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Debian is boring. Releases happen every two years, give or take. Developers spend months and months chasing bugs while other Linux distributions crank out release after release. But Debian gets better as it inches toward release.

I'm not sure what Microsoft was thinking when they priced the Surface Pro starting at $899, but if they want to compete in the tablet market, and especially with iPad, they are going to have to do better than that.

Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has announced on his blog that the organisation is joining the Internet Society (ISOC) as a Silver member. Aas points out that Mozilla has already been involved in several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups and that supporting ISOC is a logical next step.

Martin Gräßlin, the well known KWin developer, has written a new blog post explaining why if you're wanting to play Valve's Source Engine games or the other new native Linux games you should be using KDE Plasma. "If you want to get some of the now finally available games for Linux, KDE Plasma should be your primary choice to enjoy the game. I have also heard of users switching to KDE Plasma because we still provide non OpenGL based setups," Martin explains in his Fallback mode in KDE Plasma Workspaces blog post.

This tutorial shows how you can upgrade from Linux Mint 13 (Maya) to Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) with apt. Please note that this is not the recommended way, and it might break your system, however, for me it worked fine.

Star Linux developer Ryan "Icculus" Gordon said that Unity3D game engine and Steam coming to Linux are good foundations to an awesome 2013.

In quantum physics, one of the calculations you might want to do is figure out how two or more particles may interact. This can become rather complicated and confusing once you get to more than two particles interacting, however. Also, depending on the interaction, there may be the creation and annihilation of virtual particles as part of the interaction. How can you keep all of this straight and figure out what could be happening? Enter the Feynman diagram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram). American physicist Richard Feynman developed Feynman diagrams in 1948. They represent complex quantum particle interactions through a set of very simple diagrams, made up of straight lines, wavy lines and curly lines. This works really well if you happen to be using a chalk board or white board. But, these media are not very useful when sharing your ideas across the Internet. Additionally, most word-processing software is unable to draw these diagrams for your articles, papers and documents. So what can you do? Use the JaxoDraw software package (http://jaxodraw.sourceforge.net).

This week we look at how Steve Jobs ruined one CIO's life, why the mobile app development business is harder than it looks, and top tech trends for 2013.

Dell has released an Ubuntu-based developer laptop. The machine sports an Ivy Bridge i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM and several customised tools that allow developers to manage their development environment and port it between machines

A focus on young people in the open source world is just starting to become a priority, and we're also starting to see more larger corporations demonstrating their commitment to open source. Open source is indeed spreading as more and more people understand the value of the open source way.

Linux 3.7 supports ARM64, the processor used in the Raspberry Pi, and Intel's SMAP security feature. The next kernel release will also include new tools for tracing processes and improved collaboration with Microsoft's hypervisor

This chart gives you an idea of who might be tracking you, or be capable of tracking you and sharing information with law enforcement.

Genode OS, the very interesting research operating system, is out with a new release that boasts some interesting features. Genode OS is one of the early non-Linux operating systems that ported Gallium3D and GEM for its graphics drivers, provided a Gallium3D LiveCD, and then grew ambitions to become a general purpose OS. In its latest release it was ported to ARM and picked up other features, but now it's been even more improved.

Here’s a fun experiment (if, like me, you’re a huge nerd): take an open source policy from your agency, company, whatever, and strike out the words "open source." Bam, you now have a much more sensible and reasonable "software" policy.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from December 17th - December 19th, 2012.

In our recent ZaReason UltraLap 430 review, Ars alum Ryan Paul lamented that even though putting Linux on laptops is easier today than ever, it's still not perfect. Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working. Major OEMs aren't yet putting forth the same concerted effort to build and support laptops with Linux as they are their more high-margin servers.

However, Dell is changing that. Earlier this year, they announced a pilot program, "Project Sputnik," intended to produce a bona fide, developer-focused Linux laptop using their popular XPS-13 Ultrabook as base hardware. The program turned out to be a rousing success, and this morning Dell officially unveiled the results of that pilot project: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.

We're still waiting on Intel's next-generation Haswell CPUs to launch, but details and rumors are already swirling about processors that are even further down the company's roadmap. The latest scuttlebutt is that Broadwell, the follow-up to Haswell due in 2014, will forego standard socketed desktop processors. If the rumors are true—and both ZDNet and SemiAccurate report that they've received confirmation from PC OEMs—Broadwell desktop CPUs will need to be soldered directly to motherboards, and won't be easily swappable or upgradeable by users and system builders.

The Internet has always been guided forwards by collaborative, open approaches. We believe that these approaches are one of the reasons why the Web has become and remained the wonderful, powerful and empowering place we know today. In the coming … Continue reading

Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 0.15, is out. All users must upgrade as soon as possible. Changes: Tor upgrade to 0.2.3.25. Major new features: persistence for browser bookmarks; support for obfsproxy bridges. Minor improvements: add the Hangul (Korean) Input Method Engine for SCIM; preliminary support for some OpenPGP SmartCard readers; support printers that need HPIJS PPD and/or the IJS driver; optimize fonts display for LCD; update TrueCrypt to version 7.1a.

QWERTY kit limited to 1,500 developers Research in Motion has kicked off the next phase of its BlackBerry 10 Developer Program with a giveaway of a brand-new BlackBerry developer device.…