Further analysis of the revelation that Microsoft does not permit any competition to even exist

X@FOSDEM is taking place at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. Nicolai Hahnle and Daniel Stone provided talks on R300 GLSL compilation and X11 and its problems, respectively. Intel's Eric Anholt also ended up giving a very brief talk on the Cairo-GL project. Luc Verhaegen is now starting to talk on cleaning/integrating the Linux graphics stack.

Not just Microsoft Web sites but the PR sites and the investment site of Bill Gates also rely on Akamai, which runs GNU/Linux

Veracode researcher demonstrates spyware that allows someone to steal a stranger's contact list, read text messages in real time, and track the location of the phone.

fysdt writes with this excerpt from TechCrunch: "An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley's tech firms — minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco — you won't find any women CTOs. Look at the management teams of companies like Apple — not even one woman. It's the same with the VC firms — male dominated. You'll find some CFOs and HR heads, but women VCs are a rare commodity in venture capital. And with the recent venture bloodbath, the proportion of women in the VC numbers is declining further. It's no c...

Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld has put together a collection of interesting, funny, and just plain weird Superbowl television advertisements from tech companies — excluding Internet retailers. Everyone has seen the Macintosh ad that played during the 1984 Superbowl, but there are a bunch of other gems, starting with a long-winded ad for the Xerox 9200 from 1976. The funniest is probably EDS's 'herding cats' ad from 2000, but there are some oddities, too, including a bizarre ad for Network Associates depicting a Russian nuclear missile launch, and a very dated ad for Sharp from the mid-1980s. Intel has one ad in the collection from 1997, and it turns out that it is returning with two ads this year that it says feature 'geek humor.'"

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Microsoft experienced a cloud-centric week with Windows Azure, which is now generally available in 21 countries and no longer available for free. Microsoft hopes that the cloud-based platform and its application-building tools for developers will allow it to gain market share in the cloud computing arena, where it faces strong competition from the likes of Google and Amazon. In addition to Azure, Microsoft received some good news on the Windows 7 front, with a new report from Net Applications showing a rising rate of adoption for the new operating system. However, Microsoft continues to face some difficulties in mobile, with the rumor mill suggesting that the company may try to introduce a branded smartphone later this month. - Although Microsoft has traditionally earned the substantial bu...

I broke down and bought a Nexus One last week. I got the original G1 phone from google when it came out, and I hardly ever used it. Why? I generally hate phones - they are irritating and disturb you as you work or read or whatever - and a cellphone to me is just an opportunity to be irritated wherever you are. Which is not a good thing.

Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld has put together a collection of interesting, funny, and just plain weird Superbowl television advertisements from tech companies — excluding Internet retailers. Everyone has seen the Macintosh ad that played during the 1984 Superbowl, but there are a bunch of other gems, starting with a long-winded ad for the Xerox 9200 from 1976. The funniest is probably EDS's 'herding cats' ad from 2000, but there are some oddities, too, including a bizarre ad for Network Associates depicting a Russian nuclear missile launch, and a very dated ad for Sharp from the mid-1980s. Intel has one ad in the collection from 1997, and it turns out that it is returning with two ads this year that it says feature 'geek humor.'"

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Tech Source: "37. "Hey! It compiles! Ship it!""

You can capture video of all of the amazing things happening on your desktop with one of Linux’s many screencasting applications. These programs are perfect for creating demonstrations for blogs and tutorials, and for illustrating projects with more than just still images.

Since the invention of PDF format in 1993 PDF documents have become extremely popular tool for exchanging information across the Web. Even now PDF beats more recent DJVU and various e-book formats in terms of popularity.

The venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is undergoing a significant transformation. The next major release, version 2.8, will introduce an improved user interface with an optional single-window mode.

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Dynamic weather conditions at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida forces NASA to order at least a 24-hour delay for the space shuttle Endeavour's 11-day mission to the International Space Station. - Last minute weather concerns forced NASA to scratch the Feb. 7 pre-dawn launch of the space shuttle Endeavour. Less than an hour before the scheduled 4:39 a.m. EDT blastoff, NASA was hopeful the weather would clear but the space agency finally ordered a stand down at 4:31 a.m. NASA now hopes...

After the earlier X talks today and then Luc's debated Linux graphics driver stack proposal (largely between he and Eric Anholt and Daniel Stone with conflicting views, but at least Intel admitting "there's a subset of users we care about and a subset we don't"), Jerome Glisse began talking about ATI Radeon kernel mode-setting and its current state. While most that read Phoronix regularly know the direction of Radeon KMS support for the coming releases, below is Jerome's short-term TODO list for the ATI kernel support. Coming up in the Radeon DRM for the Linux 2.6.34 kernel (or releases thereafter) is support for un-mappable VRAM, support for Evergreen GPUs (Radeon HD 5000 "R800" series), use of the Linux power management API for better suspend-and-resume support, better DRM power manageme...

bennyboy64 writes "Australia's Minister for Communications wants internet providers and the film industry to sit down and work out a solution to stop illegal movie downloads, despite a judge ruling in favor of an internet provider not being responsible for policing illegal downloads. The film studios first dragged internet provider iiNet into the Federal Court back in November 2008, arguing that the ISP infringed copyright by failing to take reasonable steps — including enforcing its own terms and conditions — to prevent customers from copying films and TV shows over its network."

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Hugh Pickens writes "The first electric dental drill was patented in 1875; modern drills grind the diseased portions of teeth away at up to 500,000 rpm. But dentists have been seeking less invasive ways of wiping out stubborn, tooth-decaying bacteria. Now Live Science reports that bacteria-killing jets of plasma could soon replace the drills used to treat cavities in our teeth. Researchers recently demonstrated that a small, blowtorch-like device emitting a relatively cool beam of purple plasma could eliminate oral bacteria in cavities, leaving more tooth structure intact than a drill does. To test how well 'cold' plasma jets (about 100F or 38C) sterilize tooth material, researchers took slices of dentin from extracted human molars, doused them with bacteria, and torched them with the plas...

Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time. Luc has just begun his talk on unifying and simplifying the free software desktop's graphics driver stack. Here are his slides and we will be back with more updates and videos on Phoronix as the presentation progresses.

X@FOSDEM is taking place at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. Nicolai Hahnle and Daniel Stone provided talks on R300 GLSL compilation and X11 and its problems, respectively...

NY Times: "The House today overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at building up the United States' cybersecurity army and expertise, amid growing alarm over the country's vulnerability online."

Linus pushed out the Linux 2.6.33-rc7 kernel yesterday afternoon, but still even being seven release candidates into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel cycle, at least one more test release is due before we may see an official release. The number of regressions for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel is still high and is somthing that isn't pleasing Torvalds. While the Linux 2.6.33-rc7 kernel release should lower the regression count with many fixes going in since 2.6.33-rc6 last Friday, there is also some Intel and ATI Radeon DRM driver updates still being pushed into this next major release...

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coomaria writes "The HoneyGrid scans 40 million Web sites and 10 million emails, so it was bound to find something interesting. Among the things it found was that a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam." Here is the report's front door; to read the actual report you'll have to give up name, rank, and serial number.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said search engine will release a version of Google Voice for businesses, roll out Google Wave to all users who want it, and may deliver as much as 200 new features to Google Apps this year. Google Voice offered as part of Google Apps could be a powerful combination for businesses in the market for a UCC (unified communications and collaboration) suite, particularly at a time when companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for UCC from Microsoft or IBM. Google will also release Google Wave, the company's real-time collaboration platform, for all consumers and businesses in 2010. - Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said the company will release a version of Google Voice for businesses, roll out Google Wave to all users who want it, and d...

LTSP-Cluster can scale up to several thousands thin clients providing an enterprise-class infrastructure (load balancing, high availability, central management, monitoring) as well as large-scale remote access (Citrix like) for thousands of users at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary equivalent using open source technologies.

You can capture video of all of the amazing things happening on your desktop with one of Linux’s many screencasting applications. These programs are perfect for creating demonstrations for blogs and tutorials, and for illustrating projects with more than just still images.

The H Open: "The SD Times reports that Microsoft has sold nearly all of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) support coupons."

A critical vulnerability in the WebLogic Server Node Manager has forced Oracle to release an unscheduled update outside of its normal quarterly patch cycle.

OCatenac passes along an interview with Don Syme, chief designer of F#, which is Microsoft Research's offering for functional programming on the .Net platform. Like Scala, which we discussed last fall, F# aims at being an optimal blend of functional and object-oriented languages. "[Q] What is the best program you've seen written in F#? [A] I've mentioned the samples from F# for Scientists, which are very compelling... For commercial impact then the uses of F# in the finance industry have been very convincing, but probably nothing beats the uses of F# to implement statistical machine learning algorithms as part of the Bing advertisement delivery machinery. ... We've recently really focused on ensuring that programming in F# is simple and intuitive. For example, I greatly enjoyed working...

tcd004 writes "Wilson Bentley began photographing snowflakes in 1885, and managed to immortalize more than 5,000 crystals before his death in 1931. Now his images are widely recognized and highly sought after. At the age of 19, 'Snowflake' Bentley jury-rigged a microscope to a bulky bellows camera and took the first-ever photograph of a snowflake. Photography then, particularly microphotography, was much closer to science than art. In a 1910 article published in the journal Technical World, he wrote, 'Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature possessing the charm of mystery, of the unknown, sure richly to reward the investigator." The video embedded at the link above touches on another long-forgotten piece of history: a sketch of the photographers who captured arial views of assemblages of te...

The H Open: "The next version of Linux is not only the first to offer the Nouveau KMS graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware, it also comes with a multitude of improvements for the two AMD/ATI and Intel graphics drivers which support Kernel-based Mode Setting (KMS)."

Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 8 "KDE" edition: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 8 'Helena' KDE Community edition. The KDE Community edition aims to provide a version of Linux Mint which uses the KDE desktop. This edition is....

I have spent two days with my new laptop, the LC2210Si from LinuxCertified. Why did I order this laptop? It is one of many companies, known and less-known, who offer their hardware with Linux installed, instead of a version of Microsoft's Windows. You can read about the beginning of my research and these companies in my previous blog, “Buying a Linux Laptop ...”

Super Bowl XLIV is upon us, with the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints ready to battle at the Sun Life Stadium in Florida for the Lombardi trophy on Feb. 7. Millions will be glued to their televisions and radios for the big event, but nearly as many could be glued to their smartphones: either to catch scores while on the run, or else fill out their Super Bowl experience with stats and commentary. The following apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch can help round out your Super Bowl experience. Some will provide real-time updates from the year's biggest game, while others let you do a little (virtual) football-playing yourself. The best part: no annoying 30-second commercials. - ...

"I will be giving a talk about the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement in the Free Software Foundation Europe’s Berlin meeting on Thursday, February 11th, next week. The talk will start at 19:30 in the Newthinking Store, Tucholskystraße 48. Hopefully, we will have a chance to continue discussing the topic over a few beers right after the meeting, too..."

gjt writes "I initially posted a piece ragging on the Nexus One. But then a commenter pointed out a problem with my initial logic, and after doing some math I concluded that the $529 unlocked/unsubsidized Google Nexus One gPhone is much cheaper than it appears to be. In fact it's only $49 over two years — and that's unlocked! Google likes to say that the Nexus One represents 'Our new approach to buying a mobile phone.' But it actually seems as though T-Mobile deserves most of the credit by providing a $20/month discount to customers who purchase an unsubsidized phone, a fact that didn't seem to get much attention when T-Mobile created the plan last October."

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For those of you who use GIMP, you know it is a really great alternative to Photoshop. Like any program, free or not, there is always room for improvement. Plugins are a an easy way to add functionality. GIMP has two different types of plugins, Script-fu and Python-fu. Right out of the box, you can add Script-fu plugins. To add Python based plugins, there is some additional steps and add-ons needed.

quaith writes "With the Space Shuttle Endeavour scheduled to launch at 4:39 AM EST on Sunday for a trip to the International Space Station, the European Space Agency has released a video that shows how the modules it's carrying — Node-3 ('Tranquility') and Cupola — are going to get attached. Node-3 is a connecting module. Cupola has six trapezoidal windows and circular roof designed to provide a unique vantage-point for observing Earth. The video animations show how the station's robotic arm will be used initially to put the modules in place as a single unit, and then to detach Cupola from the end of Node-3 and reattach it on the Earth-facing side. With this addition, the ISS will start to look like something that Jules Verne would have wanted to visit."

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Since the release of its previous version in May 2009, at least 30 additional flash chip families and half a dozen variants for each family are now being supported by Flashrom. Flashrom allows users to perform BIOS, EFI, coreboot, or firmware flashes without having to undergo sophisticated boot procedures that require bootable floppy disks/CD-ROMs or even opening the computer's casing. We first featured flashrom here in an article entitled BIOS flashing comes to Linux at last. If you have no idea what flashrom is, that article can help you grasp the basics.

Ghacks: "I have a ton of various music files on my machine that are in various states of migrating from .mp3 to different formats. The primary reason for this is because of the issue of licensing between Linux and the MP3 format."

TestDrive is an Ubuntu application that is especially designed for non-technical users to easily download and run the latest Ubuntu development daily snapshot in a virtual machine.

Over the years we've discussed the possible health risks of cellphone and other microwave radiation: studies from Israel and Sweden indicating a link between cellphone use and cancer, one from England exonerating cell towers as a cause of "microwave radiation sensitivity," and a recent 30-year Swedish study that found no link to cancer. The question won't go away though. Reader Artifice_Eternity writes "I've always tended to dismiss claims of toxicity from cell phone and Wi-Fi signals as reflecting ignorance about microwave radiation. However, this GQ article cites American and European studies going back decades that have found some level of biological harm caused by these signals. Why haven't they gained more attention? Quoting: 'Industry-funded studies seem to reflect the result of...

Linus has taken some time off from playing with his new phone to release the 2.6.33-rc7 prepatch. " for the details.

Dotnaught writes "In a blog post, Walter Luh, co-founder of Ansca Mobile and a former employee of both Apple and Adobe, recounts how Apple once promoted Flash on the iPhone then changed its mind because Flash didn't provide the optimal mobile user experience. 'I think that Apple came to the same conclusion I've come to — namely that Flash has its strengths, but not when it comes to creating insanely great mobile experiences,' he writes. Luh's piece ends with a pitch for mobile development using the Corona SDK, a Lua-based programming environment that strives to recapture the simplicity of early versions of Flash."

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Linux Professional Institute and creation of training materials

seek3r sends news of a recent test of six web application security scanning products, in which the scanners missed an average of 49% of the vulnerabilities known to be on the test sites. Here is a PDF of the report. The irony is that the test pitted eah scanner against the public test files of all the scanners. This reader adds, "Is it any wonder that being PCI compliant is meaningless from a security point of view? You can perform a Web app scan, check the box on your PCI audit, and still have the security posture of swiss cheese on your Web app!" "NTOSpider found over twice as many vulnerabilities as the average competitor having a 94% accuracy rating, with Hailstorm having the second best rating of 62%, but only after extensive training by an expert. Appscan had the second best 'Poi...

ars Technica: "Google is continuing to kill off support for Internet Explorer 6 in its services; the search giant has announced that two more of its Web properties will stop supporting IE6 as of March 1."

The GNOME Journal has posted a new set of articles, including an interview with Jonathan Thomas (OpenShot video editor creator), a Banshee update , a summary of the 2009 Boston Summit , an overview of PiTiVi , and a look at writing multimedia applications with Vala .

This Ubuntu Women interview in the Women of Ubuntu Series is with Jane Silber, the current Canonical COO, but as of March 1st, 2010, she will be taking the reins of Canonical as the CEO.

A Pew Internet & American Life Project study finds a decline in blogging among teens and young adults, and very low Twitter use among teens. Pew's Amanda Lenhart explains the findings.

CNet: "IBM Research on Friday announced that it has demonstrated a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest frequency so far: 100GHz."

Since being let go by Novell last year where he worked on the RadeonHD Linux graphics driver and X.Org support within SuSE Linux, Luc Verhaegen has continued work on his VIA Unichrome DDX driver as well as other X.Org code and he has also become involved with the CoreBoot project that aims to create a free software BIOS for most chipsets and motherboards on the market. Luc has worked on support for flashing the BIOS on ATI graphics cards, native VGA text mode support, and other work to help the CoreBoot project. Today at FOSDEM in Brussels, Luc Verhaegen is about to give a talk on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS.

krupert writes to let us know that the civil liberties committee of the European Parliament has voted to revoke the data-sharing arrangement by which US intelligence agencies have access to EU banking data via the SWIFT system. The US has threatened to withhold cooperation on terrorist intelligence if the bank data deal now in place is cancelled, which it will be next week if the full European Parliament votes in line with the committe's recommendation. US intelligence agencies clandestinely tapped the SWIFT interbank clearing data from just after 9/11 until 2006, when the secret arrangement was made public. After that, Belgium-based SWIFT pulled their servers from the US and set up shop in Brussels and the US had to negotiate with the EU to keep tapping the data.

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Microsoft is getting set to phase out its FAST enterprise search offerings for Linux and Unix. Will customers move to cloud-based search or move to Windows?

Following up on its Sunday statement that it is relenting to demands to raise e-book pricing above $9.99 for best sellers, Macmillan books are again available for sale via Amazon.com.

A new report by Game Developer Research reveals that the number of developers working on games for the iPhone continues to rise, roughly doubling in number from last year. At the same time, the amount of work done on games for Nintendo's Wii dropped significantly: "Just over 70 percent of developers said they were developing at least one game for PC or Mac (including browser and social games), rising slightly from last year; 41 percent reported working on console games. Within that latter group, Xbox 360 was the most popular system with 69 percent of console developers targeting it, followed by 61 percent for PlayStation 3. While those console figures stayed within a few percent of last year's results, the change in Wii adoption was much more significant: reported developer support for the...

Exaile 0.3.1 beta (a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python) has been released today and it's a preview of the new 0.3.1 version but should still be pretty stable to use already! The new Exaile version finally adds a long awaited equalizer, but also includes a revamped and much more powerful tag editor (ExFaso) as well as some other new features.

NASA officials gave a thumbs up Feb. 5 for the Feb. 7 launch of the space shuttle Endeavour, which is currently set for a 4:39 a.m. liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. - NASA officials gave a thumbs up Feb. 5 for the Feb. 7 launch of the space shuttle Endeavour, which is currently set for a 4:39 a.m. liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. As things currently stand at NASA the mission to the ISS (International Space Station) is the first of five last missi...

"...The good thing about free software is that everyone can contribute and change what he wants. We will benefit from applications that are developed and meet the criteria …"

alphadogg writes "The US Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to review a controversial patent issued in 2001 that is claimed to cover much of the technology underlying VoIP. The patent, held by a small company called C2 Communications Technologies, is one of 10 that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been trying to strike down for several years through its Patent Busting Project. On Friday, the patent office granted the EFF's request for a re-examination. The digital civil-liberties organization argued that another applicant had submitted basically some of the same technology to the patent office before C2 did. Patent No. 6,243,373, 'Method and apparatus for implementing a computer network/Internet telephone system,' is credited to David L. Turock as inventor and is owned by C2, pre...

As you may remember from my previous post, I simply wanted to import three spreadsheets into an MS-Access equivalent, use the "Query By Example" (QBE) mode to create a simple report and export the result to another spreadsheet. I did the whole thing in MS-Access as well and it took me about twenty minutes. This time I decided to give Kexi 1.1.3 and Knoda 0.8.3 a go. Not that I really needed to, but just to see if they were up to it if I needed to execute another odd job like this.

Howtoforge: "By using my Network Monitoring Appliance we noticed a link in MRTG always under heavy load. On this link a lot of different traffic aggregates, so we decided to analyze of what quantities of protocols and therefore applications the cumulative traffic consists."

An anonymous reader writes "It's official. The Internet, which has virtually revolutionized world communication, has been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. 'Organizers said signatories to its petition backing the nomination include 2003 peace laureate and exiled Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi — which would make it a legitimate entry.' The nomination was proposed by the Italian edition of Wired magazine for promoting 'dialogue, debate and consensus through communication' as well as democracy."

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The openSUSE Project has reached its first milestone for the upcoming 11.3 release, due in July. Milestone 1 is the first of seven planned between now and late May. The development team said its primary goal is to test build interactions between newly-added features. The first milestone features version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel, development version 2.29.5 of GNOME, and the first release candidate of KDE 4.4 desktop environment. The release also includes an openSUSE debut of a new desktop option: LXDE, short for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. LXDE is designed for computers with low hardware specifications like netbooks because it uses less CPU and RAM than other environments, the developers said.

Since being let go by Novell last year where he worked on the RadeonHD Linux graphics driver and X.Org support within SuSE Linux, Luc Verhaegen has continued work on his VIA Unichrome DDX driver as well as other X.Org code and he has also become involved with the CoreBoot project that aims to create a free software BIOS for most chipsets and motherboards on the market. Luc has worked on support for flashing the BIOS on ATI graphics cards, native VGA text mode support, and other work to help the CoreBoot project. Today at FOSDEM in Brussels, Luc Verhaegen is about to give a talk on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS.

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In two different instances this past week I've found people are more interested in stimulating a conversation about the operating system if you let them ask the questions - don't force information on someone they very well might not want or even care about.

"The spectre of broadscale Internet censorship in Australia has been covered previously here on The Next Web before, but many outside Australia may wonder: why should you care if you don’t live in Australia..."

mdsolar writes "The tritium leak into ground water at Vermont Yankee has now tested at 775,000 picocuries per liter, 37 times higher than the federal drinking water standard. 'Despite the much higher reading, an NRC spokeswoman said Thursday there was nothing to fear. "There's not currently, nor is there likely to be, an impact on public health or safety or the environment," the NRC's Diane Screnci said in an interview. She had maintained previously that the Environmental Protection Agency drinking water safety limit of 20,000 picocuries per liter had an abundance of caution built into it. ... The National Academy of Sciences said in 2005 that any exposure to ionizing radiation from an isotope like tritium elevates the risk of cancer, though it also said with small exposures, the risk woul...

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle. Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has "great momentum."

Apple announced that it would prevent third-party iPhone developers using its Core Location framework from designing Apps that deliver targeted ads to iPhone users. Normally, the Core Location framework is used to build Apps that leverage the users location, such as ones that locate restaurants or other nearby points of interest. Apple's reported attempt to purchase mobile display specialist AdMob in 2009 suggests that the company could be exploring ways to port advertising on its mobile devices, although that rumored maneuver could have also been part of the escalating battle between Apple and Google over the smartphone space. - Apple announced on Feb. 3 that it would prevent third-party iPhone developers from leveraging the popular smartphones GPS to display mobile advertising. In a news...

TuxMachines: "I have spent two days with my new laptop, the LC2210Si from LinuxCertified. Why did I order this laptop? It is one of many companies, known and less-known, who offer their hardware with Linux installed, instead of a version of Microsoft's Windows."

The Clang compiler that provides a C/Object-C/C++ compiler atop the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is now self-hosting, which means Clang can now be used to compile itself. The LLVM developers reached this important milestone where LLVM/Clang can now be used to build Clang with working resulting binaries that can even go on to build another copy of Clang as well. The short announcement of this compiler achievement for LLVM/Clang can be read on the LLVM blog...

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Version 1.7 of the Irrlicht Engine has been released. For those unfamiliar with Irrlicht, it's an open-source, real-time 3D engine that has OpenGL support as well as its own software renderer...

Peter Hutterer has put out a new release candidate for X Server 1.7.5, which also marks this point release as being just about complete. There are still two weeks left before the 1.7.5 release is expected to be made and then after that we still may see X.Org Server 1.7.6...

We fully support Ogg/Theora as an upload format. As for playback, the likeliness of that happening is close to zero at the moment.

What’s holding it back is people’s love of the Microsoft operating system and that fact that it’s familiar and so on. But actually the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft.

ATandT, after some collaborating and optimizing, announced it will allow Sling Medias SlingPlayer Mobile app to run on its 3G network. The app enables iPhone users to enjoy their home TV programming from anywhere. - AT amp;T announced is now allowing Sling Medias SlingPlayer Mobile app to run on its 3G network. The app enables iPhone users to watch live, streaming television, as well as DVR content and movies downloaded in their homes on their smartphone, from anywhere in the world. AT amp;T p...

Using Linux in the public on a daily basis has made me realize that there is a right way and a wrong way to promote Linux to those who are unfamiliar with it. What is the right way to promote Linux you ask? Simple: You don't.

Geoffrey.landis writes "Many book-lovers were surprised this week when Amazon.com removed books from the publisher Macmillan from the shelves (later restored), including such popular imprints as St. Martin's, Henry Holt, and the science-fiction publisher Tor. But readers shouldn't have been surprised, according to the Author's Guild. The Author's Guild lists a history of earlier instances where Amazon stopped listing a publisher's books in order to pressure them to accept terms, dating back to early in 2008, when Amazon removed the 'buy' buttons for works from the British publisher Bloomsbury, representing such authors as William Boyd, Khaled Hosseini, and J.K. Rowling. In response, the Author's Guild has set up a service called Who Moved My Buy Button to alert authors when their books are...

It's time for another bi-weekly development update of Wine. This time around there is better support for memory allocations debugging, improved MIDI support, a wide range of Direct3D fixes, OLEDB fixes, improved debugger support on x86_64, many MSI fixes, and various bug-fixes. Offered up in Wine 1.1.38 is also support for anonymous shaders with the Direct3D 10.0 support along with other enhancements...

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While X@FOSDEM has turned into a mess due to a lack of participation and interest among the X.Org development community, plans are underway for the 2010 X Developers' Summit. This year's XDS is back in Europe and is taking place in Toulouse, France...