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If you spend most of your time typing on your keyboard (and I hope you don’t use that mouse very frequently, if you care for your wrists, that is), getting up to speed and practicing to become a better and faster typist is well worth the time and effort. And measuring something is the first step to improve it.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a series of 28nm-fabbed QorIQ multicore processors, featuring a 64-bit PowerPC core clocked up to 2.5GHz. The Linux-ready Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) QorIQ series will debut in early 2012 with the T4240, offering 12 cores dual-threaded to 24 virtual cores, numerous acceleration engines, and cascading power management, says Freescale....

In word processors, users generally settle for an appearance that is good enough. By contrast, in a design application like Scribus, you have the tools to adjust the layout until it is exactly the way you want.

For those interested in GStreamer, the open-source multimedia framework commonly used by the GNOME desktop, is slowly working its way towards doing a 1.0 release...

The Linux Foundation announced the final program for LinuxCon North America in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011. Events include the 20th anniversary of Linux gala celebration, a discussion between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman, a keynote by IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and a & 20 Years of Linux& panel featuring Jon & maddog& Hall and Eben Moglen....

GTK+ 3.2, the first major update since the release of GNOME 3.0 with the overhauled GTK+ 3.0 tool-kit, is coming along nicely in preparation for the September release of GNOME 3.2.

Fans of Linux, Microsoft and Macs used to be able to search for information about those topics on Google using specialized search tools that narrowed the results to a focused set of highly relevant Web sites. Earlier this week, however, it was discovered that Google has pulled the plug on many such specialized search portals--including Google.com/linux, Google.com/microsoft, Google.com/mac and Google.com/bsd--redirecting users to Google.com/webhp instead.

After months of preparation and anticipation, World IPv6 Day kicked off fairly quietly. More than 200 organizations around the world turned on IPv6 at 12 a.m. UTC on June 8 for the world's first mass test of the second-generation networking standard....

The world of LibreOffice and OpenOffice(.org) has been heating up recently with several exciting and, at times, bewildering developments. The Document Foundation remains very active as is LibreOffice development, but Oracle has given up on OpenOffice and slapped LibreOffice in the face by giving it to Apache. Perhaps the most important announcement was the release of LibreOffice 3.4.0.

After relatively slow early sales, Asus, Motorola, and Samsung have reduced their Android tablet manufacturing plans by about 10 percent, according to a JP Morgan analyst. Meanwhile, the rumored Amazon.com Android tablet could sell 2.4 million units in 2012 without significantly cannibalizing the company's Kindle e-reader sales, according to a Piper Jaffray analyst....

In what is beginning to become quite a tradition, the Krita team came together from May 20 to May 22 for the third Krita meeting. The first sprint had four attendees. Last year's, eight. This year, we had twelve people in attendance. If the trend continues, the Blender Institute, which hosted our sprint, will be too small for us next year! read more

While many Linux users are upset that Microsoft's buying out Skype and that the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Call hasn't matured much in being a reliable replacement to Skype (not all of the FSF projects move along), there is some interesting news this morning: an independent researcher has reverse-engineered the Skype protocol...

Android represented 36 percent of U.S. smartphone share through April, 10 points higher than Apple iOS, but down a point from March, says Nielsen. The research firm also says Android users download more data than iPhone users, while Distimo reports that Android Market has significantly fewer paid apps than Apple's AppStore -- and that it's earning less money for developers....

Now that the first KDE SC 4.7 beta is available, Martin Gräßlin, the lead developer of the KWin, has blogged about some of the underlying improvements made to the compositing window manager for KDE during this development cycle. Of course, most Phoronix graphics junkies will already know what's changed based upon previous articles, but here's an overview for those not caught up to speed...

Determinism in this sense means that a given action will occur within a fixed time interval, such as delivery of a stock quotation within some number of microseconds. Historically, Java has not been used to fill that role, because of some early design decisions in the platform. However, new options and new technologies are enabling IT organizations to use Java for both standard business needs and situations where deterministic, real-time requirements must be met.

While the first Phoronix benchmarks of EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS on the Linux 2.6.39 kernel were just published this morning, an interesting change was just made for the next Linux kernel that will affect many of the file-systems living within the kernel. For what will be the Linux 2.6.40 kernel, or rather the Linux 3.0 kernel is the finally-merged support for CleanCache.

Verizon Wireless has begun selling a new LG smartphone for $250 plus contract, preloaded with the first-ever Netflix app for Android. The LG Revolution runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, and offers a 4.3-inch display, 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution), HDMI. and both five-megapixel and 1.3-megapixel cameras, says the carrier.

In preparation for taking the Linux Professional Institute Certification exam LPI-302 for systems administrators, learn how to configure Samba and structure your configuration file. Also, learn how Samba interacts with the network, how to configure logging, and how to debug problems with Samba.

Google has announced that Gmail and Picasa as well as its Chrome browser are now using WebP, the image compression format it open sourced last fall in an effort to replace the aging JPEG standard.

Intel announced it will roll out a 22-nanometer (nm) version of the Atom processor in 2013 codenamed & Silvermont,& followed by a 14nm & Airmont& Atom in 2014. The company also promised 10 Intel-based tablets for the upcoming Computex show, and showed off a concept smartphone running on its 32nm Medfield Atom -- but also warned that phones based on its processors will be delayed until next year....