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Recent moves by VMware have caused "uncertainty in the Vert.x community", as the company has staked its claim on the project. When Vert.x, the asynchronous framework for Java and other JVM based languages, was launched in May 2012, Tim Fox, a VMware employee and project lead, described the project as "a community project sponsored by VMware".

Turns out maps matter. That's always been the case for me. I'm a map freak. I own hundreds of paper maps in various specialties, plus many atlases, books on geography, geology and other geo-obsessions. But I'm no longer an edge case, because maps are proving to be essential on smartphones, which today approaches a billion or more people. Digital maps on phones are now among the core portfolio of smartphone apps, alongside voice, text, calendar and contacts. What could be more mobile about a phone than a map to help the user look things up and get around?

Programming languages are living phenomena: They're born, the lucky ones that don't die in infancy live sometimes long, fruitful lives, and then inevitably enter a period of decline. Unlike real life, the decline can last many, many years as the presence of large legacy codebases means practiced hands must tend the code for decades. The more popular the language once was, the longer this period of decline will be.

On January 8, Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, proudly announced the immediate availability for the ninth update for their powerful and still supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system.

Subvein: Mutant Factions is a free multiplayer action game. It has over 20 weapons, a strategic skills system, crazy vehicles and countless user-generated maps. It's tactical, fast-paced and most importantly, fun! Download and play Subvein now - it only takes a few minutes to setup and best of all it's 100% FREE!

Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5.9 has landed with some cloudy love from Microsoft. The latest version of the Linux distro, released Tuesday, introduces drivers for Microsoft’s closed-source Hyper-V hypervisor rival to VMware’s vSphere. The inclusion of Microsoft’s drivers means improved interoperability and manageability for RHEL 5.9 when running as a guest on top of Windows Servers using Hyper-V.

Version 3 Beta 1 of Mageia, #2 ranked Linux distribution on Distrowatch, is available. Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux formed in September 2010 by former employees and contributors to the popular French Linux distribution. Unlike Mandriva, which is a commercial entity, the Mageia project is a community project and a non-profit organisation whose goal is to develop a free Linux-based operating system.

Does size matter when it comes to Linux distros? Well, it very well might when it comes to Ultimate Edition 3.5. There’s nothing subtle about this distro. Everything about it screams over the top, from the color scheme to the range of software included with it.

The Inkscape vector graphics editor is approaching its next milestone release, version 0.49. As always, the update rolls together a wealth of new tools and features. This development cycle is relatively light on large-scale additions, but there is a long list of small usability enhancements that will add up to a smoother design experience for most users. The project just released a bugfix to the stable 0.48 series, and although Inkscape is decidedly a "released when ready" application, the murmuring is that Inkscape 0.49 could hit virtual shelves as soon as January 2013. In the meantime, there are fairly stable nightly builds available from the trunk for those who wish to experiment.

For all of you free and open source creative tool fans out there, plenty of exciting developments happened over the past year—and there's some pretty awesome new things in the pipeline for 2013 as well! Here's a sampling of the good news..

Nokia chief exec Stephen Elop has sparked speculation about his company's commitment to its partnership with Microsoft and Windows Phone. Asked flat out by Spanish daily El Pais if Nokia will produce Android devices, Elop replied "today we are engaged and satisfied with Microsoft, but anything is possible" - an eye-catching ambivalent answer.

A Steam based console has been shown off at CES named "Piston", before you get overly excited though just be aware that it hasn't yet been confirmed what Operating System will be on it.

A Steam Box has been shown off by mini-PC manufacturers Xi3, and previous reports confirm it will likely run Linux, although Valve has yet to comment

Sam Spilsbury, lead developer of the Compiz window manager, has written a blog post declaring that he does not see much of a future in porting the project to the Wayland architecture. The developer says he is disillusioned with what he calls fragmentation in the open source community, referring to the many compositing engines available under the current X11 implementation. He thinks that porting Compiz to Wayland would be too much work with only little gain for end users.

Firefox’s new JavaScript compiler, IonMonkey, makes Web apps and games perform up to 25 percent faster. To see how exciting Firefox makes playing games or using apps on the Web, check out BananaBread, a fun 3D Web game created by the Mozilla Developer Network and powered exclusively by HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript.

A good year starts off with good ideas. But, how do you remember them all, along with the related information that is helpful for making them into realities? There are a multitude of options, from simple notepads to more robust filing systems, and we all search for the one that's just right. So, beyond finding a tool that you can easily access from your smartphone, laptop, or tablet: What do you look for in the perfect note-taking app?

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running CentOS 6.3) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (CentOS 6.3 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

The hack, performed by Clokr, exploits a vulnerability in the Windows kernel that has existed for a long time — since before Microsoft ported Windows from x86 to ARM, in fact. Basically, the Windows kernel on your computer is configured to only execute files that meet a certain level of authentication. There are four levels: Unsigned (0), Authenticode (4), Microsoft (8), and Windows (12). On your x86 Windows system, the default setting is Unsigned — you can run anything you like. With Windows RT, the default, hard-coded setting is Microsoft (8); i.e. only apps signed by Microsoft, or parts of Windows itself, can be executed.

The year is starting out with what may turn out to be significant changes in the mobile operating system market, with open source software playing a significant role just as it has in enterprise software, virtualization and cloud computing. With fading heavyweights and interesting new challengers, there are changes afoot in the mobile OS market.

Mozilla uploaded a few hours ago, January 7, the final packages of the Mozilla Firefox 18.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.