Cody Taylor

snydeq writes “Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC. ‘First of all, I don’t know how to make money on it,’ Whitehurst said, adding that he was uncertain how relevant the desktop itself will be in five years given advances in cloud-based and smartphone computing, as well as VDI. ‘The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age. I’d rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.’ Despite increasing awareness that desktop Linux is ready for widespread mainstream adoption, fellow panelists questioned the practicality of switching to Linux, noting that even some Linux developers prefer Macs to Linux. ‘There’s a desire [to use desktop Linux],’ one panelist said, ‘but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes “Although three of the four browsers that were targets in the PWN2OWN hacking contest quickly fell to a pair of researchers, none of the smartphones were successfully exploited. TippingPoint had offered ,000 for each exploit on any of the phones, which included the iPhone and the BlackBerry, as well as phones running the Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android operating systems. ‘With the mobile devices so limited on memory and processing power, a lot of [researchers’] main exploit techniques are not able to work,’ said TippingPoint’s Terri Forslof. ‘Take, for example, [Charlie] Miller’s Safari exploit,’ referring to Miller’s 10-second hack of a MacBook via an unpatched Safari vulnerability that he’d known about for more than a year. ‘People wondered why wouldn’t it work on the iPhone, why didn’t he go for the ,000?’ she said. ‘The vulnerability is absolutely there, but it’s a lot tougher to exploit on the iPhone.'” Chrome was the only browser at the contest that was not successfully exploited. We previously discussed day one of the contest, and a summary of day two is available as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five years after its launch, Skype is now the largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world, Telegeography says. Or as my friend Andy Abramson would say: The world’s biggest minute stealer.

O2, Apple’s mobile phone partner in the UK, is to offer the iPhone 3G for free as part of a new contract deal available from next month.

A overseas communications firm is suing Apple for promoting its iPhone handset as a touchscreen digital book reader, a concept it claims to have patented over seven years ago

The Pre, Palm’s new mobile phone, stole the show at CES this year. Looks helped, but mainly it was the Pre’s iPhone-like touchscreen tech that wowed the industry crowd. Two weeks later, Apple COO Tim Cook expressed his irritation (without directly naming Palm) to analysts on a conference call: “We will not stand for having our IP ripped off”

I was astounded when the cellular carriers sent Dell’s prototype “iPhone-killer” back to the drawing board. I do get it though … carriers need differentiating products in a crowded market. Still, shouldn’t the handset makers be designing the handsets and not the other way around?

Usually rip-off counterfeits are produced by disreputable, back-room shops nobody’s heard of. Now, it appears, international computing giant Lenovo is getting into the act. The company’s new Android handset is called the oPhone, and the software interface looks a LOT like the iPhone’s.

Vuze, the popular BitTorrent client formerly known as Azureus, has received a major update which allows users to automatically convert and play downloaded videos on the iPhone, iPod, Xbox 360 and the PS3. “Now playing, on all your screens” is Vuze’s new tagline.

Lounge is a Twitter client that spans both Mac OS X and the iPhone. Offering a powerful, consistent user interface that will soon synchronize various features between the two platforms, Lounge seems like a great choice for using Twitter on-the-go.