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The trouble with FUD is at first it sounds correct, or at least plausible. So when Google complained about the Apple-Microsoft partnership and the deliberate patent policy against Google, Microsoft's first response sounded like a killer blow. It said it had asked Google to join them. But… let's take a little bit closer look, because in doing so, it let slip a fact that we did not know until now -- that Google tried to get the 800 or so Novell patents that CPTN, an entity Microsoft set up with Oracle, Apple and EMC, eventually won.

Version 6.7.0 of the Knoppix Live Linux distribution is now available to download free of charge from the project's download server or via BitTorrent. As usual there are English and German versions for CD or DVD.

We are witnessing a new wave of open source use, driven primarily by innovation rather than cost, flexibility, or other advantages. With this new wave, there is a danger that the ease of commercialization ushered in by wider use, greater credibility and, again, innovation means the all-important community piece -- often the free and open source or community version as well -- becomes an afterthought.

One of the keys to using GNU sed successfully is knowing how to use its regular expressions. If you look over sed scripts without knowing regular expressions, the effect can be pretty disconcerting. Don't worry — it's not as confusing as it looks. This weekend, spend some time with GNU sed's regular expressions and put some real power into your text processing.

So let me get this straight. To get the HP TouchPad to perform as well as its main competitor, I have to hack the WebOS operating system? My ZDNet blogging colleague James Kendrick has written an excellent piece for HP TouchPad owners on how to dramatically improve performance by using a WebOS community-supported software stack called Preware that is written by a team of community software developers over at WebOS Internals.

There are two types of user interfaces Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and command line interface (CLI). In GUI you use mouse to give instructions, in command line you type commands to control your computer. Linux provides two ways of exploring command line, you can either start a terminal emulator or switch to virtual console. Terminal Emulator Terminal emulator is a program that provides access to command line when you are in GUI. It opens up a window in which you can type commands. To start a Terminal Emulator look in the application menu.

John Carmack talks about the complexities of code optimization in modern games, PC/console development challenges, choosing programming languages, static program analysis tools (mentions PC-Lint), and open-sourcing the id Tech 4 (Doom 3) engine.

The Wine development release 1.3.26 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Linux is pretty quick to boot on modern computers, but why not pare it down some more? If you’re hurting from a lack of SSD or just want to boot faster, E4rat will easily shave down your boot time. E4rat and Your Linux PC E4rat is a utility that’s designed to cut your Linux boot time drastically. Essentially you show it what you do when you start your computer normally, and it analyzes the files you access and use. Then, it’ll move them to the beginning of your hard disk so that it takes less time to find them during boot.

This is a nice collection of fonts of the most popular movies (Exp- 007 GoldenEye), games and brands

... The goal is to develop low-cost, open source Wi-Fi software, and on Wednesday Geeks Without Frontiers--an initiative of the not for-profit Manna Energy Foundation--announced the final development of just such a solution. ....

In Linux, there are so many choices, and this includes the desktop environments and window managers. Four of the most popular desktop environments in Linux are GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE. All four offer sophisticated point-and-click graphical user interfaces (GUI) which are on par with the desktop environments found in Windows and Mac OS X. When you ask different people which of these four is best, you will likely get many different answers. So which is the best between GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE?

I'm calling this the 1.0 release of my Ode blog. I have all of Rob Reed's "extra" addins working (that's persistent-dating addin Indexette, web-editor addin EditEdit and the Disqus commenting addin).

We at VisionMobile have been researching, investigating and helping to educate the industry about open source for the past five years. In this time open source software has been transformed from geekware to business as usual. Much has been written and debated regarding open source licenses – from the early days of the GPL license to the modern days of the Android platform.

Despite the widespread use of open source, from Android to WebKit, there is one very important aspect that has been neglected: openness and how to measure it.

There's a new Wine development release available this weekend for those not partaking in the Berlin Desktop Summit. The new Wine release is version 1.3.26 and it delivers on several core improvements...

The House will soon be considering a bill that will require ISP’s to maintain logs of their customers Internet use for a 12 month period. As I understand it, the law would include a customer’s browsing history, credit card numbers, etc. The stated purpose of the proposed law is to catch pedophiles visiting child porn sites, but everybody who knows anything about the Internet agrees it won’t be very effective at doing that. What it will do, if enacted, is bring Orwell’s “Big Brother” vision a little closer to home and make your network connected devices look even more like telescreens than they do now.

Sharp announced a seven-inch, 1024 x 600-pixel & Galapagos A01SH& tablet running Android 3.2 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor -- and its FCC approval suggests it's eventually destined for the U.S.. Meanwhile, the Toshiba Thrive & Honeycomb& tablet has received a sleep-and-resume bug fix, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 got a & magazine-like& TouchWiz UI update....

With KDE 4.7, the KDE team has managed to create one of the most beautiful desktops out there, and to be honest, it’s even more appealing than Windows 7 or Mac OS X. On the usability front, KDE doesn’t seem to cut corners. Trademark features like Activities and Plasmoids (widgets) are polished to near perfection. Also, since the initial KDE 4 release, a lot of quality community-created widgets and plugins have sprung up, making the KDE workspace more than just an alternative to GNOME 3 or Unity. So, if you’ve just installed KDE on your computer, here are some of the best widgets you can drop on to your desktop and make your friends jealous.

Smart Modular Technologies announced a solid state disk (SSD) that squeezes 1.6TB of storage into a 2.5-inch form factor, reading data at up to 1GB/sec. The Optimus SSD is enterprise-focused, featuring a 6Gb/sec. SAS (serial attached SCSI) interface, according to the company....

What does history teach us about the rise of Homo Sapiens in relation to the Neanderthals -- and how does open source figure into it?