Blood Frontier is a hot new free and open source first person shooter with original artwork and based on the Cube 2 engine. Phoronix takes a look "Blood Frontier is based upon the Sauerbraten engine and takes advantage of the features like a 6-direction height field world model, real-time map editing, light-maps, shader-based lighting effects, integrated physics support, and a particle engine. Like Cube and Cube 2, Blood Frontier uses OpenGL and SDL, which makes it multi-platform friendly with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X." Read more

One of the big hypes of Windows 7 was the new integrated touch and multitouch features unheard of in previous systems. On paper, it all looks nice, but the folks over at Engadget recently tested out these said features of the beta on an HP TouchSmart PC, and were underwhelmed by the efficiency of the features.

According to Keir Thomas, author of "Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference," the said book has been downloaded over 150,000 times within days of its launch. The book is supposedly written for even the timid of the Windows users who wish to switch over, assuming that the user has "zero Linux knowledge." According to Thomas, the book takes the unknowing user by the hand throughout the installation process and then delves into the file system and manager, and even covers the command line features as well as system security. The book was published and sold for $9.94 on Amazon, but is also available for free as a downloadable PDF here. Assuming each download represents a struggling to-be Linux user, it sounds like there are just barrels of them waiting to be converted.

M:N threading, in which a single kernel thread is multiplexed to run multiple logical user mode threads, has long been a feature of some Unix systems (Solaris and FreeBSD have had it for years). Even Windows NT has had "Fibers" for several releases, though they suffered from the same problems as other M:N schemes and were incompatible with many Win32 APIs. Join Windows Kernel Architect Dave Probert for a discussion on the new User Mode Scheduling Feature which solves these problems while allowing applications fine grained control over their threads.

Common Windows problems could soon be solved by clicking a "Fix It" button. Microsoft has started putting the button on its web-based support pages that detail the most common problems hitting PC and Windows users. Clicking the button kicks off a download that, once run, carries out the series of steps needed to fix a specific problem or remove a bug. Microsoft also has plans to extend the click-to-fix system to help users recover from a crash.

Do you remember the good old days? When game manufacturers fully realised that gamers don't really need a motivation and a back story to make them want to kill everything on screen? The good old days, when Grand Theft Auto 1 was released, and Carmageddon 1 and 2 were made. Those were the days. Somewhere along the way, however, game designers started shoe-horning backstories and motivations into games where the goal is "kill everything", and as a consequence, these games became pretentious. Thank god, however, for Saints Row 2: a game that brings back the good old days of mindless violence - just for the fun of it.

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. Some funny responses by the passers-by in this little nonsense-investigation.

Microsoft has lately been a bit sluggish with producing its mobile branch of Windows, and it's about time that they make some headway if they hope at all to compete with the market today. Though Microsoft isn't talking, a sneaker over at ZDNet says via her sources that Windows Mobile 6.5 will be shipping September of 2009 and 7.0 in April of 2010 (not to mention to testers in November of '09). Will Windows Mobile be able to keep up with the fast-paced mobile market of today? That, of course, is for the consumers to decide.

PureMobile sent us in the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic for a review, the first Symbian OS smartphone with S60 5.0 in it to date. This impressive-looking smartphone looks like a darling touchscreen phone, but is it really? Read on for more.

Netbooks have been heralded as the foot in the door for Linux. With the launch of the earliest Eee PC models, Asus made a bold move by only offering them with Linux pre-installed; Microsoft soon responded by working with Asus to bring Windows XP to the next generation Eee PCs. Since then, Windows XP gained market share in the netbook segment rapidly, casting doubts over whether or not netbooks would really turn out to be that foot in the door. HP has today announced that its new HP Mini 1000 netbook will not be available with Linux pre-installed in Europe.

Opera has announced a new JavaScript engine. "Over the past few months, a small team of developers and testers have been working on implementing a new ECMAScript/JavaScript engine for Opera. When Opera's current ECMAScript engine, called Futhark, was first released in a public version, it was the fastest engine on the market. That engine was developed to minimize code footprint and memory usage, rather than to achieve maximum execution speed. This has traditionally been a correct trade-off on many of the platforms Opera runs on. The Web is a changing environment however, and tomorrow's advanced web applications will require faster ECMAScript execution, so we have now taken on the challenge to once again develop the fastest ECMAScript engine on the market."

Fedora 11 Alpha includes a number of major features including Ext4 as default filesystem, A Windows cross compiler with dozens of libraries available in the repository, PackageKit Firmware support, experimental support for the next generation Btrfs filesystem, GNOME 2.26 development snapshot, KDE 4.2 RC 2 (general release available as an update), Xfce 4.6 Beta, Python 2.6 and more. Download it from here. The general release is targeted to be released at the end of May this year and will have many more enhancements available.

Between all the Windows 7 hubbub, you'd almost forget that that other operating system maker is also hard at work on the next release of its operating system. Even though Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was supposed to be a release that did not focus on end user features, it seems that Apple will still include a number of those in Snow Leopard. The new cat will follow in Windows 7's footsteps by including a location awareness framework, while also allowing programmers to make use of the multitouch trackpads in Apple's laptops.

Three months after the previous release, the ReactOS Team has released version 0.3.8 of their Windows NT-compatible operating system. We have taken a short virtual look at this new release. In addition, the project will have a booth at the FOSDEM event in Brussels, Belgium on the 7th and 8th February. Several members of ReactOS Development Team along with the Project Coordinator will be attending. You can have a chance to test the live system, speak with developers, and get a closer look at their project.