Monthly Archive:: September 2010

Hold on to your security blanket, people, because Google is rolling out a pretty big change to its search engine. Not too long ago the internet was in a shock because Google rolled out a new feature that allowed you to pick a background image for the Google home page, just like Microsoft's Bing. Google went a lot further today, and has launched Google Instant, adding search-before-you-type results to the Google home page.

"Linux Mint Debian Edition comes with a Debian base, which we transformed into a live media and on top of which we added a new installer. It's rougher and in some aspects not as user-friendly as our other editions, it's very young but it will improve continuously and rapidly, and it brings us one step closer to a situation where we're fully in control of the system without being impacted by upstream decisions." It's a rolling release, so expect continuous updates. Not a new concept by a long shot, but it's interesting to see a distribution like Mint try this out.

I've often harped on Apple for its policy regarding jailbreaking, but of course, Apple isn't the only company engaging in such practices. We already talked about Motorola, and now, we have Sony - already a company with a checkered past when it comes to consumer rights. As it turns out, Sony don't want you jailbreaking your their Playstation 3.

"It took Hewlett-Packard less than a day to file a lawsuit against its former chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, over his decision to join its rival and partner Oracle as a co-president. H.P. filed its lawsuit on Tuesday in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara, claiming that Mr. Hurd had breached his contract with the company. The lawsuit said that Mr. Hurd could use his intimate knowledge of H.P. and its trade secrets to aid Oracle and harm H.P. The two companies compete in the market for computer servers, storage systems and business software."

Finally Bricsys has released the official version of Bricscad V10 for Linux. Linux users now have very capable desktop CAD software able to handle the DWG file format. From Bricscad website: "Bricsys is the first to release a .dwg based CAD software for Linux users. Bricsys NV, the developer of Bricscad, announced today that Bricscad V10 for Linux is now available. Bricscad V10 is the first .dwg based CAD platform available for the Linux Operating System. Bricscad V10, the leading alternative CAD platform for the .dwg file format, continues to offer freedom of choice to the CAD and Engineering community."

Every so often we publish here at OSNews articles about copyright, about the war of the "old media" establishment against everyone else. Many, myself included, have argued that the way to get out of this mess -- short of changing the law -- is to have more artists release their work under a Creative Commons license. However, after a few years it became obvious to me that CC would never be able to change the industry all by itself. Offering a Free license, and having 30,000 albums released under it, was still not enough. Until the Summer of 2009, that is. Update: Added audio samples.

We've all heard of patent trolls who buy up patents without using them to make any products. Their only goal is to seek out possible infringers and sue them, making money via the justice system. It was only a matter of time, but we've now got something new: copyright trolls.

"When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities. With the release of KDE 4.5, Plasma has reached a much higher level of maturity, and activities can now be integrated with virtual desktops, dual monitor screens, and with the Dashboard feature."

Clemens Zeidler, one of the spearheads for the Stack & Tile implementation on Haiku, has let the Haiku development mailing list know that a new and improved (and refactored) version of the feature has been committed to the Haiku source tree. This new version is no longer a hack into Haiku's app server itself, but is it's own decorator, in Haiku/Be parlance.

We don't do a whole lot of gaming news (a few reviews every now and then, just for my own personal fun), but in this case, I'd like to make an exception. Iconic and legendary, Duke Nukem is going to really really really return to the main stage of gaming. Borderlands developer Gearbox has announced that Duke Nukem Forever will be released early next year, for both consoles and PC. A playable demo is now being trotted around PAX. Instant update: VIDEO! VIDEO!

Ping would have been a great thing for Apple to have done about 3-4 years ago, but at this point, the Social Networking thing has pretty much played itself out, picked its winners, and we've all moved on. Apple went to all the trouble to make a deal with a golf company, and all we got was a third rate social network? First of all, in what is probably just a temporary setback, Ping is choked with spam, but more importantly, it's just a sucky social network.

Well, this is an interesting double standard. Remember Apple's reaction to Palm trying to tap into iTunes? They were pretty pissed, right? Well, it seems that in Apple's world, it's not okay to access their services unauthorised, but when Apple needs to do the same to someone else's services, it's suddenly not a problem. As it turns out, Apple violated Facebook's terms of service, knowingly, and willingly.

The iPad pretty much has the tablet market all to itself at this point, since no serious competitor has yet been released. We've been teased to death with the first real competitor, a device from Samsung called the Galaxy Tab. It has been officially unveiled today, and it indeed looks like the first serious competition to the iPad. It runs Android, naturally.

It's been only a mere six months since its first unveiling, but Microsoft has already announced that Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturing. This means device makers can start tuning the software to their hardware, leaving plenty of time to release devices before the holiday season.