Popular open source news

A deep and detailed survey by Focus.com concludes that the best job in the United States is a tech job: systems engineer. No. 2: physician assistant. No. 3: college professor.

The biggest story this past week on Ars was ad-blocking. You may not have realized it, but blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit.

Apple’s suit against HTC could end one of two ways.
Either Apple becomes the next SCO, which ran itself aground claiming rights to Linux, or it becomes the next Microsoft, which is prospering while claiming to own Linux.
The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case.
You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued.

The Download Sort add-on for Firefox can automatically save your downloads to various folders based on rules you define. This freebie might take a bit of work to set up, but once you've got it rolling your downloads will sort themselves right into place.

The success of open-source software raises a tantalizing question: Could the same design philosophy work for tech gadgets?

Genieo (free) automatically pulls in stories and feeds from sites you visit to create a custom home page. While largely effortless, you'll likely find it less customizable than similar online offerings.

XGI's Linux driver was written off as dead back in the summer of 2008 when Ian Romanick who had been working on the open-source XGI Linux driver through his work at IBM had left the company to go join Intel where he now works on Mesa and Intel's open-source 3D stack. XGI Technology really hasn't pu...