Earthquake Retrofit writes "The Register reports that 'Facebook has sent out invitations to an event at its Menlo Park headquarters next week that many believe will see the launch of a new, Facebook-branded smartphone...' I have lately become disillusioned with Google having so much power over my phone and the usual privacy concerns, so this announcement means I now have a choice. Oh, wait..."

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Joins rest of industry in collective hypegasm

Network speed-freak Arista Networks has woven software-defined networking technologies into its operating system.…

Über-reliable filesystem now ready for wide deployment

The maintainers of the native Linux port of the ZFS high-reliability filesystem have announced that the most recent release, version 0.6.1, is officially ready for production use.…

Somewhere Tim Berners-Lee is questioning his legacy

The second international festival celebrating cat videos will be held in Oakland, California, this May, an event at which grimalkins and their bipedal slaves will spend a day reveling in the art of filméd felines.…

'To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing.'

Steve Jobs' first boss, Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell, has written a book in which he offers advice on how to find, hire, and retain visionary talent – even though such creative types can be as difficult to deal with as Apple's cofounder.…

PC-led business as appealing as cold sick to Mickey D and the gang

The global PC business is in a woeful state, and Dell founder, chairman, and CEO Michael Dell thinks the best way to put his eponymous company back on top is give it reconstructive surgery away from the prying eyes of the public stock market.…

An anonymous reader writes "I started using email in the early 90s and have lost most of that first decade due to ignorance, botched backups, and so on. But since about 2000, I've got most — if not all — of my email in some form or other. I run Linux, so this has mainly been in a mix of various programs: Kmail, Evolution, Thunderbird. The past 2-3 years are still on the IMAP servers. My problem is that I only rarely NEED to look back to email of 5 years ago. But sometimes it's nice. Or I just want to reminisce about something...or find an old attachment that I was sent. But I do not want to be clogging my current email client of choice with vast backups and even more, I don't know if it will even easily convert. The file structures are different, some are mbox, others maildir, etc., and I would ideally like a way to 1) store and archive these emails, 2) access them, and 3) search by Sender, Subject, Date, Attachments. Is there anything I can do or do I just have to keep legacy applications on hand for this? Should I keep trying to upgrade and pull old files into the new applications? Any help or suggestions about what YOU do would be great."

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MarkWhittington writes "Included in President Obama's 2014 budget request will be a $100 million line item for NASA for a mission to capture and bring an asteroid to a high orbit around the moon where it will be explored by astronauts. Whether the $2.6 billion mission is a replacement or a supplement to the president's planned human mission to an asteroid is unclear. The proposal was first developed by the Keck Institite in April, 2012 and has achieved new impetus due to the meteor incident over Russia and new fears of killer asteroids."

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Flyweight jumbo to soar from Silicon Valley to New York City at 70km/h, tops

The photovoltaics-powered Solar Impulse HB-SIA aircraft has arrived at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley's Moffett Field to prepare for a flight across the US.…

Boston Police, according to an article at Slate, are engaging in a strange use of social media to fight crime. Or at least, to stop raucous music from disturbing the city. As the Slate writer says, "While police departments have been using social media to investigate for years, its use in such seemingly trivial crimes would be rather chilling, if these efforts didn’t seem so laughably inept."

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Android to be forked by two companies at the same time?

Facebook has sent out invitations to an event at its Menlo Park headquarters this week that many believe will see the launch of a new, Facebook-branded smartphone – and an Amazon phone may not be far behind.…

Trailrunner7 writes "China has become the go-to bogeyman behind every cyber attack or malware campaign, but if you're looking for the most malicious hosting providers on the Web, you won't find any of the top 10 in China. In fact, the United States and Russia have many more bad hosting providers in the top 20 than China does. ... [One] interesting data point is the appearance of Amazon in the top 10 list of providers hosting the highest concentration of infected Web sites. These are the kind of sites used in drive-by download attacks and to deliver exploits from exploit packs. Amazon, with more than two million IPs, ranks fourth in the list of providers hosting infected sites. Also on that list is Google, which comes in at number seven. The top spot belongs to Mail.ru, a Russian hosting provider."

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Your tax dollars at work at Virginia Tech

Video  A team of robotics researchers at Virginia Tech (VT) are using a university swimming pool to show off their latest creation, an autonomous robotic jellyfish developed for the US Navy that's capable of swimming a payload of technology into position off enemy shores.…

It's been decided at the last minute that "smart scopes", a feature of the new Unity desktop, will not ship in Ubuntu 13.04...

Clouds get real when the Facebook kids sit in the big chair

Analysis  Major adoption of public cloud computing services by large companies won't happen until the current crop of IT workers are replaced by kiddies who grew up with Facebook, Instagram, and other cloud-centric services – so says Rackspace CTO John Engates. Should we be worried?…

An anonymous reader writes "Weeks after Canonical announced Mir, Wayland's display server protocol and Weston compositor have been forked. A contributor to Wayland found differing views with the project over desktop eye candy and other technical decisions to the X11 successor, which resulted in forming the Northfield and Norwood projects. The developer, Scott Moreau, has been outted from the project but has provided a lengthy explanation why the fork was needed to advance the Linux desktop."

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Beyond LLVM 3.3 having performance optimizations, one of many other features coming to this next compiler infrastructure update is greater support for Intel's AVX2 instruction set extensions...

Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft might want a piece of the mini-tablet market. The company has lowered the minimum screen resolution for Windows 8 tablets, from 1,366 x 768 pixels to 1024 x 768 pixels. "This doesn't imply that we're encouraging partners to regularly use a lower screen resolution," it wrote in an accompanying newsletter. "We understand that partners exploring designs for certain markets could find greater design flexibility helpful." As pointed out by ZDNet's Ed Bott—cited by other publications as the journalist who first noticed the altered guidelines—that lowered resolution "would allow manufacturers to introduce devices that are in line with the resolutions of the iPad Mini (1024 x 768) and the Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7 (both 1280 x 800)." Whatever the contours of the smaller-tablet market, it's certainly popular enough to tantalize any potential competitor. But if Microsoft plunges in, it will face the same challenges that confronted it in the larger-tablet arena: lots of solid competitors, and not a whole lot of time to make a winning impression. There are also not-inconsiderable hardware challenges to overcome, including processor selection and engineering for optimal battery life."

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The latest bi-weekly Wine development release offers up a few user-facing changes...

Redmond playing catch-up with Android, iPad mini

Microsoft has quietly changed its OEM certification guidelines for Windows 8 to allow devices with lower screen resolutions, a move that could mean smaller Windows tablets are on the way.…