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If necessity is the mother of invention, patents are its delinquent offspring, providing stumbling blocks to innovation and progress, inhibiting the free exchange of ideas, and restricting our knowledge of how things work, says Richard Hillesley…

The designer of LISP, father of AI, and inventor of garbage collection passed away this week leaving a legacy of far-sighted innovation

KDE4 has been flinging new technologies at us fast and furiously, many in the category of "semantic desktop." Semantic computing is the future of computing, and KDE4 has the only working implementation of a semantic desktop. The idea of a semantic Web has been kicking around for some years, and the semantic desktop is the same concept applied to the personal computer. Let's take a look and see what all the fuss is about. It starts with Nepomuk, Strigi, and Akonadi, which are odd names that have been bandied about much with little understanding.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu Studio 11.10 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 11.10 uses Xfce as the default desktop environment (instead of GNOME).

State-sponsored trojans will be harder to get rid of A leading computer scientist has warned that the latest so-called Trusted Computing proposals may restrict the market for anti-virus and security software.…

OCZ Technology announced what it claims is the first 2.5-inch SSD (solid state drive) to include up to 1TB of storage, with a SATA 3.0 version delivering reads at up to 560MB/sec. Also released was a PCI Express-based hard disk/SSD combo that also packs 1TB, but revs performance to 910MB/sec., according to the company....

Teeworlds is a free open source fast-paced sidescrolling multiplayer-only computer game. The game features simple cartoon-themed graphics and physics, and relies heavily on classic shooter weaponry and gameplay. The controls are heavily inspired by the First-person shooter genre of computer games.

ViewSonic has begun selling a $200, seven-inch tablet that runs Android 2.3. The ViewPad 7e is equipped with a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, 4GB internal storage, 800 x 600 pixel screen resolution, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, dual cameras, and a micro-HDMI port, says the company....

HTC announced they want to upgrade as many HTC devices as possible. This is completely in line with Google's statement last week about Android 4 upgrades.

First Jobs, then Ritchie, and now McCarthy. This has been a sad month.

The desktop Linux setup of Chris Forster, an academic from the humanities. Forster shows how scholarly research and Linux aren't mutually exclusive.

As most of us already WEP encryption has become a joke. WPA is quickly going the same way thanks to many tools such as Aircrack-ng. On top of this, wired networks are no strangers to unwanted guests as well. Anyone serious about security should have a good Intrusion Detection system in their toolbox. There are already some very good IDS's (Intrusion Detection Systems) available. Why would anyone want to re-invent the wheel in Bash??? There are a couple of reasons for this. Obviously Bash scripts can be very light weight. Especially compared to some of the GUI programs that are out there.

Contec announced a fanless box PC intended for embedded applications, with a height of just 1.4 inches. The BX-956 includes an Intel Atom D510 processor, two CompactFlash slots, two gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, plus a VGA port and a serial port, according to the company....

Here's some new features and other upcoming work that may excite Linux enthusiasts in the Phoronix software/hardware playground...

Microsoft has signed a patent agreement with $28 billion Taiwanese original device manufacturer (ODM) Compal Electronics. With this tenth Android agreement, over half of all Android devices are now being made by companies that have signed Android-related licensing pacts with Microsoft, claims the company....

Released several weeks late due to malware attacks on kernel.org in August, the Linux 3.1 kernel is out now, with a variety of enhancements to performance, virtualization, and power management. It also includes support for near field communication (NFC), the OpenRISC open source CPU, Nintendo's Wii controller, and 3D acceleration with Nvidia GEForce graphics processor units (GPUs)....

The Wine development release 1.3.31 is now available.

The Web site http://www.kickstarter.com is an interesting place. Basically, it's a site that allows people to invest in various projects, giving people real money to develop an idea. Those ideas vary from film-making to programming video games, but the concept is the same regardless of the project.

While there are all kinds of interesting new performance and scalability bits in Linux 3.1, there is also something that you might not expect to see. The Linux 3.1 kernel officially includes a driver for the Nintendo Wii Remote.