A different take on Sony's removal of the Other OS feature of fat PS3s. "The reality probably is that Sony loses money on every PS3 it sells, counting on game sales to make up for the loss in revenue. Academic institutions using PS3s for clusters aren't likely to buy games or engage in online commerce. That's why, when you hear that the US military was planning to buy 2200 PS3 consoles to upgrade an existing PS3-based supercomputing cluster, Sony doesn't jump for joy. I suspect it was news like this, plus other sales for clustering, that prompted Sony to turn off the 'Other OS' feature for existing PS3s."

Yeah, just in case people think we forgot: Apple launched its iPad today. It's just that since the rest of the web is pretty much clogged with iPad "news" items at this point, I don't really know what to add; who'd you rather hear from, someone who owns one, or someone like me, the small orphan child pressing his face to the glass of a candy shop full of delight he can't afford (because he lives in the wrong country)? About the only meaningful item I've seen today is Engadget's iPad review, so let's take a quick look at that one.

Common sense has prevailed (see bold text)! "The final decision on window controls for 10.04 LTS is as follows: the window controls will remain on the left, however the order will change to be (from left) close, minimize, maximise. The decision is based on the view that putting the close button in the corner will be most familiar to many users, even if the particular choice of corner is not."

I'm posting this one day late, because I didn't want it to get lost in all the April 1 nonsense. We've been in the computer age for a while now, and while that gives us the privilege of dealing with some truly great products and innovations, it sadly also means that we are starting to lose the pioneers that defined this industry. Yesterday, Ed Roberts shuffled out of life due to pneumonia. Dr. Henry Edward Roberts developed the Altair 8800, considered to be the first personal computer.

While entire contingents of media are getting twists in their knickers over the ucpoming iPad launch, we'd almost forget that other tablet we've talked about a lot - the Joo Joo. It was delayed a few times, but right now, it's finally shipping, and Engadget already has received theirs. The iPad is more important to Engadget, so we'll have to wait a bit for a real review, but they have lots of photos and a quick video of the device and its UI.

"The US Patents and Trademark Office has today made public a Microsoft patent application (serial no. 240,729) related to the graphical user interface found on the hotly anticipated Windows Phone 7 Series mobile OS. Filed in September 2008, this application describes a 'contiguous background' that extends beyond the dimensions of the screen (either vertically or horizontally, but not both) with anchored 'mixed-media' elements being littered atop it - all of which is to be served on a 'media-playing device'. That should sound pretty familiar, given that it's the central navigational concept of both Windows Phone 7 and the Zune HD, and as such it makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to seek to legally protect its uniqueness."

In line with the current torrent of articles on the H.264 and Theora debate, I feel that is it unfair for the "pragmatists" to talk about Theora as if it is a stupid ideal that is useless to consumers. This article will focus on defining the terms of the debate used and make the case that Theora has a reason, if not a chance.

This article coveres some of the new HTML 5 capabilities of modern browsers including powerful HTML 5 features such as multi-threading, geolocation, embedded databases, and embedded video. Learn how to use them in your applications.

The GNOME team has released version 2.30 of their open source desktop environment. "The GNOME Project's focus on users and usability continues in GNOME 2.30 with its hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements. The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made."

"ScaraOS is a 32bit mutiboot OS kernel for IA32 (PC/AT) systems. I wrote it to teach myself OS fundamentals and just to have a bit of fun. It already has PCI support, the beginnings of a paged memory management system, and the start of a VFS layer. It supports the basic PC/AT stuff such as timer, PIC, keyboard, floppy."

I guess this is what some people would call "karma". Apple may shout off the rooftops that it invented multitouch, and that anyone else using it is clearly stealing it from them - but another company has taken offence to that, and has slapped the Cupertino giant with a patent infringement suit over multitouch.

As geeks, we're well aware of the importance of running as a normal user instead of as root (UNIX/Linux/BSD) or administrator (Windows). However, while this should be common knowledge to anyone reading OSNews, it's often hard to illustrate just how important it is - until now, that is. A report by BeyondTrust looked at how many security bulletins issused by Microsoft are mitigated by simply... Not running as administrator.

It's time for bed over here, but before I turn in with a nice cup of tea and a Gilmore Girls episode, we've got some good news for you: SCO has been dealt yet another major blow in its baseless lawsuit against Novell. A jury has ruled that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights - not SCO.

"KDE has released a new version of the KDE Software Compilation. This month's edition of KDE SC is a bugfix and translation update to KDE SC 4.4. KDE SC 4.4.2 is a recommended upgrade for everyone running KDE SC 4.4.1 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE SC 4.4.2 multi-language support is more complete. KDE SC 4 is already translated into more than 50 languages, with more to come." Impromptu poll: Windows Phone 7 Series or KDE Software Compilation 4.4: which of the two rolls off the tongue the worst?