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You win some, you lose some," as the old saying goes, but rarely do the two occur nearly simultaneously. Sure enough, however, that's just what happened to open source software in Germany recently: It was being celebrated in Munich even as it was dumped in Freiburg.

When you use CPU intensive, multithreaded software tools on your multicore-processor such as 'pigz' or 'pbzip2' (for example), the OS loses its responsiveness (more or less) and it will slow down other running tasks, and it is something that should be expected too.

However, when running such applications while performing your other daily computer related tasks, the degraded OS responsiveness can become an issue.

Patents icon In a brief submitted to a US Court of Appeals, various major internet and IT companies have stated that the combination of an abstract idea and a computer should not be eligible for patent protection. "Many computer-related patent claims just describe an abstract idea at a high level of generality and say to perform it on a computer or over the internet", said the brief that was submitted by companies such as Google and Facebook on Friday. Other signatories include Dell, Intuit, Homeaway, Rackspace, Red Hat and Zynga.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. have joined forces to offer more than $500 million to buy Eastman Kodak Co. (EKDKQ)’s patents out of bankruptcy, said people familiar with the situation.

The two companies, competing for dominance of the smartphone market, have partnered after leading two separate groups this summer to buy some of Kodak’s 1,100 imaging patents, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is private.

Takeaway: It’s taken quite some time, but Netflix streaming video has finally arrived on the Ubuntu Linux desktop. In this easy, step-by-step, Jack Wallen shows you how.

Mac Linux USB Loader is a tool that allows you to take an ISO of a Linux distribution and make it boot using EFI on Mac.

The Linux-based GPU cluster runs the Virtual OpenCL cluster platform, which allows the graphics cards to function as if they were running on a single desktop computer. ocl-Hashcat Plus, a freely available password-cracking suite optimized for GPU computing, runs on top, allowing the machine to tackle at least 44 other algorithms at near-unprecedented speeds. In addition to brute-force attacks, the cluster can bring that speed to cracks that use a variety of other techniques, including dictionary attacks containing millions of words.

A moment of inattention has allowed the ITU’s proposed deep packet inspection (DPI) standard to escape. The slip-up happened when an Australian CryptoParty activist Asher Wolf put out a public call on Twitter asking for a copy of the text. The ITU duly sent it by e-mail – only later realising its mistake and asking her to treat it as for her eyes only.

After last year discovering a major Linux kernel power regression that was widely debated until the Phoronix test automation software bisected the problem to get to the bottom of the situation, there's more active power regressions today on the Linux desktop. As I've mentioned on Twitter and in other articles in weeks prior there's a few regressions, but one of them for at least some notebooks is causing a very significant increase in power consumption. This situation that remains unresolved as of the Linux 3.7 kernel can cause the system to be going through about 20% more power.

The Video Game Awards happened on Friday night in California. During the event, Gabe Newell of Valve commented a bit more on their next-generation console / living room PC plans. To no surprise, Linux plays a big role...

Corsix-TH the open source engine to run Theme Hospital has hit 0.11 (well they did a while ago actually) and soon 0.20 will be out as well it seems.

LXer Feature: 09-Dec-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

The developer of Kismet has released an Android tool for capturing WiFi in Monitor mode. We take a look at what you need to do your own mobile captures.

In the past I’ve wrote an article about the commands du and df that can respectively give you information about the Disk Usage and the Disk Free of your Linux computer. I personally use both of these commands a lot of times at work to check file system and/or directory, but I also understand that on a desktop with Linux you could use something more graphical to see the status of your partitions or directories, so today I’ll show you some programs that can achieve this goal: baobab, cdu, ncdu, JDiskReport and Filelight.

Over the past several weeks of running the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC that is comprised of an ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core processor, I've grown quite fond of this latest ARM processor...

Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has proclaimed that Ubuntu Linux includes spyware. Ubuntu supporters disagree with this take.

Dot Categories: DeveloperThis week's KDE Commit-Digest brings three stories: recent KDE-PIM activities, changes in Strigi and Google Code-In. The commit list includes:

With the release of the Linux 3.7 kernel being imminent (it might even be out today), here's an overview of the features and highlights of this 2012 holiday release of the Linux kernel...

The Legends of Aethereus developers announced a few days ago that the upcoming Legends of Aethereus RPG game will be available for Linux-based operating systems.

In Star shipping Inc. you take the role of the captain of of a cargo ship traveling between star systems to trade goods and commodities in strive to become the richest star ship captain in the galaxy.