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Sometimes the number of choices the Linux operating system provides can be overwhelming. I am starting to look at other options for my preferred desktop environment as GNOME 3 and KDE 4 go in directions that might be unsettling to my computing routine. One obscure yet interesting replacement candidate is Bluetile.

Europe is becoming increasingly nervous as Android and Apple's iOS continue to dominate the smartphone market worldwide "There's a concerted effort on three different fronts where European carriers and manufacturers, mainly carriers, are sounding alarms about not wanting an Apple-Google duopoly," Marc Beccue, a senior analyst at ABI Research, told ...

More legal trouble could be in the cards for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Old pal Paul Ceglia claims that Zuckerberg agreed to give him 50 percent ownership of the company. Ceglia claims he paid US$1,000 to help fund Facebook at Harvard in 2003. Ceglia sued Zuckerberg last July, and in the weeks following the suit he presented a contract bearing ...

T-Mobile Tuesday unveiled what it called its most powerful handset -- the HTC Sensation 4G It will be available this summer, and T-Mobile is talking up a storm about the device. Among other things, T-Mobile repeatedly refers to the device as the "HTC Sensation 4G."

Government reform initiatives are frequently long on saying, and short on doing. White papers and strategic plans are the stuff of good intentions, but actual implementation is often elusive The ambitious goal of the Obama administration to improve information technology management and procurement at the federal level is as vulnerable to gradual sp...

Sony Entertainment has reached a settlement with George Hotz, aka "GeoHot," the hacker who jailbroke Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console. The settlement was reached on March 31, according to a Sony blog post. The terms were not fully disclosed, but Hotz has apparently agreed to a permanent injunction This is hardly the end of the matter, though -- ...

The more we invest in something, the more committed we are to a successful outcome. Obvious enough, but what this investment of time and effort means is that we are now more motivated to follow through on our initial interest in the form of action This is a well-known phenomenon in the world of dating, for example (no need to elaborate here), but d...

Groklaw will stop publishing new articles May 16 -- exactly eight years to the day after it was launched This is because its reason for existence is gone, according to founder Pamela Jones....

When collaborating with others in the workplace, physically being there is nice. The fact is, though, that one's physical presence almost always leaves an unavoidable carbon footprint -- one that companies focused on going green might want to erase As an answer to this dilemma, new and emerging collaborative technologies offer a way to be there in ...

Level 3 has announced plans to buy Global Crossing for US$3 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Level 3 will also assume Global Crossing's $1.1 billion debt. This transaction creates a company with pro forma combined 2010 revenues of $6.26 billion, the companies said in a joint announcement. Global Crossing shareholders will receive 16 shares of Level 3 common stock for each share of Global Crossing common stock...

Adobe on Monday announced Creative Suite 5.5, a mid-point update between major releases of the suite In a tip of its hat to the realities of browser display, Adobe has included HTML5 support in CS 5.5....

Acer's Iconia Tab A500 tablet is now available for pre-order exclusively from Best Buy at US$450 Consumers will be able to pre-order the device from other stores beginning April 14, Acer said. It will hit retailers' shelves and be generally available online April 24....

The PC is not yet in danger of becoming extinct, but its position as the primary computing device in most people's lives could soon be threatened by the tablet Several analyst firms have recalculated their 2011 PC sales projections after noticing a trend in which more consumers are passing on PC purchases in favor of tablets. Gartner, for instance,...

Fast-growing Jive Software offers businesses an extensible social business solution that integrates social networking, collaboration software, community software and social media monitoring across the entire enterprise. The company recently bolstered its board of directors with a number of executives from high-profile tech companies. Helping to gu...

Last week, another iPad competitor bit the dust, and so far no vendor has even come close to bothering Apple in the tablet space. In the smartphone space, the only thing that seems to hurt Apple is the carrier and the anticipation of its next phone, which is due shortly but rumored to be delayed. If this were a poker game or any kind of sport,...

Time Warner Cable and Viacom are countersuing each other over whether Time Warner Cable has the right to live stream Viacom content to its Apple iPad app, which it released in March. In short, Time Warner Cable says the rights it already obtained from Viacom entitle it to distribute the content in this fashion. Viacom, for its part, says, no, it g...

A mysterious cosmic blast in the constellation Draco has astronomers scrambling to try to understand its cause, so unlike is it to anything ever observed before Rather than the short-lived gamma-ray bursts typically associated with the death of a massive star -- most last no more than a few hours -- this explosion continues more than a week later t...

Larry Page took the wheel as Google's CEO this week, and he's already shaking things up. On Thursday, Page placed key executives in charge of individual business units, according to the Los Angeles Times. Page indicated he wanted to simplify product and engineering structures with one executive leading each functional group.The new SVPs will report directly to him...

Facebook launched the Open Compute Project Thursday in a move that might reshape the IT hardware industry The project offers for public use tech specs and data about the custom-engineered technology developed for Facebook's first dedicated data center in Prineville, Ore....

Salesforce.com is on a buying binge as it attempts to build on its extraordinary sales momentum and broaden its market penetration within existing customer organizations and among new organizations. Since the end of last year, Salesforce.com has acquired five companies starting with Heroku and Etacts in December, Dimdim in January, Manymoon in Feb...