Over a year ago I posted a (non-OS news) article about this new geeky & underground, grass-root movement in videography -- similar to the artistic explosion digital photography saw a few years ago. We call ourselves "DV Rebels". Given a slow weekend, I decided to revisit the topic today with some newer videos shot with the Canon HV20/HV30 cameras, these $500 gems that have been the catalysts in the said movement. The HV lines of cameras are so popular that over 220 official music videos were shot with them, among other kinds of art. In the old article there has been criticism about the "motion photography without a story" nature of the videos that were sampled, but I think that since then these hobbyist videographers have come a long way. Have a look inside for some of my favorite HV20/30 videos available today, while you can check even more here.

Using CoLinux, the Xming X server, and PulseAudio for Windows, the boys and girls behind the Portable Ubuntu for Windows project have turned the entire Ubuntu distribution into a executable that you can run within Windows. You can see some screenshots, and download it from their web page.

"Firefly" is the best Joss Whedon work to date, but I always try to give the benefit of the doubt on new sci-fi shows. So tonight, as I was watching "Dollhouse" on TV with my ex-Be engineer husband, JBQ (currently at Android, along with many other ex-Be engineers), I noticed something familiar at the Dollhouse supervisor's computer screen. It seems that the Dollhouse's business runs on... BeOS. Click in for some snapshots of the scene. Update: mikesum32 tells us that they used a screenshot of BeOS full screen! In the screenshot BeShare and 'Jabber for BeOS' were open. I recognize quite a few names in their lists (some of them are OSNews readers to this day), so congrats for those who made it to... TV!

The FreeBSD team has pushed out the first test build of FreeBSD 7.2, a beta release. "The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of two recent changes to the system would be particularly valuable. The bce(4) network driver was updated a few days ago. And some significant work was done on the threading libraries a short time ago that is known to fix several major issues but testing to see if it introduced any regressions would be appreciated."

"Microsoft launched ASP.NET MVC 1.0 at the MIX09 event last month. This new ASP.NET enhancement brings a Rails-like model-view-controller framework to Microsoft's Web development stack. In a blog entry published on Wednesday, Microsoft developer division vice president Scott Guthrie announced that the framework is now open source. The source code is available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), a permissive open source software license that has been approved by OSI and is characterized by GNU as a free software license. Microsoft's move to open the framework will enable third-party developers to modify the source code, incorporate it into their own software, and share it with other users."

After weeks of negotiations, IBM reportedly is eyeing a $9.55-per-share buyout for Sun Microsystems, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Such a price would value the deal at roughly $7 billion and offer Sun investors nearly double the price of the stock before reports surfaced earlier this month that the parties are in buyout talks. A report in The New York Times, meanwhile, notes the parties are discussing a purchase price of $9.50 a share. In either case, Sun's investors haven't seen the hardware maker's stock trade at those levels since August. Last spring, Sun was trading at a 52-week high of $16.37 a share.

RPyC is a seamless library for integrating Python processes on many machines/processes. This article looks at the advantages or drawbacks RPyC has over other distributed Python frameworks such as XML-RPC and Pyro. A few simple examples of using RPyC are included to give you a feel for the library.

According to Canonical head honcho Mark Shuttleworth, Windows 7 presents the ideal opportunity for Linux to gain significant inroads into the desktop market. He said so in an interview with InternetNews. While I certainly do hope so, an eerie sense of deja vu creeps up on me: isn't this like the 923298th opportunity where Linux is supposed to make inroads into the desktop market?

We're really in a KDE/GNOME mood today, it would seem. The KDE team has released the second maintenance release for the KDE 4.2 series, KDE 4.2.2. The three biggest improvements in this release are stability fixes in KRunner, performance enhancements in KMail, and bugfixes, performance improvements and optimization in KHTML. As always, this release will find it way to your distributor of choice soon enough, but if you're impatient, you can always build it yourself.

My first thought was that this was an April Fool's joke, but as it turns out, this is real (I actually downloaded and tested it). The openSUSE KDE team has created a KDE 2.2.2 live CD using openSUSE 11.1 as a base. It boots like any other live CD, but instead of the latest and greatest KDE 3.x or 4.x desktop, you're presented with a fully functional KDE 2.2.2 desktop. That sure brought back some memories!

Geeks.com, home of cheap iPods, sent us in the 4th Gen Apple iPod Nano to take it for a spin. Let's see how it stacks up against the 1st generation Nano that we also happen to have available in our lab, and the iPod Touch.

"A few years ago, Matt Rodbard wrote an article on the invention of the Apple Logo in Sync Magazine. The magazine died, the articles got buried, and Matt was kind enough to let me re-publish it here, so that you can enjoy it and it doesn't get lost."

We here at OSNews take open source software seriously. That's why, today, we're making our site's source code available to the public. While some sites have inline SQL statements, embedded passwords, afterthought modules, and sensitive data embedded into their pages, at OSNews, we have a strict system that employs no hacks whatsoever to extend functionality. This is why our site rarely changes look-and-feel and rolls out new features slowly, only after they've been rigorously tested. This code is offered under the BSD license: feel free to use it as you wish! So, today, we're proud to offer you the code that powers OSNews.com. Be sure to start with the README file to get started! Enjoy responsibly.

We're well and deep into April 1 now, and if you were to believe some of the reports and hype on the internet, we should've all been paying in bottle caps right about now. As any sane person already saw coming, the Windows worm Conficker didn't do anything. It just kind of sat there, patiently mocking all those who did not update their machines properly.