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Along with the release of the new Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet on Tuesday and the rollout of updates to Android 4.2 to several existing Nexus devices, Google has also pushed the source code for the new Jelly Bean flavour of its mobile operating system to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). In a post on the Android Developers Blog, the company detailed the features in the latest Android version, which also brings with it a new SDK revision (API level 17).

Since first being announced back in July 2011, Mozilla has slowly but steadily revealed new details of its upcoming mobile operating system, Firefox OS (formerly Boot to Gecko). Now, a few months after giving a Firefox OS introductory talk in Brazil, Mozilla has decided to share both the videos and the slides from presentations by Andreas Gal, Mozilla’s Director of Research, and Philipp von Weitershausen, one of Firefox OS’ lead engineers.

How much time do I spend turning this laptop on each time? I don't know about you, but my company laptop takes about 5-10 minutes to boot. That is not only because of MS Windows XP, which was installed God knows when and then never properly "cleaned up" of the inevitable mess. That is more to do with all the corporate applications that start with Windows. All those antivirus, screenshot tools, internal communicators, remote access tools and so on.

What is the solution when you're on-the-run?

There may be the situation that you have to monitor a MySQL server remotely. There are some linux tools to do performance and query monitoring locally, and these tools can also used to monitor remotely - but only unencrypted! Also often MySQL is only listening on the loopback interface, so it is even not reachable remotely over the net (which is very good seen from the security viewpoint). But there is an easy solution in the Linux world.

While Firefox OS isn’t here yet, it is coming soon— sometime in early 2013. If you are interested in the OS and want to give a test drive, you previously could use a nightly build and throw it onto the Raspbery Pi or even flash it to a Galaxy Nexus. These methods were both quite complicated, though. Good news, a new Firefox browser plug-in allows you to emulate FireFox OS on Mac, Linux and Windows.

The plug-in is called r2d2b2g and works pretty well.

There's a call for unification of the four largest *BSD operating systems in a move to create a "unified BSD" with the best features in order to better compete with GNU/Linux. It's unlikely that this call for unification will result in any action, but an independent user has written a brief statement cross-posted to several BSD mailing lists about a Unified BSD? The user asks why the BSD community can't band together and form a unified platform rather than fragmenting their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. He wants to see the four largest BSD variants merged: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD.

Brian Manderville proudly announced a couple of days ago on Twitter that the development for the upcoming Descent|OS 4.0 Linux operating system has started.

Last week, we discussed Microsoft's patent filing on a content distribution system that counted heads and charged license fees accordingly. Utilizing the Kinect or some other unnamed technology, Microsoft had the beginnings of the copyright industries' wildest dreams: an opportunity to treat the public's living rooms like theaters and collect "admission" from every viewer.

Rick Falkvinge has amusingly pointed out that "prior art" exists for this "Content Distribution Regulator" -- in the form of a satirical piece published at BBspot (and covered here years ago, noting that it "hit too close to home") five years before Microsoft's filing.

Quoting:Six years ago, a satire site wrote a story about how the copyright industry wanted more money if you invited friends to watch a movie in your living room. This notion has now been patented in new technology: automated headcounts coming to a living room near you, to enable new forms of restrictions. Apparently, the copyright industry takes six years to catch up with the very worst satire of it.

MOOCs—or Massive Open Online Courses—have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX), and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered via Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free online course. 

With Xubuntu I can customise the way my desktop works and I can keep the system highly responsive even on older hardware. This article shows how.

We're proud and happy to announce the first re-spin of Peppermint Three in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. The downloads are live now via our standard download links and are also available for purchase in both CD and USB format. The re-spins offer a fully updated install as of November 5th, 2012, so you aren't left needing to download hundreds of megabytes of updates immediately after the install. In addition, we changed the desktop notifications back to the way they were in Peppermint Two after several users noted that the way they were implemented in Three seemed to be a bit of a step backward compared to the previous iterations. For users already running Three that also want this, it's actually quite simple: simply install the packages 'notify-osd' and 'notify-osd-icons'.

Every time my paycheck is direct-deposited, I contemplate purchasing a Chromebook. Long gone are the days of the CR-48 laptops with the clunky interface and frustrating usability. Although I never quite seem to pull the trigger and buy a Chromebook, thanks to the developer Hexxeh, it's possible to run the Chromium OS on a wide variety of hardware combinations.

A few folks have sent in this story on the blog of the wonderful (and super popular) site Cake Wrecks, which (as the name suggests) highlights hilariously bad cake designs, supposedly done by "professionals." Not surprisingly, the site is well known among those who wield cake decorating bags. However, some do not appreciate the wonders of such a site... especially when it features their own cakes. Cake Wrecks recently put up a blog post in which it reveals that at least one Safeway (a part of the giant supermarket chain) has apparently told its bakery that there is a "no photography" rule, officially set up to avoid having its cakes show up on the site -- though, they're using copyright as their excuse..

So it is easier to claim that their cakes are copyright protected than to just make cakes that look decent? Now that's funny. - Scott

Now this is an interesting little tale: Samsung has raised the price it charges Apple for the main applications processors in the iPhone and iPad. The interesting question is why have they done this? I have a suspicion that I know the answer why: no proof, just a suspicion.

Samsung Electronics , the world’s largest technology firm by revenue, raised the price of mobile processor supplied to Apple Inc. AAPL +0.67% by 20% recently, Chosun Ilbo reported Monday, citing a person familiar with negotiations between the two tech giants. “Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price raise in (the mobile processor known as) application processor,” the person was quoted as saying in the report. “Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the (increase.)”

LDT has been published, a Linux Driver Template for helping new Linux kernel developers begin writing hardware device drivers.

I’m convinced: If Windows 8 and Surface had been the run-away successes Microsoft hoped for and needed, Sinofsky would still be at Microsoft. Instead, he's the scapegoat for their failures.

Linux developer Andy Grover has posted to the kernel developer mailing list (LKML) to accuse RisingTide Systems of violating Linux kernel licensing conditions with its RTS OS storage operating system. This has led to a discussion in which prominent kernel developers, a RisingTide employee and a legal representative for the company have explained their positions. Discussion has also turned to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux drivers and related cease and desist notices.

When you consider that none of us could have much of an interest in Linux if it wasn't for the hardware it runs on, x86 hardware gets relatively little attention. This might be because Linux is now so stable, and performs well enough on older hardware, that we seldom need to think about it.

The Research team at Mozilla has announced the launch of a new open SWF runtime project called "Shumway". Described as "an HTML5 technology experiment", Shumway is intended to provide a web-native implementation of Adobe's SWF Flash file format, used for vector graphics and multimedia.

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