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We cannot ignore them — they are everywhere. Lists of things “todo”. Things to buy. Choices to choose from. No mobile environment would be complete without the ability to display a list of choices to a user. Of course, every platform has their own name for them. Android calls its list a ListView and requires an “adapter” to supply the data to the list widget. iPhone developers create lists with the UITableView and flesh out a “protocol” in Objective-C to provide the data via a callback paradigm. For the Java programmers among us, a protocol is similar to an Interface in Java.

It's easy to lampoon Ray Ozzie's farewell memo to Microsoft - Dan Lyons summarised it as "We suck. I quit. Goodbye." - but the departing Chief Software Architect has made some serious points. Tech is changing, and Microsoft isn't changing fast enough. It's not the easiest memo to read, because Ozzie never uses one word when he can use 80 - so we stuck it through Microsoft Word's AutoSummarize feature to find the important bits*.

A really slick Ubuntu advertisement was shown during Mark’s keynote address at the Ubuntu Developer Summit 2010. It's a very well put together Ubuntu advert and gives you a quick preview of what Ubuntu is all about. Watch the video below.

This article shows how you can change the appearance of your Ubuntu 10.10 desktop so that it resembles a Mac. This can be achieved with the help of Elementary, Docky, and Gloobus-Preview. Elementary is a project that provides a popular icon set and GTK theme; Docky is an interactive dock (like the one you know from a Mac) that provides easy access to some of the files, folders, and applications on your computer, and more; and Gloobus-Preview is an extension for the Gnome Desktop Environment designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file or directory.

Intel will be introducing their first Sandy Bridge CPUs in the coming months, which we already know has Linux graphics support well underway, but for now the top-end Intel desktop processors are the Gulftown CPUs that were introduced earlier this year. The Gulftown CPUs boast six physical processing cores with Hyper Threading to put the total thread count per CPU at 12. Besides putting 12 processing threads at your disposal, these CPUs are built upon the 32nm die shrink of Nehalem and boast 12MB of L3 cache. The first Gulftown desktop product to launch was the Intel Core i7 980X, which was quickly followed by the Core i7 970, and we now finally have the chance to test out this incredibly fast but expensive processor under Linux.

Microsoft plans to impose royalty fees on Taiwan-based vendors of Android handsets for using its patents in e-mail, multimedia and other functions, with Acer and Asustek Computer being targets in an actual attempt to prevent the two vendors from adopting Android and Chrome OS for their netbook and tablet PCs, according to Taiwan-based makers. There are only several Taiwan-based handset vendors and only HTC has signed for licensed use of Microsoft patents.... Acer's and Asustek's handset shipments are in small volumes and therefore Microsoft's royalty charge is not for revenues, the sources noted.

The "Unity" user interface that debuted in Ubuntu 10.10's Netbook Edition will be standard on the next version of the Ubuntu Desktop Edition, as well. Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will replace the Linux distribution's default GNOME environment in favor of the multitouch-enabled Unity user interface, says Canonical. Making the announcement at a keynote Oct. 25 at Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Fla., Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, said Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will swap out the GNOME user interface in favor of the Unity interface that is now available on UNE.

I’ve said before that I love what Ubuntu is doing with design, but the recent announcement to ship Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity as the default desktop is going to make things a bit rocky for the next couple of years. The Unity interface, while beautiful, still has quite a few bugs to work out, which will make it rocky for Ubuntu developers. Adoption of Unity probably means that the GNOME Shell is not going to be used in Ubuntu, which makes relations between the GNOME and Ubuntu developers a little more rocky. Right in the middle of all this are Ubuntu’s users who might be left wondering what their place in all of this is.

I was excited to see that the Linux From Scratch (hereafter, LFS) project just released a new and stable documentation “build” for version 6.7 this past September. I have known about the LFS project for many years but I didn’t start experimenting with it until not too long ago.

Compact Flash and SD storage cards are everywhere; gigabytes for cheap in a tiny form factor. Most come formatted with VFAT. So what is the fastest Linux filesystem for these little devices? Flash drives and SD Cards are getting bigger, faster and cheaper. They're not just for sucking down snaps from your pocket camera any more: they're backup storage, portable homedirs, netbook expansion ... you name it.

Alex Miller is just 12 years old, but don't let his age fool you. This teenager has just made his mark in the technology world by spotting a major security bug in the world's second most popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox.

The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here's a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.

Compiz 0.9.2 was revealed recently with a number of major improvements, new features and even new plugins. But the future of Compiz became uncertain since both Gnome with its GNOME Shell and KDE with its new KWin has decided to go forward with the new integrated desktop approach. But hold on, Compiz might just become an ever more active and important project with Canonical deciding to integrate Compiz with Ubuntu Unity.

The life expectancy of a DSLR camera is usually measured in shutter actuations. For example, Nikon D5000 is good for about 100,000 shutter clicks. That doesn’t mean that your camera dies the day it exceeds its shutter actuation limit, but the shutter count provides a good indication of the camera’s condition.

Linux averages 5.5 changes per hour, every hour of every day, and is perhaps one of the most active software projects in human history. Jon Masters charts these changes every month in quite possibly the best technical column in human history…

One of the reasons Ubuntu developers gather at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is to figure out what the next version of their Linux distribution should be about. At the Natty UDS currently underway in Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has provided a new desktop direction with a move to the Unity shell, instead of the GNOME Shell. Moving beyond just the user interface, Shuttleworth has also shared some insight into where he sees Ubuntu headed in the next five years.

Oracle continues to be at the center of controversy despite their press release stating they will continue to support and release OpenOffice.org as an open source project. Most recently Oracle was vilified by bloggers and the press for asking members of The Document Foundation to resign from OpenOffice.org due to potential conflicts of interest.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce 8200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Rosegarden allows recording, arranging, and composing music. Multiple tracks can have effects added and then be mixed down for burning to CD or for distribution on the web. The built-in notation editor supports printed output via GNU LilyPond

So we set out to make the newly released Civilization V would work in CrossOver a few weeks back. I felt it was my duty to help the QA staff with the testing.