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Lim Ding Wen, a fourth grader in Singapore, has taken up writing applications for Apple's all-popular iPhone, his latest of which is called "Doodle Kids," aptly named for its doodling or painting capabilities. He began his computer experience at the ripe age of two and has a good twenty programming projects under his belt. He is fluent in six programming languages. His father also writes iPhone apps, and they often compare statistics to see whose is more popular-- as it is, Lim's app has over 4,000 downloads. Do you think perhaps we could be calling him "King Ding" in thirty years when he's taken over the digital world?

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.

Yes, actually. The old-school, inefficient, heat-generating incandescent bulbs are all but history, CFL (compact florescent) bulbs taking the pedestal what with how relatively inexpensive and efficient they are when it comes to both electricity consumption and overhead cost. However, even these may have a short-lived supremacy as British scientists developed a new way of "growing" the material needed for LEDs on silicon instead of sapphire wafers, which was the original and somewhat expensive way of doing it. Because of this, household-grade lights of LED nature can be produced for under $5.00 and last up to sixty years. LEDs are three times more efficient than CFLs, last substantially longer, and contain no mercury, so they're even more environmentally friendly. These wonder-bulbs are supposed to be available to consumers within two years. It is estimated that if these new bulbs were to be installed in every home and office, it would cut electricity used on lighting by 75%. I'll take twenty of those, please.

Roger Grimes offers a comparative overview of browser security, including profiles of Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, and Opera. Grimes subjected each browser to numerous tests, including dozens of pre-defined tests made in his lab, Internet-based test suites, and exposing the browsers to known-malicious Web sites. "None of the fully patched browsers allowed silent infections or exploitation beyond simple DoS attacks. All of the browsers stopped the latest malicious attacks available on the Internet. Occasional zero-day attacks could silently infect a particular browser during a particular period of time, but all of the browsers have this same risk, and all of the browser vendors in this review are fairly consistent in patching significant problems in a timely manner." The package also includes articles on each browser's XSS vulnerability profile and cipher support.

Sony just reported that through the fourth quarter of 2008, their profits plummeted a staggering 95%, losing $1.67 billion. The reported down profits were taken from last year's Christmas season, usually the time of the year that all companies including Sony sell the most products. This is the first loss that Sony has reported since 1995 when they produced several box-office flops. In lieu of the situation, Sony is reportedly cutting 8,000 jobs and going to shut down five or six of the 57 worldwide factories. Will the headless chicken that is the economy ever recover?

According to Forbes, who conducts this and other types of research every year, Seattle has achieved the crown of being the most wired city in the United States in 2009, squeezing ahead and pushing Atlanta into second place. This is probably due to the septillion Starbucks WiFi hotspots, and it probably helps that Amazon.com and Microsoft are situated nearby. Why not check to see if your home town made it on the list of the top thirty? Glory lies in being a thoroughly networked city.

In a recent video, several hard core overclockers had a heyday just after CES lugging in the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to provide themselves with enough coolant to perform such a feat-- and all for the public eye to see, no less. At nearly absolute zero temperatures of -232 degrees Celsius, these speed demons pushed their Phenom II X4s right into the record books, achieving a staggering clock of 6.5 GHz, not to mention shattering the hopes and dreams of thousands by stealing the 3DMark05 crown with 45,474 points. As a side note, liquid nitrogen is a bit tough to come by in most societies, so you may want to stifle that overclocking beast that has risen within you and keep your chips nice and un-fried as they were designed to be.

The Russian government is planning to build a new operating system (if you are fluent, here's the original), most likely to be derived from Linux, made especially for the country itself as a whole. This is being done to reduce Russia's reliance on foreign license agreements, particularly those of Microsoft it seems. The OS is expected to be open source and distributed at little or no cost, but it's uncertain just how successful this nationwide operating system will be, if indeed it ever comes to fruition. If it's anything like that Chinese Red Flag enforcement fiasco, count me out.

Several days ago when Apple hinted at legal action against Palm, we held our breath to see just what would happen. Now Palm has stepped up to the plate boldly and hinted that they'd fight whatever legal action is thrown at them.

In an editorial previously on OSNews, there was some amount of detail about the upcoming US digital television switch, coming (now somewhat tentatively) on February 17th. Apparently, some 21 million Americans are still waiting for the $40 coupons the government promised but could eventually not deliver seeing as how the well went dry. These millions of Americans, assumed to not have gone out and bought a digital converter despite being coupon-less, will now be at a loss of "news, information, and emergency alerts" come the official switcheroo (but we all secretly know they mean "soaps, game shows, and sitcoms"). For this reason, some of those political fellows are vying to delay the transition to June 12th; a good idea, or will this just cause more confusion and problems with the already fuzzy topic? A great deal of money has been spent on telling the public "January 17th, 2009, folks!" for years now. Is it really worth it to delay?

Apple reported first-quarter earnings significantly higher than analysts had expected coming off a disappointing holiday season for most tech companies, but provided its usual conservative guidance. For the three-month period ended December 27, Apple recorded $10.2 billion in revenue, as compared with $9.6 billion a year ago, and net income of $1.6 billion, as compared with $1.58 billion a year ago. That translates into earnings per share of $1.78, far more than the $1.39 in earnings per share that analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected. Expected revenue was $9.75 billion.

On September 30, 2008 Fudzilla reported that memory manufacturer Corsair did not think the time was right to enter the SSD market, but they were watching the market closely. A little under four months later, Corsair feels the time is right to enter the SSD market. Hexus.net reports the 128GB drive will be named the S128, and it will feature Samsung flash memory and a Samsung controller. Corsair decided to use the Samsung controller over a JMicron controller due to problems with the latter. Even though the drive has not been announced by Corsair, Scan.co.uk has it listed as well as NCIX.

OpenOffice.org 3.1 is 65 days away, and developers are finishing up more than 1000 issues targeted for this Microsoft-Office-killer packing an army of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Major new features include antialiased drawings, solid dragging, translucent selections in Writer, improvements in Chart axes and labels, improved grammar checking, macros and full support for SQL including syntax highlighting in Base, and many more.

The future of Windows is clearly Windows 7. But what if you could get a smaller footprint, way better battery life than Vista or XP (think days, not hours), and everything else your little heart desires already? You can, and even better, you have been able to for a while.