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"Researchers in South Korea have built a networking router that transmits data at record speeds from components found in most high-end desktop computers. A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology created the router, which transmits data at nearly 40 gigabytes per second--many times faster than the previous record for such a device."

A rumor has been going around for about four months now that Valve is coming out with a Linux version of Steam and had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. However Valve have officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear - there is no Linux version of Steam in development.

Rumours were abound that the first Google ChromeOS device would emerge towards the end of the year. Although this rumour turned out to be false, other snippets of news surrounding Google and the ChromeOS also emerged. One of these stories consists of rumours reported by TechCrunch, and two others are not rumours but simply confirmed facts.

In June 2009 we had some very good news about the integration of multitouch events support inside the Linux kernel. Since then, many multitouch device drivers were developed, mostly in collaboration with LII-ENAC, to take advantage from this. All the work was kernel-based, and multitouch supports needs more components to be added in a stack to get multitouch working out of the box. Canonical got interested in providing the needed user experience for multitouch by developing a new gesture engine that recognizes the grammar of natural hand gestures and provide them upstream in the stack as new events.

The "Macs are too expensive" argument is one of the most tiresome and long-lived flamewars in internet history. Obviously, Apple makes a premium product and charges premium prices, and you can always find a computer from another vendor that seems to match or exceed specs that costs less. But if you look at Apple's Mac Pro line, and compare it not so much to other vendors, but to the past lineup of Mac Pros, you discover some very unpleasant truths that help explain why Apple is enjoying record earnings for their Mac line, but doing so to the detriment of some its most loyal and valuable customers.

In previous OSNews articles I've claimed that discarded computers up to ten years old can be refurbished and made useful to someone. They shouldn't be discarded. They should be refurbished -- fixed up and reused -- rather than recycled -- destroyed and separated into their constituent materials. So how does one do this? In this and several subsequent articles, I'll describe how to revitalize older computers.

"As a long-time fan of GeoWorks Ensemble (now Breadbox Ensemble), a DOS based graphical user interface and office suite popular in the 80s, I've run it under a variety of operating systems and emulators over the years. You see, Ensemble requires an underlying operating system to provide a DOS compatible file system, not unlike early versions of Windows that required DOS. With the release of eComStation 2.0 I thought I'd revisit the challenge of getting Breadbox Ensemble running under OS/2 again but to add a further twist, since I didn't want to do this on a dedicated machine, I chose to see if I could get things running under VirtualBox."

On July 15th the latest Android super-phone was released by Motorola and Verizon Wireless. All hail the Droid X. The release was not without controversy though. The Droid X, while greatly raising the bar for Android phones in general, does so at the expense of the very power users and community that made the original Droid the gotta-have phone it became. Alienating this group may have far reaching consequences for Motorola.

As of April 2010, a silent change was made on Foundry27, users with a myQNX account could no longer checkout/update their copies of the QNX SVN repositories and a vague Wiki page was created "detailing" some licencing clarifications.

InfoWorld's Andrew Binstock takes an in-depth look at scripting language performance on the JVM. While Java has become more complex, the JVM has become one of the fastest and most efficient execution platforms available, creating an opening for a new generation of languages that lack Java's syntax overload to take advantage of the JVM. The report examines Groovy, JRuby, Scala, Fanthom, and Jython. Of the five, Groovy and JRuby have risen from the niche, a trend that will also likely benefit Scala and Fanthom as well. Jython's moment in the sun, Binstock writes, has probably come and gone.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses 10 ways locked-down app store delivery models limit choice for developers -- and ultimately hurts users. The model, best known in the form of Apple's notoriously finicky iPhone App Store, has established an entirely new relationship between software vendors and consumers, one some are calling 'curated computing,' a mode in which choice is constrained to deliver more relevant, less complex experiences. This model, deemed essential to the success of tablets, provides questionable value to developers, undermining their interests in a variety of ways. From disproportionate profit cuts, to curator veto powers, to poor security, fragmentation, and hostility to free software, developers must sacrifice a lot to 'curated computing' to get their wares into the hands of end-users.

Last month, I described how the computer industry encourages planned obsolescence in order to sell more product. This business model exacerbates the problem of computer disposal because it artificially shortens computer lifespans. This increases production and, ultimately, the numbers requiring disposal. One result is that e-waste -- electronics waste -- is one now one of our most pressing environmental challenges. Updated

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister offers 10 reasons why the PC is here to stay despite Steve Jobs' recent pronouncement that the iPad signals the end of the PC era. 'Depending on whom you ask, the iPad will save journalism, rescue the book publishing business, transform the movie industry, change the way we communicate, and make the perfect omelet. But there are plenty of reasons to suspect that at least some of these predictions will prove overly optimistic. Even more dubious is the idea that the iPad signals a true sea change in computing,' McAllister writes. Chief among the reasons the PC is not dead yet are desktops' comparative cost-effectiveness, the lack of versatility of mobile devices, the fact that desktop and mobile OSes don't mix, and limitations inherent to tablet devices' dependencies on the cloud.

MeeGo is a Linux-based operating system designed by Intel and Nokia for netbooks and smart phones. Installing MeeGo on an Eee PC 1000 netbook is quick slick and easy. I found the user interface to be colourful and stylish with many quirky animations. MeeGo's features are easy to discover and it is fast and responsive.