Instead of having too many appliances and devices plugged into one outlet, why not reverse the idea? In order to save ourselves from the rat's nest of wires below the entertainment center (or the computer desk), David Friedman, photographer, had the idea to have an entire wall of plugs. Just imagine. No more crowded daisy-chains, no more losing pets and small children to the mess underneath, and just think how jealous the neighbors will be with the new sort of 21st-century art you'd have on your wall-- changeable depending on your current mood, too!

Last week we talked about whether or not the Debian project would include Mono in its default GNOME installation. This incited some heavy debate on OSNews, but sadly, the Mono debate also lead to some very nasty blog posts in the Debian community. Time for damage control, Debian project leader Steve McIntyre must've thought.

A few days ago Opera launched a placeholder website which said they were going to "reinvent" the web, on June 16. Well, it's June 16, and Opera has announced Opera Unite, a technology which allows individual Opera users to connect to one another, turning every machine running Opera Unite into a web server.

It's not available in the latest kernel just yet, but if you just so happen to have gotten your hands on a USB 3.0 device you want to use at full spectrum (you lucky jerk) or want to do this for the sake of geekiness, it's now possible to get USB 3.0 support for Debian and Ubuntu systems. The USB 3.0 subsystem will be integrated into the Linux kernel "soon," but if you've got some time on your hands, instructions have been provided to do it yourself.

The critical Java vulnerability in Mac OS X which we reported on earlier has finally been fixed by Apple. "Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 delivers improved reliability, security, and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.5.7 and later." The fix for this vulnerability is in there.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr. All demon spawn from Web 2.0, and we all love to make fun of these websites and the services they provide. However, here in the West, where everything is at arm's length and democracy is something we do not remember fighting for, it's easy to forget that what looks silly and useless to us, can be of the utmost importance somewhere else in the world. Update: I've been informed that the first casualty has fallen at the hands of armed government supporters. Hundreds of thousands of people are now on the streets all over Iran. More updates inside.

KDE, the K Desktop Environment, is a free software project based on a desktop environment for UNIX-like systems. Learn how to build small but extremely useful applets for Plasma - the new shell for the K Desktop Environment - starting with a handy memory monitor applet.

According to various rumours, Steve Jobs would make a surprise appearance during last week's keynote address at the WWDC, marking the end of his sick leave. While that rumour turned out to be false, Apple has now confirmed that Jobs will return to Apple at the end of June.

The Interactive Computing Lab team in ENAC, Toulouse, has been successful in collaboration with Linux developers in bringing native multi-touch support to Linux. While there is Multi-Pointer X in the mainline X.Org server (to be released with X.Org 7.5/X Server 1.7), we now have multi-touch support to be able to handle gestures and other actions. This multi-touch support requires the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. How this works right now is by reading the input events, translating them into multi-touch events using simple gesture recognition, and then sending D-Bus messages over to Compiz to produce multi-touch effects. Right now the code is deemed just a proof-of-concept, but they are currently working on a better implementation.

It's an almost 50/50 split of Apple and Microsoft news. Apple's WWDC is an unavoidable news-machine outputting Snow Leopard, Safari 4, new MacBook s and the iPhone 3GS (The 'S' is for sucks -- ed. It's a joke!). Microsoft returns the volley with their decision to remove IE completely from Windows 7 in Europe, but between all this giant game of tennis we find a quiet moment to discuss QNX and SkyOS too.

With the growing "mobile, mobile, mobile!" craze, many groups have been working strenuously to develop slimmer, easier to use mobile operating systems and applications. At the forefront of these innovating developments are various Linux branches, Android quite possibly one of the most popular and most hoped to come preinstalled on netbooks. In the humble shadows, however, a new mobile OS is emerging and just may have the viability to cover some hefty ground in the market. Meet "Xenon," the new mobile OS.

We've got some news in the Apple vs. Psystar tragedy that's been unfolding before our eyes for months now. We all know the gist: Psystar sells machines with Mac OS X pre-installed, while the EULA states that's not allowed. Apple then took this stuff to court, and in the meantime, Psystar went into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. The news today is that Apple has filed a complaint stating that this Chapter 11 thing is just a shield that allows Psystar to continue its business practices, which Apple deems as illegal.

A Mono developer responds to a request for "a calm presentation of why Mono is desirable, why it is not a threat, and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default" answering the three questions individually, then attempting to address general anti-Mono sentiment.

Reuters reports that Microsoft is getting ready to unveil a free antivirus service for computers to compete with the many retail antivirus offerings on the market. Microsoft first made plans for its free antivirus offering codenamed "Morro" in November of 2008. At the time, Microsoft said that the service would be launching in the second half of 2009. The exact launch date of the new free anti-virus service has yet to be announced, but Reuters reports that Microsoft will "soon" make a beta version of the free protection available for users. Investors in security software firms like McAfee and Symantec are worried that a free offering from Microsoft could potentially harm revenue for the companies.