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After having its way with the smartphone market, Android is now poised for a repeat performance in the tablet market, according to market anlyst firm IDC. IDC says it’s just tweaked its multi-year worldwide tablet market forecast to account for an average 11 percent increase in overall unit shipments from 2013 through 2016, based on a recent “surge in smaller, lower-priced devices.” The firm now projects annual tablet shipments to exceed 350 million units (globally) by the end of 2017.

Version 1.4 of Sinatra, the domain specific language (DSL) for creating web applications in Ruby, is imminent, according to a blog post by its current maintainer, Konstantin Haase. The new version will be the first release with new features since October 2011's 1.3.0 release. Those new features include support for new HTTP methods, updated templates, an improved classic mode, better parsing of routes, MIME-type parameters and more supported servers.

At my recent trip to Mobile World Congress, I had the pleasure of seeing a lot of the latest and greatest smarphones, and you know what? There are lot of nice phones out there, but unfortunately for most manufacturers, the quality of their phones simply doesn't matter because two companies rule the mobile roost and it doesn't seem as though anyone can break that stranglehold.

Although I dabble with many different Linux distributions, nothing comes close to matching Linux Mint. From freedom came elegance. From elegance came stability, reliability, and usability.

Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over networks and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries and generates performance data for reporting. Scalable and extensible, Icinga can monitor complex, large environments across dispersed locations.

With the new version, 12.3, the openSUSE developers are presenting an update of their popular Linux distribution that offers a redesigned, elegant desktop, updated software and various technological improvements.

LibreOffice developers have been working on bringing the open source office suite to Android for more than a year. But aside from a remote control app that lets you use your phone to control presentations running on a desktop, nothing has yet hit the Android app store.

Since ISPConfig 3.0.5, it is possible to use multiple PHP versions on one server and select the optimal PHP version for a website. This feature works with PHP-FPM (starting with PHP 5.3) and FastCGI (all PHP 5.x versions). This tutorial shows how to build PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 as a PHP-FPM and a FastCGI version on a CentOS 6.3 server. These PHP versions can be used together with the default PHP (installed through yum) in ISPConfig.

As part of one of its "spring cleaning" initiatives, Google has announced that it will be shuttering its popular RSS reader service Google Reader by 1 July. The news caused an outcry of surprise and anger on several social networks and a petition on Change.org for Google to keep it running has already gathered more than 60,000 signatures.

I use Reader every day and love it, I'm not happy to hear this. - Scott

Buhl Data Service GmbH, the developer of the WISO Mein Büro2009 software has agreed to pay €15,000 (approximately £13,000) to adhoc dataservice GmbH for using its LGPL-licensed FreeadhocUDF open source library in his business software without observing the LGPL's licensing terms. The GNU Lesser Public Licence allows software to be used free of charge, but it stipulates that developers must give prominent notice to where the licensed code was used, point out that the code is under the LGPL, include a copy of the LGPL, and make the library's source code available.

Another push from Valve for Steam Linux! We now have Day of Defeat and Day of Defeat: Source(Beta)!

We still don't know where Google is going with Android and Chrome OS, but putting Chrome's top executive in charge of Android is a big, honking hint.

Given all the legends surrounding Apple's widely mourned Steve Jobs, it's not entirely surprising that comparisons should be made any time another tech leader begins to resemble him in any way. Case in point: Mark Shuttleworth. The billionaire Canonical founder has actually been compared to Jobs on numerous occasions before, but lately the discussion was renewed afresh by a recent post on Linux Advocates.

The DistroRank Weekly Popularity Rankings have now been posted for the week of 3/14/2103. Debian and Arch swap positions again - very close data between those two well-respected and popular distributions.

A task of any operating system is to provide software that strongly increases its security. A lot of programs of this type have been created; some are better than others.

Back around July 2012, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) predicted big things from a new round of products — Windows 8, tablets, Phone 8, Office 365, Office 2013. In fact, Microsoft compared its current product refresh cycle to 1995, when Windows 95 and Office 95 triggered a sales boom. Soon after Windows NT 4.0 took enterprise servers and workstations by storm. But Microsoft's logic was flawed. Here's why.

The difference in reasons why people who create, manage, and develop open-source and free software, and why end users consume it is a major philosophical disconnect.

Chances are good that you've been to a library and used its resources. Kids check out colorful, educational books; adults seek out entertainment and information; and academics of all ages use libraries as a place to work, meet, and discover resources. Today, there is a national discussion around the role of libraries in public and academic sectors.

This is part of the "Case for KDE" series of blog entries in which I explore various non-technical aspects of KDE. What follows are my personal thoughts and observations rather than an officially sanctioned position statement by the KDE community. I figured I would start with the topic of branding as it is a fairly simple topic .. a nice way to ease into this little adventure. It's also a topic that has been getting increasing amounts of attention in the Free software communities in the last few years as products become more successful, projects progress and more companies appear on the scene. So where does KDE stand on branding?

The United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization headquarters in Paris recently hosted the launch of IMAGINARY, a new platform for collaborative mathematics and maths art, or open mathematics. The launch was part of the Mathematics of Planet Earth Day and the opening of the first international crowdsourced science, open source exhibition hosted by the platform: Mathematics of Planet Earth.