It is interesting to see the differences in approach between the ISO JPEG group and the ISO MPEG group on IP. Licenses, even peppercorn payments, are a real stumbling block for artisan developers, who were the bedrock of FOSS until the coporates co-opted it. You cannot attach payment to something you give away for free: the difficulties with H.264 are a current example of this. The solution seems to be that the codecs must be provided as part of the graphics card (which is paid for): NVidia is associated with this approach. Developers have to reach outside the self-constructed FOSS gilded cage to something posing as hardware.

Get more from your mail with these essential Gmail tips. Read on for 14 tips for more advanced users which can simplify how Gmail works and make it more powerful and useful.

Adobe AIR apps are some of the best designed, most useful applications you can have on your desktop.

With anti-piracy outfits warning those who share copyrighted content and ISPs threatening to pull the plug on alleged offenders, many file-sharers have decided to protect themselves by going anonymous. To accommodate this growing demand, ItsHidden is now offering a free VPN targeted at those who want to protect their privacy online.

The pace at which Mozilla works can seem insane. It was less than a month ago when the the company released Firefox 3.5. But the ambition doesn’t end there. The Firefox team is looking even farther in the future: all the way to Firefox 4.0.

The company’s decision not to support upgrades from Windows XP is a rare misstep in the Windows 7 delivery process.

Instant messaging has become so ubiquitous, an entire generation of internet users is probably unaware there was ever life without it. Check out the following five most popular instant messengers to to help you communicate across networks and the world.

Believe it or not, almost 50% of Twitter users, prefer to tweet directly from Twitter.com. This isn’t surprising, but most heavy Twitter users agree that Twitter.com is actually the poorest user experience among the plethora of alternative web applications to access the service.

Initial Mockups for the Windows theme revamp.

Prior to Doom’s release, programmers found themselves in the stone age of game development. Building a game meant starting from scratch and compiling all new code, but like the invention of the wheel, the advent of the game engine forever changed the PC gaming landscape. We look back at all the major PC game engines and what made each one special.