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In advance of today's Apple v. Samsung hearing, Samsung filed a key document it fought hard to acquire—Apple's recent patent settlement with HTC.

The 143-page settlement [PDF] is heavily redacted, and no financial terms are revealed. Still, certain parts of the document are revelatory. The document outlines an arbitration process that Apple can initiate if it believes HTC has created a "Cloned Product" that apes Apple's too closely. It gives specific examples of similarities that would be acceptable and others that would be verboten. "Pinch to zoom" is OK; "slide to unlock" is OK, but only if it looks different.

Not only are ibomber games coming but Steam For Linux Beta has been expanded!

Canonical may have ultimately changed its mind about "Avoid the pain of Windows 8" -- the slogan that accompanied the original launch of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" earlier this fall, but like so many deeply compelling notions, it seems to have staying power here in the Linux blogosphere. That indeed is why more than a few Linux fans have viewed Windows 8 with jubilation rather than dread.

We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen.

I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 5.0 and thank you all for funding this release. In this release we made the switch from our deskbar tool to the Xfce panel 'deskbar' mode which introduces many new features, like extensible plugin support and the ability to configure your desktop. This release is based on Xubuntu 12.10 and is compatible with the Ubuntu repositories; it brings in many changes, such as Linux kernel 3.5, X.Org 7.7 and PulseAudio 2.1. Changes: OpenShot 1.4.3 with YouTube upload support and a lot more features; AbiWord 2.9.2, the current edge of development; Audacity 2.0, Claws-Mail 3.8.1, Firefox 17, GIMP 2.8, Inkscape 0.48.

The Ubuntu PyPi Lens is an Unity Lens that allows Python developers to easily and quickly access the powerful Python package index website, also known as PyPi, directly from Unity Dash.

The Critter Chronicles, prequel to the critically acclaimed point and click adventure game 'The Book of Unwritten Tales', has been released for Linux.

An Intel developer has proposed a migration tool based upon LLVM's Clang tooling library to auto-convert C++ code to take advantage of new C++11 features in an automated manner...

The recently released update for the free DNS server closes a security hole that could be exploited for Denial-of-Service attacks. The only servers that are affected use DNS64, an option intended to help with migrating to IPv6

Teleglitch is a roguelike top-down shooter with pixel graphics. The game takes place in procedurally generated military research & training complex that has a different map every time you play.

The discussion on those is very interesting, both in the book and in the podcast. I won't spoil it all for you yet, but I will say that, yes, he's talking about going back to what copyright law was in 1790 -- meaning that it only lasts for two 14 year terms, and that it should cover only "maps, charts and books" since that's what the founders intended. Also, infringement only happened if you copied the entire thing. Copying a section was fine. Interestingly, Bell's next book (also published by Mercatus) will apparently be published under those exact terms. As for why other things shouldn't be covered, well, he notes that the founders didn't appear to think such expressive works like music, painting and sculpture required copyright, and it's not clear why that should have changed.

The judge in the Apple v. Samsung case, the Hon. Lucy Koh, has just ruled that the HTC-Apple license agreement that was signed on November 11 will be made public, the only exception being the pricing and royalty terms, which will be sealed. Samsung's lawyers have already gotten to see them, but we won't. But we will get to see the list of patents covered by the agreement.

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.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu Studio 12.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Please note that Ubuntu Studio 12.10 uses XFCE as the default desktop environment.

The move away from open source solutions by the German city of Freiburg didn't seem to add up. With some help from German friends I've dug into the report - and it is indeed suspect. We recently saw the news that the German city of Freiburg had decided to end its open source migration and instead switch to using Microsoft products again. The rationale provided seemed curious to me - after all, at the same time the German city of Munich announced total savings amounting to €10 million from its own successful and ongoing migration. What seemed odd was there was no account of how they changed course to make the migration succeed. Munich learned lessons from early challenges and updated its strategy in order to succeed. But not Freiburg.

Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.

A full review of Ubuntu 12.10, including a gallery of images.

December 5, 2012. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the last in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.4 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.9.3 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

In this article I'll show you what's umask and how to use it to get the right permissions on your files. umask (user mask) is a command and a function in POSIX environments that sets the file mode creation mask of the current process which limits the permission modes for files and directories created by the process. A process may change the file mode creation mask with umask and the new value is inherited by child processes.

So here is the current list of games that are for sale, time to grab yourself a bargain. If I have missed any please let me know and I can add it to the list. I will try to keep updating the list over the holiday period.