"Imagine that you are a super-successful movie director, who's been given hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of whiz-bang technology to make a cinematic epic. Sounds good? Not once you are told that people will have to watch it on fuzzy old black and white television sets. Something similar happens to the text that appears on your computer screen whenever you log on to a Web site. The site's owner has so little control over the fine details of what you will see that the typeface in which the text appears is bound to be distorted. Pity the poor designer who struggled to perfect it."

A few weeks ago, we asked for the OSNews community to help with some questions we were going to ask Aaron Griffin from the Arch Linux team, and the response was glorious and somewhat phenomenal. We added those questions to our own and sent them on over, and then we were surprised by receiving not only Aaron Griffin's responses but answers from various individuals from the team.

I followed the hype: Reddit, Slashdot's front page, months of thumbs up on my blog and various video forums by Linux users for OpenShot. Given that I'm longing for a usable Linux video editor since 2003, and given that OpenShot version 1.0 had just been released, I naturally gave it a go, by also downloading its provided dependencies on my Ubuntu Linux 9.10.

"Microsoft has filed a second appeal in their XML patent case, claiming the original ruling could be dangerous for future patent cases. Last month, the software giant lost to tiny Canadian company i4i, and removed all infringing custom XML editing abilities from its Office 2003 and 2007 suite. Microsoft also paid USD 290 million in damages."

"Open source has dramatically reshaped the software development landscape. Yet is it enough to help propel the Web itself forward for the next decade? That's what Mozilla believes. After having been synonymous with open source for over a decade, thanks to its efforts behind the popular Firefox Web browser, Mozilla is now creating a new effort to help shaping the Internet's development using the same sorts of techniques that have made open source a success. The goal of the new Mozilla Drumbeat effort is to go beyond open source code to encourage and nurture projects that help to expand understanding and participation in the open Web. While Drumbeat is today only in its early stages of development, Mozilla is budgeting more than $1 million in funding for the effort - a project that it thinks could help to direct the very future of the Internet."

Independent game company Wolfire write why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX. The article goes over a brief history and the standard and Microsoft's tactics with DirectX, and what this really means for developers. DirectX keeps games on Windows, and that's not a good thing--over half of the users for one of their games are not on Windows. The fact is that Microsoft will have you believe that DirectX is the better choice for gaming, but OpenGL has always had the best features, first, and in a consistent and transparent way. I'm particularly interested in the last couple of paragraphs where WebGL is mentioned because this is gaining traction with browser vendors and it would go directly against Microsoft's grain for them to implement it in IE--as they should. Will we see yet another generation of Microsoft ignoring the standards and going their own way with a 'WebDirectX'?