While browsing the ever-wider world web today, I came across a story about IBM's patent of a sort of "Facebook Remote Control." It was appalling. Do we seriously need more single-purpose devices that will enable us to sit around more wasting more time than we already do? Does anyone really need to seclude themselves from the world even more to publish their lives on yet another teen-infested network? Must we really always be connected to the net? Read on for my ramble concerning a dark side of technology.

The next version of Fedora, Fedora 12, will integrate a Moblin Desktop Environment. It can be easily "groupinstalled" via the yum package manager. The environment has already been added to the Constantine alpha release of Fedora 12 and to Fedora's "Rawhide" development branch. They're seeking testers to "make it great" for the final release of Fedora 12, which will be released in early November.

Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV have announced the immediate availability of eComStation 2.0 Silver Release for download on August 28th, 2009. This beta release RC7, codenamed "Silver Release", is available to Software Subscription subscribers. This release of eComStation 2.0 has been under development for a long time. This is demonstrated in the amount of issues resolved and the amount of code committed. For example, 259 bugs were resolved, of which 174 were "fixed" since the previous beta release (eCS 2.0 RC6a). Over 1450 commits were made since the release of eComStation v2.0 RC6a (beta).

InfoWorld has announced its 2009 Best of Open Source Software winners, spotlighting its top 40 picks among open source enterprise software, application development tools, networking and network management software, and platforms and middleware projects. The package also includes a 'Hall of Fame' for the 10 most indispensable open source projects of all time. InfoWorld's top picks among desktop productivity tools builds on its recent 'Best Free Open Source Software for Windows,' adding GIMP, Blender, and Audacity, among others.

Some detailed benchmarks of Snow Leopard. "The performance improvements we encountered in Mac OS X 10.6 through our benchmarks we were quite astonishing. Thanks to the introduction of the Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit migration, OpenCL support, and other refinements made "under the hood" of Snow Leopard, this is one hell of a fast operating system. We were quite appalled with multiple tests exhibiting nearly 50% performance boosts over Mac OS X 10.5.8. While that was an extreme improvement, many other tests ran 10~16% faster. In a few tests, the performance was the same or the delta was statistically insignificant, but in a couple tests, there were regressions."

"With the Ubuntu Software Store, Canonical is hoping to unify all of the different package management needs into a single, unified interface. While this will not be achieved in Ubuntu 9.10, Canonical is hoping that all of the capabilities of the update-manager, Synaptic, the computer janitor application, gdebi, and other package management-related programs will be merged into Ubuntu Software Store. When this has occurred, it will be easier on the new end-user having to just deal with a single program to provide all of this functionality."

"Popfly, a platform developed by Microsoft to help people create and share games with their friends, was shut down this week, according to a blog post on the project's Web site. It's not a total loss to the gaming community, however, since Microsoft decided to open source the code and host it on CodePlex for anyone who still wants to tinker with the game engine."

"Since the last update from around the time of 1.1alpha2, Thusnelda has moved to the SVN trunk where work has concentrated on final features, cleanup and testing for the Theora 1.1 (Thusnelda) final. We're very close to the complete 1.1 and have already released two 1.1 release candidates. We'd optimistically scheduled final 1.1 release for last week, however we're taken some additional time to do more testing/tuning of the two-pass rate control."

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the ideal of a truly standards-compliant Web will ever be possible given ongoing disagreements over HTML 5, including those most recently set in motion by Microsoft's latest concerns over the spec. "While some items on Microsoft's list seem like quibbles, others are valid issues," McAllister writes. And with others in the working group supporting the proposed additions in question as they stand, an impasse could conceivably be the end result. "Disagreements are an inevitable part of any standardization process. But if disagreements lead to irreconcilable differences, it calls in to question the validity of the final standard." So where does that leave HTML 5?

Genesi just launched the Efika MX 'smarttop' - an ARM-based Linux device with HD video capability. Based on the Freescale i.MX515 processor (800Mhz ARM), it includes WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI, and only consumes about 7W of power.

Among OSNews readers, Slackware is a surprisingly popular choice when it comes to Linux distributions. A new release came out today, Slackware 13, which comes packed with improvements, and even a whole new port.

The recent release of the PS3 Slim brought about joy for those who were waiting for a less expensive/smaller gaming system and indignation for those who were waiting for a Linux experimental machine of the same type as there was no "OtherOS" or Linux option on this model. Why? we cry sadly. Because, the deep, omniscient voices of two Sony representatives boom back.

A complaint you hear quite often is that the Linux desktop environments, which mostly refers to KDE and GNOME, are trying too hard to be like Windows and Mac OS X. Now, even James Bottomley, Distinguished Engineer at Novell, Director of the Linux Foundation, and Chair of its Technical Advisory Board (put that on your business card) states in an interview that he believes the Linux desktop is too much like Windows and Mac.

"It's turning out to be a busy week for Nokia. Days in advance of NokiaWorld in Stuttgart, and a couple of days after lifting the curtain on its first netbook, Nokia has announced the Nokia N900, the successor to its almost four-year-old lineup of Internet Tablets. The N900 follows in the footsteps of the N810 with its slide out keyboard, but adds for the first time built-in 3G (Nokia calls it 3.5G) functionality, making the N900 the first Nokia tablet with the ability to go online without a WiFi connection or cellphone pairing. It's also the first Nokia device to run Maemo 5, Nokia's homegrown Linux distro."