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Following last week's completion of the Radeon driver power management tests against the AMD Catalyst driver, now it is time to turn the tables on NVIDIA. In this article are some power consumption and thermal tests when comparing the latest open-source "Nouveau" driver code against NVIDIA's closed-source proprietary driver.

How do you make sure that your passwords are safe? You can make them longer, complicate them by adding odd characters, making sure to use different passwords for each user account that you have. Or, you can simply skip them all together.

The splits and controversies around LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have highlighted a number of issues concerning the licensing and corporate governance of open source projects and communities

In a follow-up to the Bloomberg story, Lifehacker suggested opening suspect hardware in a virtual machine. There are better, simpler options.

The safest approach is to use Linux, as so little malware targets it.

Windows users are best served with a copy of Linux on a USB flash drive. Just yesterday I ran Mint version 10 off a USB flash drive to delete files in the Windows recycle bin, files that Windows itself would not display, but were there nonetheless.

Netflix has launched a certification program for its Netflix HD application, awarding its first seal of approval to Texas Instruments' OMAP 4 processor and WiLink 7.0 chipset running on Android 2.3. TI's dual-core OMAP 4 won the certification thanks to its ability to play 1080p video at 30fps and its on-chip support for DRM (digital rights management)....

With the great popularity of C, you would think that a wide variety of solutions would have flourished

Developers of action game Garshasp : The Monster Slayer are working on a Linux port. The game is inspired by Prince of Persia series and is based on Ogre3D engine. Garshasp is based on ancient Persian mythology bringing to life the epic battles of the mythological hero, Garshasp. You play as Garshasp himself, the strongest man in Persian Mythology, in the ancient lands against the evil monsters and in a journey to revenge and reclaim the legendary mace of your ancestors which is stolen by the Deevs. The main mechanics of the game revolve around melee combat, hack 'n' slash gameplay, platforming and exploration. The game is developed by Dead Mage and Fanafzar Game Studios and is in development since 2006. Windows version has already been released but soon we will see it on Linux as well.

While 2011 may not necessarily be the year of the Linux desktop, it could very well be the year of the Linux-powered tablet. This past week, HP rolled out its Touchpad tablet, which is powered by webOS. As is the case with Google's Android, webOS leverages Linux at its core.

The Uzebox is an 8-bit, "retro minimalist" games console with a design that's entirely licensed under version 3.0 of the GNU GPL.

MSFT vs Android image Microsoft has announced that it has signed a patent agreement with Taiwan's Wistron Corporation that will cover the company's tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other devices running Android or the Chrome platform. Wistron will pay royalties to Microsoft under the agreement.

Eccentric indie game developer Robert Pelloni (& Bob's Game& ) announced he is developing a gaming handheld prototype based on Linux that will sell for $10-20 by year's end. The 400MHz ARM-based & nD& device will offer a 2.4-inch, 320 x 240 display, and Wi-Fi, and will be supported soon with a Linux SDK, claims Pelloni, although many are skeptical the device will see the light of day.

My response to this news was to go into denial. This couldn’t be, I told myself. The magazine wouldn’t let it happen. eWeek without Spencer Katt would be like Kellogg’s without high fructose corn syrup. When the next week’s issue arrived, I quickly turned to the page where I would normally expect to find Spencer’s purrings, only to find some boring article (an opinion piece, I believe) in it’s place. I felt betrayed. Spencer Katt had deserted me.

"Who makes up this insanity?" asked Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. "It is like saying, 'motorcycles are gonna kill delivery vans' while ignoring that they are two different vehicles for two completely different roles!" A netbooks is "a 'baby laptop,' and as such is good for most jobs a laptop is good for," he explained. A tablet, by contrast, "does one job and one job only: consume content."

phpMyAdmin Logo The phpMyAdmin developers have released versions 3.3.10.2 and 3.4.3.1 of their database administration tool; these are security updates that fix a total of four security holes. Rated as "highly critical" by Secunia, the vulnerabilities include a session manipulation bug in Swekey authentication that could be exploited to overwrite session variables, a possible code injection hole in the setup script and a regular expression quoting problem in Synchronize code.

Linux Mint represented my return to Linux. It was the first distribution I tried that "just worked", and since that day I have not had Windows installed on any of my personal PCs. I have, however, jumped between a few different Linux distributions, and have recently settled on Fedora 15. I found myself installing Linux Mint once again while resurecting some old Dell laptops. As it turns out, Fedora 15 has issues installing on PCs with 512MB or RAM or less. So I jumped on the Linux Mint website and saw that they had just make a release candidate of their LXDE 11 distribution available.

Joining John Bridgman and Alex Deucher in working on the open-source driver stack at AMD are two new, but familiar, names: Michel Dänzer and Christian König. These two Linux graphics driver developers are now officially AMD employees.

In my last post I talked about getting set up and ready to write some quality documentation for Linux. In this one I'm going to get down to the nitty-gritty of the actual writing.

Microsoft has entered into a patent-licensing agreement with Wistron that for the first time covers Google's Chrome OS as well as Android. The agreement -- announced a day after a Microsoft-led consortium beat out Google for Nortel's wireless patents -- covers smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, suggesting Wistron may be working on a Chrome OS tablet....

All packages required are already in PPA "Spice-Gtk-0.6 on Ubuntu 11.04 and Ubuntu 11.10".Spice-gtk-0.6 has been done for Oneiric as two builds. First one with python and gobject-introspection enabled (GTK2). Second one --with-introspection and --with-gtk="3.0" (GTK3).This builds actually are the core builds in PPA, which bring RH's technologies to Ubuntu 11.10. Patched virt-manager and virtinst also support spicevmc channel.View :

Spice-Gtk-0.6 on Ubuntu 11.04 and Ubuntu 11.10 The only one qemu-kvm package should be rebuilt (spice enabled) as soon as stable qemu-kvm 0.15 git tree will be branched.

This week, the fundamental threads that runs through all of the stories are freedom, protecting GNU/Linux from attack, and providing viable alternatives to proprietary software.