KOffice 2.2 Released

KOffice 2.2, the office suite for KDE, has been released. New features include import filters for Office 2007 thanks to Nokia, and the return of the Access clone Kexi. With this release, the KOffice team writes, "we are at a stage where we think that KOffice can be used for real work by some users". A full list of changes can be found here.

FSF: Apple’s iTunes Store Terms of Service at Odds with GPL

"The Free Software Foundation is up in arms over Apple's iTunes Store Terms of Service, suggesting that these terms fundamentally conflict with the terms of the GNU Public License. The foundation has warned Apple that a version of GNU Go distributed by the App Store makes Apple liable to comply with GPL terms that allow free sharing of code, but warned that its 'Usage Rules' violate those terms. The fallout could potentially affect any app that uses GPLed code."

Disabling the Tynt Copy/Paste Nonsense on Websites

If there's one thing several people are really, really good at, it's ruining the web. The latest attempt is something quite insipid, something that had me scratching my head a few times before I realised what was going on. When copying and pasting text from certain websites, content would be added to your clipboard without you knowing about it - something like "Read more at". John Gruber finds this just as insipid as I do, and investigated a little further - while also coming up with a way to block this nonsense. Seriously - this is right up there with those in-text underline ad things.

Nokia N8 Demonstration: Nokia’s Got Work to Do

Like Research in Motion, Nokia is playing catch-up, software-wise, to the iPhone OS and Android, which is funny in a cruel way because both Nokia and RIM have a far larger market share than both of them. Nokia has put out a preview video of their upcoming N8 smartphone, which runs the latest Symbian version, Symbian^3. Nokia, like RIM, has got work to do.

Resource Management for Web Applications in ServiceOS

Microsoft Research continues to evolve its Gazelle concept. "In this paper, we present ServiceOS, a platform that tightly integrates a multi-principal browsing architecture with the underlying OS. ServiceOS provides a centralized, fine-grained resource access control model, and uses recursive web-oriented algorithms for sharing system resources. ServiceOS also introduces new abstractions that allow a web service to explicitly allocate and manage resources for any helper services they embed (e.g., via iframes). A key challenge that ServiceOS solves is managing resources in the face of complex web service composition."

Facebook Finally Gets it with New, Simpler Privacy Controls

"Facebook has introduced its newly overhauled privacy controls, and most critics should be pleased this time around. The company noted during a press conference Thursday that the site today is very different from how it was when it first started in 2004, admitting that the privacy controls had grown into something of a Frankenstein monster as the company kept adding on features. Thanks to feedback from users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, Facebook has completely revamped its offerings and has begun slowly rolling out the change to users."

Apple, Microsoft Stock Does Stuff

Yesterday, the technology world was full of this whole "market capitalisation" thing where Apple overtook Microsoft and became the biggest technology company in the world. Illustrating the futility of this stuff, the situation has already been reversed today, but before the end of the day, Apple may overtake Microsoft again. Or not. Or it may start raining unicorns. No, we're not going to keep track of this stuff. I'm just mentioning it here so nobody can accuse us of being anti-Apple. So, here it goes: for one night, Apple was the biggest technology company in the world by market capitalisation. I hugged my Macs and iPhone.

Writing iPhone Apps with Visual Studio?

It's rumour time! Analyst Trip Chowdhry, with Global Equities Research, is claiming that Microsoft has been allotted seven minutes during Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote speech. Supposedly, the Redmond giant will unveil that developers will be able to write native iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications using Visual Studio 2010 on Windows. As crazy as this sounds, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who can move beyond the outdated Apple vs. Microsoft attitude.

Genode Becomes Noisy, Confines Its Processes

With the just released version 10.05, the Genode OS Framework reaches out to new application areas by providing a solution for subjecting all processes to mandatory access control, and adding the infrastructure needed for high-quality audio processing. On the way towards running general-purpose OS workloads, the port of the Webkit-based Arora web browser running as a native Genode process marks a pivotal point for the project.

Korona 4.4.3 Released

Pavel Heimlich has announced the release of an updated version of Korona 4.4.3: "Korona is the live DVD adding KDE4 packages on top of OpenSolaris. It is intended to be the showcase of the current state of the kde-solaris project, definitely not a distribution for any serious use."

MeeGo 1.0 Released

"Today we are announcing the project release of MeeGo v1.0. This release provides developers with a stable core foundation for application development and a rich user experience for Netbooks. The MeeGo Netbook user experience is the first to appear, with the development of the MeeGo Handset user experience moving to the open in June."

The Foxconn Suicides

Now this is a subject I've been tiptoeing around for a while now, not entirely sure what to do with it: the suicides at Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn. Instead of acting all morally smug and superior from my comfortable rural home in one of the richest countries in the world, I want to talk about two things journalists and bloggers should really stop focusing on when writing about this story: Apple, and the suicides. Wait, what?

EyeOS 2.0 Beta Released

EyeOS has released version 2.0 Beta. "After several months of hard work we're happy to announce the immediate availability of the official release of eyeOS 2.0 Beta. And even more: the new release doesn't come alone but with the brand new eyeOS.org website, which has not ben redesigned for the last 2 years now. eyeOS 2.0 Beta can be downloaded from the new downloads page and tested from a Beta test server in eyeOS.info."