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Canonical’s foray into the tablet arena is fundamentally different from both the iPad and a WebOS tablet, and unfortunately reeks of a company failing to learn from their competitors successes and failures. Here are four reasons why an Ubuntu tablet simply won’t work.

Google engineer John Koleszar asked the open source community for help optimizing the VP8 codec for the WebM project, Google's open source project for watching video online. In soliciting help, Koleszar gave a sort of State of the Codec Address regarding VP8, it's functionality and the headway he and his fellow programmers have made since the WebM announcement at Google I/O 2010.

Exactly two years ago I spoke about interoperability and standards here in Brussels.
Here is a brief overview:

• Interoperability boosts competition and we need more of that.
• For devices or applications to be interoperable - to work together - all concerned parties must agree to a common way of "doing things".
• Formal standards are one way to get there.
• More transparency in formal standard-setting can lead to more efficient outcomes.
• Public and private procurers of technology should be smart and build their systems as much as possible on standards that everybody can use and implement without constraints: this is good for the bottom-line because it promotes competition between suppliers and prevents vendor lock-in.

In other words, as I said on that occasion: choosing open standards is a very smart business decision. That speech brought a general perspective to my work on competition policy.
Today I must apply that thinking in a more direct way, as the person who has proposed the Digital Agenda for Europe. Even though the whole Commission is responsible for its implementation I expect interested parties to mostly turn to me to demand progress – and rightly so.
Therefore let me explain what I have in mind when it comes to the topics of interoperability and standards.

WebEden the online service where you can build your own website has today announced the release of hundreds of new website templates. This is in addition to the thousands of template, colour and font combinations already available within this website builder.

Open source electronics firm Liquidware has released a kit for attaching a 4.4-inch Liquidware BeagleTouch OLED touchscreen to a BeagleBoard to construct a Linux-based, tablet device. The Beagle Embedded Starter Kit also incorporates a BeagleJuice battery module and a 4GB SD card.

The PocketBook 301+ is actually a recent update of the original model released in 2007, itself based on a popular eReader design that’s been sold by various companies…

There was a talk last week at LinuxTag in Berlin by Egbert Eich about kernel mode-setting and the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) graphics stack on Linux. Egbert is, of course, a long-time X developer and openSUSE developer at Novell who was one of the masterminds behind the RadeonHD graphics driver and has worked on various pieces of X over the years. In Egbert's brief KMS talk he briefly covered the history of the Linux graphics stack, the user and kernel-space APIs for DRM mode-setting, and related topics. For those that missed out on his talk, below are his slides.

According to Henry Chesbrough1, Open Innovation consists of using external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, to advance a company's technology. Software architects and developers are usually not short of ideas, but which of those ideas are the really good ones? How do you select the winning options and avoid wasting energy and money on the useless ones?

Java father James Gosling has endorsed plans to juice managed runtimes on Linux from a company that was once at loggerheads with Sun Microsystems over his beloved language. Gosling has said he's "excited" by the Managed Runtime Initiative, which involves code contributions from Java appliance specialist Azul Systems, saying the effort will create the new functionality needed for managed runtimes to "continue their growth and evolution."

The long delay in releasing mobile phones running Windows Phone 7 is damaging Microsoft's mobile opportunity. It's been six months since Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer officially announced Windows Mobile 7, now called Windows Phone 7. And now, well and truly into the second-half of the year, Microsoft's answer to the iPhone and Google's Android OS is still nowhere to be seen.

Eucalyptus Systems — the open source outfit that mimics Amazon's so-called compute cloud inside private data centers — has released a major upgrade to its commercial product, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) 2.0 includes support for Windows virtual machines, letting you hoist Windows Server 2003, 2008, and Windows 7 images atop a Eucalyptus cloud — not just Linux images — and it includes new billing, accounting, and user management tools. New CEO Marten Mickos — the former CEO of MySQL AB — also promises "improved scalability."

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was founded in 1980 to enable users to read and post public messages to various newsgroups. As such, it predates forums, blogs, instant messaging and P2P networks.

Rooting your Android device is much like jailbreaking an iPhone. Once rooted, you can make your phone run faster, tether it to your computer, tweak hidden settings to your liking, and more. Here's how to do it on your Motorola Droid. Rooting essentially means giving yourself root permissions on your phone. It's the equivalent of running programs as administrators in Windows, or running a command with "sudo" in Linux. There are a number of great reasons to root your Android phone, highest among them being speed (through custom ROMs and through overclocking), tethering, and installing apps and widgets from other builds.

After applications recently started disappearing from the Android Market, Google continued to have reliability issues with the online store as developers over the weekend experienced issues with erroneous download counts. On Saturday, a number of developers started complaining about incorrect download counts on Android Market. The total number of downloads for their respective applications had in some cases dropped by several thousand, developers reported.

The release of FFmpeg 0.5 last March was significant as it was the first official release in quite a while for this popular and widely used free software media program. Fifteen months later, FFmpeg 0.6 has been released with plenty of changes including support for Google's VP8 codec / WebM and improvements for HTML5/H.264 video playback.

I use Ubuntu on all my personal computers and I even recommend it to friends. I am starting to think maybe I shouldn't though, because it is obvious: Ubuntu is harder to use than Windows

In a recent walkthru we outlined the steps for taking an existing server and converting it into a NAS box. That article assumed that you already installed Linux on the server and you will maintain that installation (i.e. updates, security, etc.). This article takes examines an alternative: a dedicated NAS distribution called OpenFiler that allows you to very simply create a stand-alone NAS box that can be administered over the web.

Here are some screenshots of the Slackware based Zenwalk 6.4 GNOME distribution. This quick little distro features many improvements and takes full advantage of GNOME 2.28.2, the Linux kernel 2.6.33.4, features several artwork changes, and more.

It looks like Dell will join Acer and HP in offering netbooks based on Google's Chrome OS sometime this fall. Dell isn't among the official Chrome OS partners named by Google, but as noticed by Download Squad, the code repository for Chromium OS — the open source incarnation of Chrome OS — includes some rather conspicuous bits that point to Dell as an early manufacturer.

If you've ever tried to change system-wide bash settings, you know there are three major ways of invoking bash, all of which behave differently when reading in settings files. 1. Interactive login shell (e.g., when logging in from the console or via ssh) 2. Interactive non-login shell (e.g., when you run bash at a terminal prompt) 3. Non-interactive shell (e.g., to run a shell script).