Free Software Wins, But You Have Nowhere to Install It
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We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy -- and there is no point in having free software if you can't own your hardware.
KDE SC4 Architecture and What it Means for the Future
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KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly (August 4th, 2010), roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals. The critical shift KDE SC took in this series is abstracting the desktop from the underlying system through three pillars, phonon, plasma and solid making the desktop some sort of a virtual platform environment and easily portable to other operating systems.
JailbreakMe Returns: Easy iPhone 4 Jailbreak
A few years ago, there was a website called Jailbreakme.com that enabled you to jailbreak your iPhone without iTunes, by just visiting a web site. But it stopped working with one of the OS updates, so people forgot about it. Well, it's back. I've actually been waiting to jailbreak my new iPhone 4 and for an iOS 4 jailbreak for my old iPhone 3GS, but after fiddling around with downloading big ipsw files from sketchy websites only to find they didn't work, I decided to wait for an easier option.
Mobile Data Plans Around the World
Tableau Software has created an interactive table/graph that examines data rates for the iPad, carrier-by-carrier. The results are interesting. As you might expect, data rates from AT&T in the US are near the top of the list, but those unlucky souls in France have to pay twice what AT&T users do. Residents of Singapore may not be allowed to chew gum, but they can pay as little as $.51 per Gigabyte for wireless data.
New GNOME Shell Mockup Looks Good – But Is It Better?
Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.
Register: Microsoft Should Make a Bold Open Source Move
A provocative editorial at The Register makes this suggestion: "Microsoft should consider acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile. Novell has a seat at the Linux Foundation's MeeGo table, and Microsoft should embrace that operating system rather than its myriad (but universally unsuccessful) mobile variants of Windows."
AMD Set to Beat Intel in USB 3 Race
AMD plans to start shipping the USB 3-equipped chipset in the fourth quarter of 2010, beating Intel to the post. Intel hasn't announced its official plans for integrated USB 3 support yet, but various sources say it's not expected until we're well into 2011.
Millions Download Suspicious Android Wallpaper
Up to 4.6 million users of the Android smartphone operating system have downloaded a suspicious wallpaper app that collects and transmits user data to a site in China, mobile security firm Lookout has warned.
Microsoft Releases Free Security Tool for Older Platforms
Microsoft has released a free tool to bring newer security protections to older platforms and applications. The enhanced mitigation experience tookit (EMET) was announced at the BlackHat USA 2010 security conference in Las Vegas. EMET will be available from August and is designed to help block targeted attacks against unpatched vulnerabilities in platforms such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Graphics Chip Market Seeing Big Changes
As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by "radical" shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.
Microsoft’s Tablet Self-Deception
Microsoft had its annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday, and Steve Ballmer answered questions about what the company's answer to the iPad was going to be, and whether Windows Phone 7 was going to be a part of that product strategy. He said, "We're coming . . . We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows." Ballmer and Microsoft so don't get it. I can't believe Steve Ballmer is making me feel sorry for Microsoft.
Tools That Find Serious Bugs Automatically Could Lead to Safer, More Stable Software.
Several talks at the Black Hat security conference this week in Las Vegas will focus on tools that could make software safer by automatically searching for bugs--and pinpointing the ones that could be most dangerous.
RMS Answers 25 Questions
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Richard Stallman, who's still taking on the role of the extremist who says extreme things so other Free Software advocates can look moderate in comparison, answers Reddit readers' questions. But there's some good stuff in there, and it seems he's dialed back the nutty a bit.
Dell, HP to Resell Oracle’S Operating Systems
Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement "demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness," company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement.
KDE SC 4.7 May Use OpenGL 3 For Compositing
KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7.According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers.Read more here
Details of 100m Facebook Users Collected and Published
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Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been harvested and published on the net by a security consultant.The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile, their name and unique ID.BBC News
New BlackBerry OS Expected August 3
BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has distributed invites to an exclusive media event in New York, where it's expected to show off the first device to run the brand new BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 6. CIO.com offers predictions for how the event will unfold.
LiMo + GNOME: *crickets*
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The GNOME foundation and the LiMo group announced a partnership to help push Linux forward in the consumer field. The only notice that anyone has seem to have taken is mockery. So why can someone announce some dedication to promoting open source software in the mobile space and generate no enthusiasm in the mobile space? Android.
GNOME Census
GNOME developer Dave Neary has posted the highlights of his work to determine where contributions to GNOME come from. This "Census" is a combination of data mining and surveys that gives a snapshot of gnome activity and the profile of a GNOME contributor. This project's aims were to answer three questions in particular: What does the developer community look like? What companies are investing in GNOME, and how? What does the commercial ecosystem around the GNOME project look like?
GNOME 3.0 Delayed to March 2011
During the currently ongoing GUADEC conference in Den Haag the GNOME release team announced that GNOME 3.0 would be delayed for another six months and is now scheduled for March 2011. "We could release in September and have something working that is okayish, but it's not up to the standards we have" release team member Vincent Untz explains the reasoning. There's coverage of this issue at derStandard.at and an official GNOME press release.