Cody Taylor

Anarchduke sends in a Reuters story quoting unnamed sources who say that the European Union has decided to find Intel anti-competitive. The finding should be announced in the coming week. “…the Commission will say Intel paid PC makers to delay or scrap the launch of products containing AMD chips. The Commission will characterize the payments as ‘naked restrictions’ to competition, the sources said. … Intel set percentages of its own chips that it wanted PC makers to use, the sources said. For example, NEC Corp was told that 20 percent of its desktop and notebook machines could have AMD chips, the sources said. All Lenovo notebooks had to use Intel chips, as did relevant Dell products. The figure was 95 percent for Hewlett-Packard’s business desktops, they said.” Previous infractions by Intel include giving illegal rebates to computer makers back in 2007 and paying retailers not to sell AMD-based computer systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Conky is a highly customizable desktop monitor for X Window System. Think of it as KDE4 desktop widgets on crack.

There is nothing wrong with XP (cough) but I do like trying new shiny things and Windows 7 defiantly seems to be one of them. I could never run windows Vista on my PC because of the totally awesome ” Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding, but has successfully recovered.” error. Thanks Microsoft / Nvidia – your cool!

MarkDennehy writes “The Broadcasting Bill 2009 (currently in the last stages of becoming the Broadcasting Act 2009 and then being commenced into law in Ireland) has thrown up a rather unpleasant little nugget for broadband users in Ireland. It now defines a television set as being an electronic apparatus able to receive TV signals or “any software or assembly comprising such apparatus” which would mean that even if you haven’t got a television set, even if you don’t watch streaming content from RTE.ie (the state broadcaster’s website), you’d still have to pay 160 euro a year for a television license for your iPhone, or netbook, or laptop or desktop if you have fixed or mobile broadband.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The truth is no one knows exactly how many desktop Linux users there are. But, here are some of the ways we can use try to get to accurate numbers.

jammag writes “It’s long been one of those exceptionally hard-to-quantify numbers: exactly what percentage of the desktop PC market is held by Linux? Doubters suggest it hovers around a negligible one percent, while partisans suggest it’s in excess of 10 percent. Bruce Byfield explores the various sources of estimates, dismissers’ and fan boys’ alike, and guesstimates it might realistically be 5-6%. Still, he admits, ‘the objectivity of numbers is often just a myth.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anyone who knows anything about my tastes in the Linux desktop knows I really haven’t liked the KDE 4 interface, but the latest version, KDE 4.2.2, is looking good, darn good.

KIDO’Z is a pretty nifty Adobe AIR-powered desktop browser app that gives kids a safe and fun environment to play games, watch videos and/or visit pre-approved websites. When you first install the AIR app as a parent, you can configure the age and gender of your offspring as well as your location and preferred language (there are 17 available).

In this article I’ll include three ways to screencast your Linux desktop with the help of recordMyDesktop, XVidCap and Istanbul. These three applications are included in every major distribution.

FrankKarlitschek writes “At last year’s KDE Conference Akademy, the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide group of contributors and users who believe in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making the sharing and exchanging of knowledge (PDF) easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people; to contact them and collaborate. If a user is starting KDE for the first time, he has questions. At the moment, a lot of the support for KDE users is provided through forums and mailing lists. Users have to start up a browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The community is relatively loosely connected; it is spread all over the web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the information found somewhere out on the web. Although it works relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.