Well, this is a welcome surprise for those of us waiting for Ubuntu 10.04, the Lucid Lynx. Several users are reporting that their iPod Touches and iPhones (including the 3GS) work in alpha 3 - without tweaking, without jailbreaking, without patching - with Nautilus and Rythmbox.

Ah, Nautilus, GNOME's default file manager. It's been with us for a long time now, and it has certainly been at the centre of a number of controversies. Do we go with a spatial or a navigational Nautilus? Should we replace the location bar with a breadcrumb bar? And now, it's time to move on. Recently, it has become apparent to many that Nautilus could use a make-over.

"DSL.sk did a test of the 'ballot' screen at www.browserchoice.eu, used in Microsoft Windows 7 to prompt the user to install a browser. It was a Microsoft concession to the EU, to provide a randomized ballot screen for users to select a browser. However, the DSL.sk test suggested that the ordering of the browsers was far from random. Maybe there was cogent technical analysis of this issue posted someplace, but if there was, I could not find it. So I'm providing my own analysis here, a little statistics and a little algorithms 101. I'll tell you what went wrong, and how Microsoft can fix it. In the end it is a rookie mistake in the code, but it is an interesting mistake that we can learn from, so I'll examine it in some depth."

Evidence has just submitted to LKML a new version of the SCHED_DEADLINE real-time CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel. The project is basically a new scheduling policy (implemented inside its own scheduling class) aiming at introducing deadline scheduling for Linux tasks, and it is being developed by Evidence in the context of the EU-Funded project ACTORS. This version takes into account comments come from Linux kernel developers, and it also introduces a first drafted implementation of deadline inheritance.

Kroc, Thom and David devote a show to the discussion of monopolies. What defines a monopoly, what has it to do with morals, and what positive and negative effects monopolies have on the market. Microsoft and Google are mentioned throughout as we try to place the current position Google finds itself in in context with the massive change in the technology world since Microsoft was king of the hill.

I just have to make mention of this. ACube, the company behind the sam440ep PowerPC motherboard, has finally made available the backplates for sam motherboards. As mentioned in my review, they shipped the sams without backplates, which over time kind of became a running joke in the Amiga world. Sam440 owners can now contact their dealers, or ACube directly, for a free backplate.

The Joo Joo tablet has been delayed by one month. "Just a day after we pondered the shipping status of Fusion Garage's JooJoo tablet, the company's come clean and told us shipping will delayed to March 25 because of a manufacturing issue with the tablet's 12.1-inch capacitive screen. Yep, it looks like it's going to be at least 27 more days until you've got a JooJoo of your very own - which means, of course, that Fusion Garage will now be trying to launch this thing during the same week Apple's scheduled to launch the iPad."

"Parallels, known for its virtualization solutions for both desktops and servers, has announced another option for creating virtual servers on Apple's Xserve. The recently announced Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition lets admins create Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux virtual servers without the overhead of running Mac OS X Server as a host OS."

The debate about HTML5 video is for the most part pretty straightforward: we all want HTML5 video, and we all recognise it's a better approach than Flash for online video. However, there's one thing we just can't seem to agree on: the codec. A number of benchmarks have been conducted recently, and they highlight the complexity of video encoding: they go either way.

GNOME hacker Seth Nickell has written a lengthy PDF and accompanying blog post with a number of very interesting ideas for GNOME 3.0. I pondered putting this up on the front page, but since that usually only attracts the "It's not what I'm used to so it sucks"-crowd, I decided to put it up here. Be sure to read the blog post, the PDF, and the comments on the blog post to get the entire picture.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes about the no-win scenario facing today's independent programmers: "In a knowledge economy, programmers rank among our most valuable workers, yet the current legal and regulatory climate makes a career as an independent software developer virtually a dead-end prospect." Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the hurdles and costs of obtaining health care for one's own family, a hostile legal climate in search of accountability for any defects in code - these harsh realities make it "easy to see why software developers would give up on entrepreneurship. For many, the risks simply don't match the potential rewards. Better to keep their heads down, not rock the boat, and hope they can hang onto their jobs until retirement."

"One of the most interesting Mozilla Labs projects has now stagnated. Is the project dead? Does it have a future? The Mozilla developer who led the project tells all. Back in the summer of 2008, Mozilla began development of an experimental add-on called Ubiquity, providing new command mash-up capabilities for the Firefox browser. After just over a year of development, Mozilla is now pulling back on the effort, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been successful. The current release of Ubiquity is version 0.1.9.1, and was released on January 20th of this year. To date, Ubiquity has garnered more than 420000 downloads, according to the Mozilla add-ons site. So what is happening with Ubiquity now?"

Windows users were already enjoying the Opera 10.5 beta for a while now, but the Mac and Linux versions weren't yet available. Mac users can now rejoice, as the beta is now available for their platform as well. In the meantime, Windows users can already upgrade to beta 2 if they so desire; Linux users will have to remain patient a while longer.

BBC News reports "Mark your diaries for 4 March because in Denver the funeral arrangements are well underway for the planned passing that day of Internet Explorer 6". There's a phobia of being buried alive but I think in this case, it's the living that are all too quick to be shoveling the dirt over as IE6 doesn't officially die until 2014 when Microsoft pull the life-support.