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Matthias Clasen proudly announced a few minutes ago, November 15, that the second and last maintenance release of the GNOME 3.6 desktop environment is now available for download.

With the much-ballyhooed launches of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 behind it, Microsoft has now announced its product road map for the less consumer-centric version of its OS platform: Windows Embedded.

Linux 3.7 introduces a range of Btrfs performance improvements. The kernel now supports the SMB data exchange protocol used by recent Windows versions, and it offers discard functionality for software RAIDs, which is important for SSDs

Unity3D the awesome game engine has official released 4.0 including the much requested Linux publishing support which will hopefully pave way for many more Linux titles!

What a difference a year makes. It used to be that gaming was Linux's "Achilles' heel" of sorts, cited by more than a few enthusiasts as justification for their reluctance to switch away from Windows. Fast forward to today, and gaming may well be the focus of more Linux-centered excitement than any other area. How did we get from point A to point B, you may ask?

Anne Nicolas announced a few last night, November 14, the immediate availability for download of the third Alpha release of the upcoming Mageia 3 operating system.

For governments looking for cutting edge, open source messaging solutions, the recent action by the OASIS standards consortium to approve the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) Version 1.0 is a major development. The need for cutting edge, mission critical messaging options is arising in a variety of contexts: it is a key component to interoperable 'smart grid' frameworks, as well as 'cloud' solutions.

BYOD = Bill Your Own Director as comms costs soar RIM's share of the business market continues to slide: new figures put BlackBerrys into third place behind Android and iOS as staff are increasingly allowed to use their preferred handsets for work.…

The upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment will allow users to easily connect to their ownCloud and Flickr accounts, via the GNOME Online Accounts app.

Rarely do small business and home users need all of the features that are included in the powerful Microsoft Office suite of products. Microsoft Office is the industry leader in office productivity software, but many free alternatives exist that will satisfy the needs of most small business and home users. This gives cost-conscious business owners a way to save money while maintaining productivity.

Open source office products will include many of the features of costly programs and support all of the major file type, including Microsoft file types.

After exactly five months of work, Skype is happy to announce today, November 15, that Skype 4.1 for Linux operating systems has been released and it is now available for download.

This tutorial shows how you can serve CGI scripts (Perl scripts) with nginx on OpenSUSE 12.2. While nginx itself does not serve CGI, there are several ways to work around this. I will outline two solutions: the first is to proxy requests for CGI scripts to Thttpd, a small web server that has CGI support, while the second solution uses a CGI wrapper to serve CGI scripts.

What I especially like about the whole desktop is that every aspect is clean, uncluttered and very intuitive to use. This is definitely one distribution to keep an eye on.

Android enthusiasts trying to reach CyanogenMod.com, the website for the popular community-maintained firmware of the same name, will find themselves staring at a blank filler site as of today. As has been detailed in a blog post up on the new CyanogenMod.org, the owner of the original domain (one Ahmet Deveci) name shut the site down after he was discovered impersonating CyanogenMod founder Steve "Cyanogen" Kondik for the purpose of cutting referral deals with other sites.

Congratulations on leaving Microsoft. Unless you have bills to pay, you won’t regret it. I left at the end of 2004, and have since learned of a vast and amazing — but still flawed – world of computing out there. For example, I discovered that we should already have cars that (optionally) drive us around and computers that talk to us. Linux on the desktop is powerful and rich but failing because of several strategic mistakes. Google claims to be a friend of Linux and free software, but most of their interesting AI code is locked up. Programming should be a part of basic math literacy for every child. The biotechnology world is proprietary like Microsoft, which is stunting progress in new medicines.

Microsoft has released Skype 4.1 for Linux...

Steven Levy has always been a great writer covering the tech industry, but his article on "the patent problem" for Wired is a must read, even if you're familiar with these stories. He does a great job illustrating just how screwed up the patent system is, focusing on a few key trolls, and pulling in some important information and data to support the anecdotal claims. Much of the story is about Mitchell Medina, who took a ridiculous patent that came from an idea about scanning medical documents into electronic format, and turned it into a belief that he held a patent on which practically every website infringed. You really should read the whole thing, but a few tidbits: first off, Medina and the two other people named on the patent never actually could build a working product.

It's already no secret that Linux tends to dominate as the operating system of choice on the world's fastest supercomputers, but the release on Monday of the 40th edition of the twice-yearly Top500 List of the world’s top supercomputers made that connection more clear than ever.

Engineers from Google's Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced book scanner under an open source licence on Google Code. The Verge reports that the engineers developed a prototype during the "20 per cent time" that Google allocates to its employees for personal projects. Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner can automatically digitise entire books.

Have you ever heard the following? "Welcome to the team! Here's a list of 15 applications to install, the instructions are in the team room, somewhere. See you in a week!" Or: "What do you mean it broke production, it runs fine on my machine?" Or: "Why is this working on her machine and his machine, but not my machine?" Development environments are becoming more complex, with more moving parts and tricky dependencies. Virtualization has been a huge boon for the IT industry in saving costs, increasing flexibility and maintaining control over complex environments. Rather than focusing on virtualization on the delivery side, let's look at how you can provide that flexibility and control to developers to manage multiple development environments easily using Vagrant.