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Recently, software guru Jakob Nielsen gave Windows 8 a thorough vetting, with usability testing on both desktops and tablets. His verdict? Journalist Preston Gralla of Computerworld summed it up this way: “Windows 8 is bad on tablets and even worse on PCs. [Nielsen] blames dueling interfaces, reduced ‘discoverability,’ ‘low information density,’ and more.”

Dropbox has announced that Python creator Guido van Rossum will be joining the company. Dropbox has been built using Python from the beginning and its design was influenced by the language's design philosophy

You win some, you lose some," as the old saying goes, but rarely do the two occur nearly simultaneously. Sure enough, however, that's just what happened to open source software in Germany recently: It was being celebrated in Munich even as it was dumped in Freiburg.

Patents icon In a brief submitted to a US Court of Appeals, various major internet and IT companies have stated that the combination of an abstract idea and a computer should not be eligible for patent protection. "Many computer-related patent claims just describe an abstract idea at a high level of generality and say to perform it on a computer or over the internet", said the brief that was submitted by companies such as Google and Facebook on Friday. Other signatories include Dell, Intuit, Homeaway, Rackspace, Red Hat and Zynga.

Last month, Jos Poortvliet's job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle. He was chosen to lead a discussion on open governance at the Summit of New Thinking in Berlin. The open innovation concept is what got him interested in free software communities while studying organizational psychology, and it's an idea he tries to merge into growing the openSUSE community.

Alex Deucher of AMD emailed in a pull request on Friday afternoon for the Radeon graphics driver that will end up as part of the DRM pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel...

I recently graduated in May, and I had not heard of Creative Commons until I came to work at Red Hat. After a few months, I had gained some familiarity with Creative Commons but it was only when I was recently asked to create images for their 10th Anniversary that I realized I had some research to do. 

Roll-your-own app store means game on for BYOD Organisations planning to give users access to curated collection of Android apps can now do so with their Google Apps account, after the advertising giant quietly threw the switch on what it has poetically dubbed “The Google Play Private Channel for Google Apps”.…

Over the last months, I became more and more aware of the "open" movement. "Open" as in open access, open source, open data, open science. In mid 2011, I had a project where I needed to annotate the tandem mass spectra of some cyclic peptides. So I sat down, fragmented the compound structures "on paper" to see what theoretical fragments I would likely find in my spectra, and compared them with my experimental spectra. This was one of the most stupid and boring tasks I had ever done. And it took me more than 2 full days of work to annotate my two spectra. I mused that for such stupid work computers had been invented.

The open-source Alien Arena game is going to see a major update soon that will enhance its renderer and bring other improvements. Alien Arena 7.65 is this exciting game update that's forthcoming...

The developers of Linux Mint have released version 14.1 of their distribution and have remastered the corresponding ISO images to fix three bugs affecting performance with Intel GPUs and booting on EFI systems

The Fedora developers have released the first and final beta of Fedora 18 after almost two months' delay. The latest version of the distribution introduces the MATE and Cinnamon desktops to the repositories

According to a press release issued by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association, the government of Portugal has decided to approve a single editable, XML-based document format for use by government, and in public procurement. And that format is not OOXML.

Now that full-fledged computers are approaching the size of a USB Flash drive and are being sold for less than $75, my interest in designing a Linux computer of my own has been re-awakened. As an educator, I would stock that computer full of free creativity and learning software, logic puzzle games, tutorial screencasts, engaging multimedia and artwork created with open source software. Naturally, I would use Linux as the operating system for that computer. No matter how hard I worked designing such a computer, finding purchasers would not be easy. People are naturally wary of spending money on a computer designed by an unknown entity. So I started thinking, could I volunteer my time to support some well-known entity to sell a very affordable, very lightweight Linux computer that would benefit students worldwide? This entity or organization would need to composed of millions of smart and energetic youth and parents who already collaborate effectively to raise funds for their cause. I'm thinking the Girl Scouts of the USA.

The Fedora Project team is excited to announce the beta release of its free, fully functional Linux operating system, Fedora 18, code-named “Spherical Cow.” Fedora continues to enable users to experience the latest in free and open source technology, integrated into a Linux distribution and ready for free download, use, modification and redistribution.

The Qt Developer Days conference took place earlier this month in Berlin, Germany. For those not in attendance at this open-source development conference, the slides for many of the Qt talks have been uploaded with coverage on Qt Quick, KDE Frameworks 5, and other interesting areas surrounding this tool-kit soon to finally reach its major 5.0 milestone...

The developers of the eudev fork of udev plan to support the separate mounting of /usr/, which isn't possible with udev; udev inventor Greg Kroah-Hartman has criticised the approach

Aside from why LLVM/Clang was ported to one of the fastest super computer's in the world and using Clang to implement Microsoft's C++ AMP, another interesting session at this month's LLVM Developers' Conference in San Jose was about using Clang to analyze code comments...

In the week ending 17 November - Google open sourced Android 4.2, an RC of Linux Mint 14 arrived and Popcorn Maker 1.0 was released. Also, an interview with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and the Kernel Log looked at filesystems and storage for Linux 3.7

Netflix video streaming is now available on Linux through the use of Wine. When running a specially patched version of Wine in conjunction with the Microsoft Windows versions of Firefox and Microsoft Silverlight, Netflix can now do Internet video streaming to the Linux desktop...