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t’s not every day that you start a business and quickly decide to say “no” to 70 percent of your potential customers. In retrospect, this turned out to be 4ormat’s secret weapon. At 4ormat, our goal is to provide an easy way for creative professionals to create and manage an online portfolio website. Although the portfolio itself looks great in all browsers, to this day, the portfolio building interface does not support Internet Explorer. And we don’t just mean IE6 or even IE7. We mean every version of Internet Explorer.

Apparently, Torvalds stepped into the arena and helped convince an ITC Administrative LAW Judge named Theodore R. Essex that Microsoft’s patent in question was invalid. The same judge who determined that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents, including one known simply as the 352 patent. That particular patent has to do with storing filenames with a lot of characters in old file systems like Windows FAT. Torvalds told the judge that Motorola had found the posting he had made about long filenames used in a compatible manner with short filenames, and that post predated the Microsoft patent by three years....

Devices will soon be available ANYONE THAT HAS THOUGHT the Raspberry Pi is exciting in the last few weeks but is annoyed that they cannot get one can cool their jets, as the wait is almost over. We have heard that the uncased early models are slightly delayed, and already sold out, but good news comes from RS Components.The Pi Foundation blog has shared an email from RS Components about the hardware and its progress.RS Components is making Raspberry Pi devices. It has updated them on its ordering systems and has plans for a dedicated online store. "We will be...

Linux. It’s really not a hard operating system to learn. In fact, that very first statement is wrong. Linux is not an operating system. Linux is a kernel which is used as the very core to build an operating system around. But these are the things that children of today are not learning. Not in public school systems anyway. When I was a teenager, I was very interested in computers. I looked forward to and really enjoyed my Information Technology classes. But it wasn’t just the computers that I was interested. The more I got involved with them, the more...

I got a really strange call from an old friend regarding "proprietary Linux". It would seem that AARP is peddling foolproof old people PCs with "proprietary Linux" installed on them. It seems my friend got handed a brand new laptop courtesy of AARP that the sound doesn't work. (Aww dam' remember the driver wars?) My question: Has anybody heard of "proprietary Linux". According to him it can only be fixed online for a fee.

Raspberry Pi is the name given to an ultra-low-cost computer that went on sale recently for just $35. The bare-bones PC, which is built to run a few different flavors of Linux, is capable of hooking up to a mouse, keyboard, HDTV and Ethernet. Initial interest has been strong -- the first batch quickly sold out. Frantic buyers cleaned out the shelves of two UK retailers offering a small US$35 Linux computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

What would really help give a better overview of any general trend in Linux usage is an average market share percentage. So I’ve done just that, taking the average reach for each month (based on stats from all the companies) and plotted it below.

Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Linux Mint project's fork of the GNOME Shell, has been released and the APIs and desktop interface have been declared fully stable by Mint Founder Clement Lefebvre. Created last year to streamline the Mint developers' changes to the GNOME 3 environment, the Cinnamon fork brings familiar GNOME 2 design elements to the GNOME 3 shell. Among the enhancements in the stable version is easier customisation through a "Cinnamon Settings" tool which includes, for example, the ability to set the date format for the calendar applet and change panel launchers' icons. The Settings tool is also...

I use a Linux desktop. According to Google Analytics, 12% of the visitors to my various technology Web sites use Linux. Nevertheless, I know that on the traditional desktop, the vast majority of ordinary users are running Windows, and don’t even get me started on “The Year of the Linux Desktop.” It’s not going to happen. But, and this is interesting, it appears that there is a slight upward trend in desktop Linux use.First reported by Katherine Noyes on Linux Insider, it turns out that the Web research firm Net Applications’ data show that Linux’s desktop market share has been growing...

Intel's Linux graphics team is seeking any questions or feedback that Phoronix readers have concerning their open-source Linux graphics driver stack. ... Before anyone asks, this is only about the driver developed by the Intel OSTC team for hardware with true Intel integrated graphics -- Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Ironlake, i915, i945, etc -- and not the notorious Poulsbo or now the Medfield situation. This is also only about graphics and not any other area of your Intel Linux desktop/notebook/netbook/tablet. Go forth and post!

The control of US military spy drones appears to have shifted from Windows to Linux following an embarrassing malware infection. Ground control systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, which commands the killer unmanned aircraft, became infected with a virus last September. In a statement at the time the Air Force dismissed the electronic nasty as a nuisance and said it posed no threat to the operation of Reaper drones, but the intrusion was nonetheless treated seriously. "The ground system is separate from the flight control system Air Force pilots use to fly the aircraft remotely; the ability of...

The Beefy Miracle already has a beefy list of possible changes like maybe the Btrfs file-system by default, multi-touch advancements, GNOME Shell software rendering, and many other features, but now there's even more. At the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting on Monday (9 January), several more Fedora 17 features were approved. Here's the features that were just approved to be part of the Beefy Miracle:

"The following are major features for Fedora 16: enhanced cloud support including Aeolus Conductor, Condor Cloud, HekaFS, OpenStack and pacemaker-cloud; KDE Plasma workspaces 4.7; GNOME 3.2; a number of core system improvements including GRUB 2 and the removal of HAL; an updated libvirtd, trusted boot, guest inspection, virtual lock manager and a pvops based kernel for Xen all improve virtualization support."

With over 600 GNU/Linux distributions available, 300 of which are under active development, what’s the best? How do you choose? It would be nice if there was a Linux Store, like the Apple Stores, where you could actually walk in and “testdrive” a Distro (short for Distribution). Unfortunately, there aren’t any “Linux Stores”. Money’s just not there. Apple products are premium products with premium price tags. Leasing a store, stocking it with “testdrive systems” and having Geeky Guru’s on the payroll just won’t work with a FREE product. Why are there so many Distros anyway? Makes it difficult to find...

In the last two weeks, we have lost two people who had immense influence on our industry. It is undeniable that Steve Jobs brought us innovation and iconic products like the world had never seen, as well as a cult following of consumers and end users that mythicized him. The likes of which will probably be never seen again. I too, like many in this industry, despite my documented differences with the man and his company, paid my respects, and have acknowledged his influence. But the “magical” products that Apple and Steve Jobs — as well as many other companies...

India has launched what it says is the world's cheapest touch-screen tablet computer, priced at just $35 (£23). Costing a fraction of Apple's iPad, the subsidised Aakash is aimed at students. It supports web browsing and video conferencing, has a three-hour battery life and two USB ports, but questions remain over how it will perform. Officials hope the computer will give digital access to students in small towns and villages across India, which lags behind its rivals in connectivity. At the launch in the Indian capital, Delhi, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal handed out 500 Aakash (meaning sky) tablets...

Posted in smartphones , MeeGo , Tizen , Intel , Samsung When Intel first announced its intentions to enter the smartphone space it needed an OS that demanded the additional silicon Intel was willing to invest in this market. With PCs Intel had Microsoft Windows, an OS that could seemingly always use more processing power. Newer versions of Windows helped Intel sell newer versions of its processors. There was no analog to that in the smartphone market when Intel first started making noise. It was software and styling, not SoCs that differentiated most Android smartphones early on. Obviously times are...

Here's one non-UDS announcement hitting the web right now that's also very significant for open-source and Linux: Advanced Micro Devices has announced today they will support Coreboot on all future processors. Coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is an open-source Linux-based BIOS implementation. AMD has long been a supporter of the Coreboot project with releasing code for Coreboot and supporting documentation in their products: both chipsets and servers.

A senior Red Hat engineer has lashed back at Microsoft's attempt to downplay concerns that upcoming secure boot features will make it impossible to install Linux on Windows 8 certified systems. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications are designed to offer faster boot times and improved security over current BIOS ROM systems. The secure boot feature of the specification is designed so that only digitally signed OS loaders will load, a security feature that would prevent the installation of generic copies of Linux or FreeBSD as well as preventing rootkits and other boot-time malware from running. A digitally signed build...

Microsoft has become locked in a dispute over whether the boot process in Windows 8 will block Linux from running on hardware designed for the next version of its flagship platform. Windows 8 secure boot uses pre-OS boot checks, as well as third-party software checks, to ensure that users PCs remain healthy. Photo credit: Microsoft Matthew Garrett, a power management and mobile Linux developer at Red Hat, raised questions in a blog post on Tuesday about dual-booting of Linux in Windows 8. He argued the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based secure boot means either Windows 8 will be signed...