Now that I'm done with my internship and ready to take on OSNews again, I figured it'd be nice to start off with something light-hearted. I just read that Google bought an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a camera, ready to photograph whatever it flies across. We may consider Google's biggest threat to be privacy, but with all this computing power they have, their Street View cars, and now, unmanned flying drones, they look more and more like SkyNet to me. So, what's your most likely apocalyptic scenario?

So, now that jailbreaking is easier than ever, right now is probably the best time to dive into the vast array of possibilities that lay ahead in shackle-free land. I've already tricked my iPhone out pretty substantially, but there's always somewhere further you can go. Yes, Flash had already been ported to the iPad, and now the iPhone has received the Flash treatment as well. Jailbreaking required, naturally.

A bunch of figures travelled all over the web this past week regarding Android's remarkable growth. Its growth is indeed remarkable - bigger than the iPhone, bigger than Research In Motion's BlackBerry (in the US, at least). However, as impressive as those figures are, isn't it about time we start comparing platforms instead of devices?

Ksplice applies kernel patches on-the-fly - no reboot required -- in a fraction of a second. Here's a hands-on guide to performing painless system updates. Learn how to patch a live kernel and give reboots the boot.

JoliCloud, the much talked-about cloud client OS, is making its debut today with the release of the official 1.0 milestone, and is now available for general release. JoliCloud is an operating system combined with a user interface that allows people to access web services as if accessing an app on their smartphones.

Been wondering about Nokia's strategy for conquering the rapidly expanding app space? Great! So were we, which is why we joined up with a recent dev event carried out by the Finnish company for an update on how and where things are going. It's a familiar narrative by this point: Qt is all set to become the way that Nokia-friendly apps are made -- whether it be for Symbian smartphones or MeeGo-powered mobile computers, coffee machines or infotainment consoles

The "Macs are too expensive" argument is one of the most tiresome and long-lived flamewars in internet history. Obviously, Apple makes a premium product and charges premium prices, and you can always find a computer from another vendor that seems to match or exceed specs that costs less. But if you look at Apple's Mac Pro line, and compare it not so much to other vendors, but to the past lineup of Mac Pros, you discover some very unpleasant truths that help explain why Apple is enjoying record earnings for their Mac line, but doing so to the detriment of some its most loyal and valuable customers.

If the latest reports on IE9 preview are accurate, then this is a very encouraging development: "The fourth and final Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 9 was released today, along with a raft of new HTML5 demos and tests." Microsoft have reportedly further improved IE9's performance and standards compliance.

This article looks beyond Active Directory at a variety of approaches available today to getting Linux and Windows to work together on the network. While still not a job for an average Linux administrator or a Windows Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) who's still wet behind the ears, there are tools available that make the job easier than ever.

The British government has rejected a call to dump Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), saying that it is saving taxpayers' money by staying with the nine-year-old browser.

Anyone contemplating a new computer purchase (for personal use or business) is confronted with new (and confusing) hardware choices. Intel and AMD have done their best to differentiate the x86 architecture as much as possible while retaining compatibility between the two CPUs, but the differences between the two are growing. One key differentiator is hyperthreading; Intel does it, AMD does not. This article explains what that really means, with particular attention to the way different server OSes take advantage (or don't). Plenty of meaty tech stuff.

In previous OSNews articles I've claimed that discarded computers up to ten years old can be refurbished and made useful to someone. They shouldn't be discarded. They should be refurbished -- fixed up and reused -- rather than recycled -- destroyed and separated into their constituent materials. So how does one do this? In this and several subsequent articles, I'll describe how to revitalize older computers.

Free Software Magazine published an interesting lexicon of terms that are thrown around within the Free Software and Creative Commons worlds that have particular meaning, and might not be familiar to people who aren't open source or free culture advocates.

Here is the continuation of a series of comparison tests that is without doubt bound to cause a huge amount of controversy: Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux There are performance wins and losses on both sides of the fence, but Ubuntu compares very well with Windows 7, and no doubt these tests indicate a much closer performance comparison than most people would have expected.