Cody Taylor

Been working on the appearance of Thunderbird for the last two months now and as things are starting to land in the Nightly builds, things are indeed starting to look quite nice.

The KDE community proudly announced last night the immediate availability of the third maintenance release of KDE 4.2. The new version brings lots of bug fixes, especially for applications such as Kate, KRunner, Kephal, KSysguarda, KScreensaver, Kalzium, Konquest, JuK, KAlarm, KMail, KGpg, Ark and of course the KHTML engine.

Vuze, the BitTorrent client formerly known as Azureus, has just been released in a portable version. Unlike the regular Vuze client, Vuze to Go is closed source and costs .99. No doubt a pirated version will end up on torrent sites sooner or later.

daemonburrito writes “Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of ‘advertorial’ publications. Excerpta Medica, a ‘strategic medical communications agency,’ is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other ‘journals.’ Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glyn Moody writes “They might be, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal, which suggests ‘licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions,’ becomes law. The idea of making Microsoft pay for the billions of dollars of damage caused by flaws in its products is certainly attractive, but where would this idea leave free software coders?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mikesd81 writes “Google plans on advertising with spots promoting its Chrome browser this weekend. Google Japan had already released a 30-second video promoting Chrome on YouTube, but the company will distribute that video through the Google TV Ads network this weekend as an experiment to see if it can drum up interest in Chrome. Google advertised their browser on the New York Times’ website on Wednesday.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Afforess writes “In a new file submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sun Microsystems admitted that ‘we have identified potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the resolution of which could possibly have a material effect on our business.’ The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it ‘unlawful to make a payment to a foreign official for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.’ Yet, Sun would not release further details, only that it ‘took remedial action.’ Oracle, the new owner of Sun Microsystems, also said that they had prior knowledge of the infraction, yet also refused to release any details.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.