Opera, MySQL, Kubuntu

This was a bit of a weird week for OSNews. Monday and Tuesday I was unable to reach OSNews and its related domains from home; we still don’t know why, but the end result was that I could not work on OSNews, meaning very few items. For the rest, it was a very quiet and relaxed week, with little going on.

Remotes and Connectivity: Reason No. 6 Why We’re Fat – 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.

Opera 10 Released – After a long gestation period, Opera has released version 10 of their browser, which comes packed with a whole lot of improvements and new features. It’s got a completely new interface, a turbo mode for those days of bandwith drought, automatic updates (finally!), and lots more.

Debunking Apple vs. Psystar Myths – Apple has responded to Psystar’s new lawsuit today, stating that it is nothing but a stall tactic on Psystar’s end. While I could just paraphrase whatever the filing reads, I decided to take this opportunity to address a number of sentiments and analogies often made in comment threads (not necessarily on OSNews).

GNOME 3 Launchers Change Behaviour – Have you ever been bitten by accidentally loading multiple instances of the same application in GNOME? When you click on the launcher of an already-running application in GNOME, it will load up another instance of the same application, instead of switching to the already running one. This can lead to bugs and other unforeseen behaviour, which of course isn’t desirable. In GNOME 3, this issue has been resolved.

EU Concerned About Future MySQL – While the US Department of Justice has already given the green light to Sun’s purchase by Oracle, the European Commission is a little more weary about possible antitrust issues. Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for competition, is especially worried about the future of Sun’s open source endeavours, specifically MySQL.

Kubuntu Gets Some Love – It’s no secret that when it comes to KDE-based distributions, Kubuntu isn’t exactly the cream of the crop. With the release of Kubuntu Karmic Alpha 5, the KDE4 desktop delivered with Kubuntu received some much-needed love. Let’s take a look at what the Kubuntu people are doing.

Firefox To Include Flash Version Checker – Earlier this week, news got out that Apple was shipping an outdated version of Adobe’s Flash Player with Snow Leopard; if you updated to a more recent version before the upgrade to Snow Leopard, you would receive a downgrade. This older version had security holes in it, so Adobe advised everyone to upgrade. The Mozilla team has now announced that Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 will include a Flash version checker.

7 Comments

  1. 2009-09-07 11:34 am
    • 2009-09-07 2:57 pm
      • 2009-09-07 3:07 pm
        • 2009-09-07 8:57 pm
  2. 2009-09-07 3:19 pm
    • 2009-09-08 7:54 am
  3. 2009-09-07 3:30 pm