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Obviously, there have been an awful lot of patent lawsuits in the past few years concerning smartphones and various software and hardware associated with smartphones. The folks over at law firm WilmerHale have now released a paper, which conservatively (and thoroughly) estimates that the patent royalties that need to be paid by smartphone manufacturers currently exceeds $120 per device -- which they note is right around the price of the components themselves (found via FOSS Patents, which notes that the estimates in the paper almost certainly lowball the patent royalties, so they may be much higher). Basically, more than half the cost of making a smartphone these days is in paying off patent holders.

The idea of OS convergence is starting to take a hold in the world and major companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical are working hard to achieve it. There seems to be a race going on and all the players want to reach the finish as soon as possible.

It's no secret to anyone paying attention to the video game industry that the graphics processor war has long been primarily waged between rivals Nvidia and AMD. What you may not realize is just how involved those two companies are with the developers that use their cards and tools. It makes sense, of course, that the two primary players in PC GPUs would want to get involved with game developers to make sure their code is optimized for the systems on which they'll be played. That way, gamers end up with games that run well on the cards in their systems, buy more games, buy more GPUs, and everyone is happy. According to AMD, however, Nvidia is attempting to lock out AMD's ability to get involved with developers who use the Nvidia GameWorks toolset, and the results can already be seen on the hottest game of the season thus far.

The only way to truly beat Hack 'n' Slash, a new video game from Double Fine Productions, is to reprogram it. But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack 'n' Slash makes manipulating the game's source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.

I’ve been watching HBO’s tech-startup spoof Silicon Valley. One of the reoccurring background jokes is that every software company, large and small, purports to be making the world a better place — usually as a sort of reflexive afterthought with no real meaning. In Fedora, we’re a little more modest with our claims, but we back them with both sincerity and action. We sometimes debate the relative positioning of our “Freedom, Friends, Features, First” foundations (of course we do — we’re a community-driven open source project, and so everything is always up for discussion), but our collective goal of leading the advancement of the free and open source world together is never in doubt.

The first smartphone running the Linux-based Tizen mobile OS launched today. The Samsung Z will first be made available to app developers.

The way Linux development has worked for the last several years has been relatively straight forward. Every six to 10 weeks there is a new Linux kernel, with each kernel requiring six to eight release candidates. At the end of the release cycle, Linus Torvalds opens up the 'merge' window during which new code is pulled in from the various sub-system maintainer developer trees.

One of the developers of Desktop Dungeons has written a blog post from a Windows user point of view about getting Unity games to play nice on Linux.

If you code a little, you know how handy an Integrated Development Environment (IE) can be. Java, C, Python, they all become a lot more accessible when the IDE software is checking the syntax for you, compiling in the background, or importing the libraries you need. On the other hand, if you are on Linux, […]Continue reading... The post How to turn Vim into a full-fledged IDE appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to open a large text file on Linux How to edit a remote file over ssh How to install Adobe Flash Player on Linux How to take a full-length screenshot of a web page in Linux How to set up C/C++ development environment in Eclipse

Red Hat today announced Matthew Miller as the new leader of its Fedora community Linux project. Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron, who announced on May 19 that she was stepping down as Fedora Project Leader.

Suppose you are working in a data center or company and your boss puts a dumb debian server setup and you need to configure it in the running environment. Yes it is little painstaking, but not very tough task. In my case I have a dumb debian server which was installed by someone in his networking environment and I want to make it functional in my static IP environment. Suppose I have a vacant IP 192.168.0.100 and I will implement it in my environment. My IP details are as follows:

The US Supreme Court issued rulings this morning in two of the five patent cases it heard this term. In both cases, the high court unanimously struck down rules created by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation's top patent court.

The two rulings continue a pattern that has developed over the past several years, in which the Supreme Court has overturned key Federal Circuit rulings, finding them too favorable to patent-holders and too harsh on parties accused of infringement.

The open-source SPARK 2014 language can prove that code correctly matches specs. This capability closes off vulnerabilities and illuminates logic errors in code. It seems like every week or so, we are reading about some new software disaster (often described as a "glitch" in the press) caused by a bug in a program. Recently publicized incidents include recalls of cars due to a significant error in the control software, and shortly before that, the security hole in many Apple operating systems. The "glitch du jour" is a little more spectacular: the Heartbleed bug has caused a security hole in literally tens of millions of devices from dozens of manufacturers. This is a particularly disturbing defect because there is no way to tell if some malevolent intruder has taken advantage of it.

A candidate vying to become one of the directors of the GNOME Foundation has raised the issue of Red Hat's domination of development of the GNOME Desktop Project, claiming that "for the last several years, Red Hat's wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, including the larger user base of GNOME."

Google has quietly begun rolling out a new version of Android to its flagship Nexus devices, but so far it has remained shtum on just what has changed. Support pages from US wireless player T-Mobile reveal that the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 handsets and the 2013 version of the Nexus 7 tablet all began receiving over-the-air updates to Android 4.4.3 on Monday.

The Aaeon “AIOT-X1000? IoT gateway supports the Gateway Solutions for IoT architecture (aka “Moon Island”) unveiled by Intel in April. Aaeon’s product joins other “Moon Island capable” gateway systems previously announced by ADI, Adlink, Advantech, Eurotech, and Portwell, not to mention Intel’s own Gateway Solutions for IoT reference design. Although Intel’s reference design supports a choice of either Atom or Quark processors, Aaeon’s device, introduced this week at Computex in Taipei, casts its lot squarely with Quark.

Unvanquished sure is one of the prettiest open source games around isn't it? Like clockwork they have released a new alpha with a bucket-load of changes.

Salix MATE is officially back. Our previous MATE release (back in 13.37) came with high praise from a lot of our users, with many considering it as our best release ever. Salix MATE 14.1, built around the latest MATE 1.8 desktop environment comes to follow up with that. The MATE desktop environment brings a familiar and user-friendly approach to the desktop, with sane defaults and a great selection of application bundled with it. Included in this release, alongside the MATE desktop applications like the Caja file manager, the MATE Control Center and all the MATE panel applets and utilities, is the latest Firefox ESR browser, the LibreOffice suite, GIMP, the ClawsMail e-mail client, and more.

Do not adjust your screen that is a real headline. Crytek's CRYENGINE Powered Homefront The Revolution has been announced with full Linux support.

iOS rival 'dominates the mobile malware market,' says totally unbiased observer. Apple CEO Tim Cook took a few minutes of his two-hour keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday morning in San Francisco to stick his thumb in Android's eye.