The Fedora 14 Beta was released today, but as a Network World article points out, it "will be the first Red Hat supported distribution to let users choose MeeGo as their desktop." This new release will also include the Sugar interface, intended for netbooks, and "will also be the first version to fully incorporate Red Hat's VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), called SPICE, or Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments. SPICE will allow Fedora to host virtual desktops that can be accessed over a network."

From the NetBSD Blog: "The fourth (failing further faults, final) release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download. Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC4 tag is available as well. See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the list of changes from RC3 to RC4."

"Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is 'going dark' as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications - including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype - to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages." I could quote Benjamin Franklin again - but I'm starting to suspect that our politicians (this isn't just a US thing, it happens all over the world) have no respect for the wise men and women who fought for the principles we are now trying to shove upon the rest of the world. How can the west push freedom and liberty around the world while at the same time taking them away at home?

Is Research In Motion still, well, in motion? Heck yeah they are. They just unveiled their long-awaited tablet, christened the BlackBerry PlayBook. It's got a dual-core 1Ghz ARM processor, and it runs... QNX! This alone already makes it the most awesome tablet ever.

"Watch a Nasa shuttle burning a path into space or a video of Saturn's rings taken by the Cassini satellite and it's hard not to marvel at man's technological prowess. But the surprising truth is that space exploration is built on IT which lags many years behind that found in today's consumer gadgets and corporate PCs. To this day, Nasa still uses elements of technology that powered the moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s, while the International Space Station - the manned station circling the Earth 250 miles above our heads - relies on processors dating back more than two decades."

The PlayStation 3. For a long time, it was a rather well-protected machine, and it wasn't until early this year that George Hotz finally managed to crack the thing wide open. In essence, it was now possible to jailbreak the PlayStation 3 like you would jailbreak your iPhone, but of course, Sony wasn't pleased. With the recent firmware update, v3.50, Sony went from surgical precision to the battle axe - they blocked all non-Sony USB devices controllers (and a lot of PS2 > PS3 controller adapters) from working.

A few days ago I dove into the lawsuit filed by Skyhook against Google, and came to the conclusion that Skyhook's case - while an entirely plausible sequence of events considering Google is a big company and hence prone to abuse - simply wasn't a very good one. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has given a rather generic-looking statement on the matter, but however generic it may be, there's a hint in there.

Well, this certainly isn't particularly surprising. The rising popularity of Android leaves more victims in its wake than just Windows Mobile. Sony Ericsson, one of the major manufacturers of Symbian phones (other than Nokia) has just announced it will pretty much abandon the platform to focus entirely on Android - leaving Nokia as the sole person cheering for team Symbian.

Now this is a subject sure to cause some discussion among all of you. LifeHacker's Adam Pash is arguing that Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the browser of choice for what he calls 'power users'; polls among LifeHacker's readership indeed seem to confirm just that. He also gives a number of reasons as to why this is the case.

So, we have the iPad out and about for a while now, doing its thing, most likely selling well. Of course, others want a piece of that pie as well, so we see tablets pop up all over the place, most of which are either ultra-low budget junk or vapourware (how that's Adam coming along, Notion Ink?). Earlier this year, Steve Ballmer proudly held up HP's Windows 7-powered Slate - but then, HP bought Palm, canned the Slate, promised a webOS tablet, and then resurrected the Slate as an enterprise product. Now we have a video of the Windows 7-powered Slate. Let's compare it to Samsung's detailed overview of its Galaxy Tab, and see ever so clearly why HP canned the darn thing in the first place.

"Evercookie is a javascript API available that produces extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal is to identify a client even after they've removed standard cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and others. Evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in several types of storage mechanisms that are available on the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it recreates them using each mechanism available."

As I was casually browsing around today, I came across this blog post. It's about the recently released VLC media player for the iPad, which you can use to play just about any video under the sun on your iPad. The blog post is a complaint about a bit of help text that's not properly rendered inside the application - annoying, but no dealbreaker. Until I actually read the text - this is how you're supposed to get content on your iPad?

"So what is the state of the Hurd? Is it vaporware, like Duke Nukem Forever? Fortunately not: the code exists, there is still work going on (for instance as part of Google Summer of Code), and there are even some relatively functional Hurd distributions. Let's look first at the code and the current architecture, and then at the Hurd distributions."

"Luca Barbieri made a rather significant commit today that adds a state tracker dubbed 'd3d1x', which implements the Direct3D 10/11 COM API in Gallium3D. Luca says this is just the initial version, but it's already working and can run a few DirectX 10/11 texturing demos on Linux at the moment. This is not a matter of simply translating the Direct3D calls and converting them to OpenGL like how Wine currently handles it, but is natively implemented within Gallium3D and TGSI to speak directly to the underlying graphics driver and hardware. Thanks to Gallium3D's architecture, this Direct3D support essentially becomes 'free' to all Linux drivers with little to no work required."