in the near feature, that the technology is not ready because Intel has yet to adopt the platform. A recent rumour slated Intel to integrate USB3 it into its chipsets by no earlier than 2012. LaCie electronics, however, is not prepared to wait around until 2012, and has just released an USB3.0 driver for Mac OS X. Just one catch: it only works with LaCie's hardware.

"For a fairly scruffy looking guy, I have a surprisingly healthy approach to organising my files. However, I'm constantly pushing up against the limitations of a system that is based around directories. I'm convinced that Linux needs to make greater use of tagging, but I'm also beginning to wonder if desktop Linux could abandon the hierarchical directory structure entirely."