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If you’re a real gamer you know just how terrifying Windows 8 can be. With the changes they’ve made there just might not be any sort of viable way for real gamers to get the kind of experience they want. Expect seriously inconvenient DRM implementations and major difficulties for independent developers because of the proprietary (and profitable) app store built in to Windows 8. Independent developers are going to have no choice but to make the transition, meaning quality free games will disappear, too.

South Korean behemoth Samsung has announced over five million units have been shipped of its Note II device, with the 4G version to arrive on Australian shores very shorty. Worldwide sales of the controversial phone have now exceeded 5 million, proving naysayers well and truly wrong, who said the original phone was too big and without a targeted purpose.

I became aware of the Arduino Project from occasional media reports and a presentation at Atlanta LinuxFest 2009. I was impressed with what the Arduino community was doing, but at that time, I saw no personal use for it. It took a grandson who is heavily involved in a high-school competitive robotics program to change things for me. During a 2011 Thanksgiving family gathering, he asked me some questions about robotics-related electronics, and I told him to google Arduino. He did. Arduino ended up on his Christmas list, and Santa delivered.

OpenShift Enterprise 1.0 is the next phase in the growth of the platform, and makes it available for small and big businesses to deploy and maintain it on-premise.

A report from Taiwan states that Google is working on its own house-brand Nexus Chromebook with a touch screen. This, in turn, suggests that it might run a mixture of Android and Chrome OS.

Sahalana 1 is available. Sahalana Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution, developed in Sri Lanka, with the goal of facilitating effective use of information and communication technologies by civil society organisations throughout the country.

Red Hat has announced that the call for papers is now open for the ninth-annual Red Hat Summit, to be held June 10-14, 2013 in Boston.

Many systems administrators expect IT budgets next year to decrease or, at best, remain flat even though they say they face problems because of the rising costs and increasing complexity of systems. The administrators say that despite facing growing pressure and demand they cannot rely on increased budget to ease their concerns, with 82 percent of them indicating in a recent survey that software to manage IT systems is getting more expensive and complex.

Xen.org, home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced the availability of Xen Cloud Platform 1.6 (or short XCP), an industry-leading virtualization platform for companies to create and manage virtual infrastructures for servers, desktops and clouds. XCP 1.6 strengthens its server virtualization feature set for datacenter consolidation and simplifies the path to cloud computing with advanced virtual machine migration, enhanced networking and security.

Netflix has moved on from just releasing the tools it uses to test the resilience of the cloud services that power the video streaming company, and has now open sourced a library that it uses to engineer in that resilience. Hystrix is an Apache 2 licensed library which Netflix engineers have been developing over the course of 2012 and which has been adopted by many teams within the company. It is designed to manage how distributed services interact and give more tolerance to latency within those connections and the inevitable failures that can occur.

Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and uses Cinnamon 1.6 as its desktop. We are greeted to the new file manager in Nemo and the vast improvements in performance in this latest release of Linux Mint.

When your company goes BYOD, it's easy to think it's an employee-friendly approach, but you might not have thought through all the implications for both employer and employee. Here's how enterprise mobile management vendor Apperian addresses the problem.

The Scale effect lets you see all the open windows on the current workspace, while Expo lets you see the workspaces.

The latest release of Canonical's innovative open source operating system, Ubuntu 12.10, maintains its twice-annual upgrade pattern. Even though the last few releases have generated a steady chorus of cries for longer release schedules, Canonical's leadership stands by the schedule and the rationale behind it.

Indie hit Dear Esther will be soon heading to Linux platform. The game has been made by thechineseroom, an independent game studio based in Brighton, UK.

Linux Mint returns with updates all round, but has it addressed the minor issues we had with Mint 13 along the way?

I would like to take a few moments to introduce Buffalo, the access point and router which provides network connectivity to portable computers in the Free Software Foundation's office. More specifically, we are using Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH, which features the free-software-supported Atheros AR9132 chipset with 32MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM.

With the many high-profile efforts to bring Linux to desktop computers, it's easy to forget that Linux has been dominating other certain areas of computing, such as servers, for many years. Yet, server-oriented Linux distributions are relatively rare. The Slackware-based Superb Mini Server is one notable exception, focusing exclusively on server deployments and configuration through the intuitive Webmin web-based interface that can be accessed from any web browser. Also in this issue, an update on Secure Boot that seems to be universally present on most new computers...

The stable, supported, mainstream version of Firefox on Windows is a 32-bit application. Even if you use 64-bit Windows, if you use Firefox, you're using a 32-bit browser. The exception is if you're using the Nightly build of Firefox. This represents the latest, cutting-edge version of the browser, and it's available in two versions: a 32-bit one, and a 64-bit one. However, this won't last much longer. Mozilla announced last week it was no longer going to produce 64-bit Nightly builds of Firefox for Windows; nor will it run automated tests of 64-bit Firefox. The browser's future on Windows is resolutely 32-bit. Linux and Mac OS X, in contrast, both have official 64-bit versions.

NVIDIA has added infrastructure to the Linux kernel graphics drivers for Tegra SoCs (system on a chip) which supports the use of hardware-accelerated 2D on Tegra20 and Tegra30 chips. NVIDIA staff are working on integrating the extension, which is released under an open source licence, into the Linux kernel. At present, it does not look like this will be completed in time for Linux 3.8.