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We've covered plenty of stories concerning Apple's ridiculously arbitrary nature as the gatekeeper for iOS apps, approving or pulling them with little reason. And, of course, we've discussed a variety of ridiculous patent lawsuits -- including one we wrote about back in March, concerning a fight over an iPad app for "augmentative and alternative communications." This was the case of the mother of a 4-year-old girl, whose daughter Maya was unable to speak, but had finally found an iPad app, called Speak for Yourself (SfY) which actually helped her communicate with her parents. There were alternative products on the market, but most did not work for Maya -- and were many time as expensive (one is described as running $7,000 -- which the family appeared to be willing to pay, but not after they realized it wouldn't work for her). And, of course, a patent dispute threatened all of this. Two companies who make some of the expensive offerings, Prentke Romich Company and Semantic Compaction Systems (PRC/SCS) have sued SfY for patent infringement, over a patent (5,920,303) on a dynamic keyboard (held by SCS, but licensed by PRC), which they claim SfY violates.

Linux Feed Reader, aka "Liferea," is part of a highly specialized category of apps. It is an aggregator for online news feeds, weblogs and podcasts. As such, it provides a tool for pulling into one spot an eclectic collection of your newsfeed content so you do not have to go to each separate source.

I have loads of epubs on my computer, and I have traditionally used Calibre's server feature to share them with our phones. In the past, I've kind of clobbered together things on an Ubuntu box that also served as my main desktop computer. That worked well in the past, but I've recently set up a headless Debian Squeeze server, and I decided to migrate my Calibre server there.

Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers that manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

Want to know what could be the next big things in data centers? Listen to this podcast to find out.

LibreOffice 3.6.0 beta 1 has been released with many new features and improvements, including contextual spacing for Writer, DOCX import improvements, support for importing Smart Art, label / business card wizard improvements, widescreen format for Impress slides and more.

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday said it will integrate an ARM processor with upcoming x86 chips, marrying two rival architectures and ending more than a year of speculation around AMD's plans to use ARM technology.

Father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, has today received the 2012 Millenium Technology Prize. The announcement of this year's winner was made back in April. Linus received the award today at the Technology Academy Finland.

In brief, I servicized the mounting and unmounting of the network drive, and the control script I wrote for it also places netdrive symbolic links in each non-system user's home directory if a directory on the share exists in their name. Here's how it's done.

The Linux login manager or display manager is used to handle the login procedures for the Linux desktop. If you have a login manager and a desktop environment installed on your system the login manager will load in place of the default shell after booting your system.

A new patent granted this week aims to stop students from sharing textbooks, both off and online. The patent awarded to economics professor Joseph Henry Vogel hopes to embed the publishing world even further into academia. Under his proposal, students can only participate in courses when they buy an online access code which allows them to use the course book. No access code means a lower grade, all in the best interests of science. For centuries, students have shared textbooks with each other, but a new patent aims to stop this “infringing” habit. The patent in question was granted to Professor of Economics Joseph Henry Vogel. He believes that piracy, lending and reselling of books is a threat to the publishing industry.

Designed by the Apache Software Foundation, Hadoop is a Java-based open-source platform designed to process massive amounts of data in a distributed computing environment. Hadoop’s key innovations lay in its ability to store and access massive amounts of data over thousands of computers and to coherently present that data. Though data warehouses can store data on a similar scale, they are costly and do not allow for effective exploration of huge amounts of discordant data. Hadoop addresses this limitation by taking a data query and distributing it over multiple computer clusters. By distributing the workload over thousands of loosely networked computers (nodes), Hadoop can potentially examine and present petabytes of heterogeneous data in a meaningful format. Even so, the software is fully scalable and can operate on a single server or small network.

While we're still waiting for Enyo 2.0 to come with the rest of the Open webOS kit, we'll take an update to the beta framework when we can get one. In fact, this week we're getting one with a bump to Beta 5.

Over the last fourteen months, discontent with Unity and the GNOME 3 series of releases have sent GNOME users galloping in all directions in their search for alternatives. Xfce and Linux Mint's Cinnamon and Mate in particular have benefited from this search. However, one alternative that users have not considered to any extent is KDE. Considering the years in which GNOME and KDE were considered the main desktop environments for Linux, this trend is surprising at first.

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case that will affect whether you can sell your iPad -- or almost anything else -- without needing to get permission from a dozen "copyright holders." Here are some things you might have recently done that will be rendered illegal if the Supreme Court upholds the lower court decision:

1. Sold your first-generation iPad on Craigslist to a willing buyer, even if you bought the iPad lawfully at the Apple Store.

2. Sold your dad's used Omega watch on eBay to buy him a fancier (used or new) Rolex at a local jewelry store.

3. Sold an "import CD" of your favorite band that was only released abroad but legally purchased there. Ditto for a copy of a French or Spanish novel not released in the U.S.

4. Sold your house to a willing buyer, so long as you sell your house along with the fixtures manufactured in China, a chandelier made in Thailand or Paris, support beams produced in Canada that carry the imprint of a copyrighted logo, or a bricks or a marble countertop made in Italy with any copyrighted features or insignia. Here is what's going on..

I really cannot see the Judges upholding this one - Scott

Back in February, AMD raised the possibility that future processors from the company might include ARM cores. The assumption at the time was that these ARM cores would be used for computation. The company has revealed its first plans for chips combining x86 and ARM cores, but it turns out they won't be used for computing at all: the embedded ARM cores will be used to provide security services.

This is a selection of a whole of 100 best games available for Linux, some free and some paid, along with their genre and where you can acquire them.

We are living in 2012 but so far Linux Desktop is nowhere. Even the “too big to fail” Canonical struggles to make partnerships with manufacturers and distribute Ubuntu in a broader market. Maybe Gnome could show the way?

BYOD and working in the shadows: A mandate for change or juvenile rebellion? Did you ever know someone who just has to break the rules no matter how many times you warn him or threaten him? Did you also notice that he’s the type of person who skips through life and work, often relatively undaunted, but his manager thinks he’s the bomb? Sure, we all know the guy. A lot of people see him as a guru, as a quirky genius or even as a prima donna but we, his irritated coworkers, see him for what he is: A disruptive goon who makes life harder for us all. That’s the typical picture in your head when you hear the term, “Shadow IT” but that isn’t always the case. Believe it or not, I could be talking about you.

The BBC has interviewed Linus Torvalds after winning the Millennium Technology Prize, revealing his thoughts on the success of Linux