Well, this is an interesting double standard. Remember Apple's reaction to Palm trying to tap into iTunes? They were pretty pissed, right? Well, it seems that in Apple's world, it's not okay to access their services unauthorised, but when Apple needs to do the same to someone else's services, it's suddenly not a problem. As it turns out, Apple violated Facebook's terms of service, knowingly, and willingly.

"Google is celebrating Chrome's second birthday by releasing a new stable version of its rapidly evolving browser, offering a slightly simpler user interface, an automatic form filler, and the ability to synchronize extensions and form data across machines."

The iPad pretty much has the tablet market all to itself at this point, since no serious competitor has yet been released. We've been teased to death with the first real competitor, a device from Samsung called the Galaxy Tab. It has been officially unveiled today, and it indeed looks like the first serious competition to the iPad. It runs Android, naturally.

It's been only a mere six months since its first unveiling, but Microsoft has already announced that Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturing. This means device makers can start tuning the software to their hardware, leaving plenty of time to release devices before the holiday season.

Well, this was rather unexpected. As it turns out, Commodore USA's CEO Barry Altman isn't particularly pleased about the article I wrote earlier today in which I placed a considerable amount of scepticism with regards to Commodore USA and its business (and website). He (not his lawyer) sent us a threatening email demanding we take down the article, post a new correction article, the whole shebang. The entire email - as an image, you'll want the original formatting - after the break. Our reply? We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

A whole lot of Apple news of course, but we've never really done music players or streaming devices, so let's skip the barrage of new iPods and the new Apple TV (streaming-only? Fail). The real meat is of course iOS 4.1 and 4.2, both of which were detailed during today's press event.

Well, this is kind of funny. Steve Wozniak, still an Apple employee, has defended Paul Allen and patent trolls in general. "I'm not at all against the idea of patent trolls cause I've had friends who just got forced into bankruptcy by bigger people who had more money and could have a lawsuit against them, forced them to be their own lawyers, and in the end, sometimes they're victorious. But it's a real hard way to do it. So if you're going to have a patent and say 'It's worth some money, I'll sell it', well, even if Paul Allen makes a fortune off of it, I think he had the insights to recognize which patents were valuable." Apple is one of the companies Allen is suing.

Just when you thought the Amiga world was finally getting its act together, finally making things a little less obtuse for outsiders, this happens. So, we have the AmigaOne X1000 coming up, a brand-new PowerPC computer, running the real deal - AmigaOS 4. In the meantime, Commodore USA - the one with the sketchy website - has apparently secured rights to the Amiga hardware brand, and is planning to release Amiga-branded computers running AROS. In the meantime, Hyperion, the Belgium company behind AmigaOS, who is working with A-eon on the AmigaOne X1000, claims this is a clear violation of the settlement between them and Amiga Inc., and has notified its US lawyers.

"KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. This update is the first in a series of stabilization updates to 4.5.0, coming every month, as if delivered by a cronjob. 4.5.1 brings bugfixes and translation updates on top of KDE SC 4.5.0."

"When it comes to Apple products, the iPad and the iPhone get all the headlines. But in recent years, the company's Macintosh line of computers has enjoyed a remarkable revival that has been vital to Apple's emergence as the most valued technology company on Wall Street. In the latest sign of that comeback, Autodesk plans to announce on Tuesday that it is bringing its flagship AutoCAD design and engineering software to the Mac for the first time in nearly two decades."

Despite doing what I think are some great things for the American people, the Obama administration has a dark side. Joe Biden and many others on staff come straight from the RIAA camp, and it shows. Today, the Obama administration disregarded every US law relating to theft and copyright by stating that piracy is "flat, unadulterated theft".

Highly innovative but remarkably illusive - that's how I describe the webOS. The operating system never made its way to The Netherlands, and as such, I never got to try it. Now that Palm is part of HP, development on webOS continues, and the company has just detailed what's coming for developers in version 2.0.

Since interesting news that I'm actually knowledgeable about is still a little hard to come by, I have to work a little harder. This is something interesting to discuss: John Gruber, rather famous Apple blogger, is now arguing that Apple is in fact not fighting the jailbreaking community. Wait, what? Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

"Mozilla has announced a new alpha release of its Fennec mobile browser for Android and the Nokia N900. Fennec offers support for add-ons and has tight integration with Firefox Sync, a browser synchronization service that was formerly called Weave. The support for Firefox Sync is arguably Fennec's killer feature, especially because Mozilla is planing to include the synchronization features out-of-the-box in Firefox 4. Users will be able to have access to the their bookmarks, browsing history, and tabs across all of their computers and supported mobile devices."

"Intel Corp.'s $1.4 billion acquisition of Infineon Technologies AG's wireless unit marks another step by the chip maker to expand in the wireless device market, an area where it has struggled in the past. Intel's need to push further into wireless was highlighted Friday by the company's surprising warning that third-quarter revenue would fall short of its previous expectations because of weaker-than-expected demand for consumer PCs. Smartphones and other mobile devices have long been a faster-growing segment than the PC market."

I remember a time when you bought ATI instead of NVIDIA, much the same way you still buy AMD instead of Intel. As we all know, AMD bought ATI, further confirming the implicit relationship between the two that already existed anyway. Now, though, the relationship comes to an end, since AMD has confirmed the ATI brand will be phased out.

Remember that other tablet, which came out right around the same time the iPad was released? Yeah, the joojoo, by Fusion Garage. During its development, it was known as the CrunchPad, and emerged out of some form of collaboration between Michael Arrington's TechCrunch and Chandrasekhar Rathakrisnan's Fusion Garage. Things went sour between the two, and eventually, Fusion Garage released the joojoo on its own. Consequently, Arrington sued, and we've got the first major court decision.

"Chinese PC maker Lenovo will go head-to-head with the big boys in the video game console market, looking to snatch away market share from the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. On Aug 9, a team of some 40 Lenovo software engineers was spun off from the Lenovo Group to develop and market the 'Ebox', a platform similar to Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360."

Well, this is about as surprising as Fiona Apple being awesome in every possible way. Google has announced that it has withdrawn itself from JavaOne, an annual conference on, well, Java. The cited reason? Oracle suing Google over Android's use of Java, of course.

I don't think you'll find many people left in our western world who prefer an old-fashioned regular camera over a digital one. While I can still appreciate the charm of fiddling with actual film and the thrill of finding out what your photos looked like all developed, digital photography is easier in just about every possible way. Thanks to The New York Times, I found a story from 2007 on the Kodak blog, detailing the ceation of the very first digital camera. In 1975. An old story, but fascinating nonetheless.

Most of us here are not particularly big fans of the concept of patents. Most of us are aware of the significance of patents, we just believe the system has gone out of control and needs a serious kick in the butt. Well, it turns out not even the richest people on this earth are immune to the call of the patent troll. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed a massive patent lawsuit, using broad and vague patents to sue just about any big name in the business - from Apple to Google.

When Google and Verizon unveiled their joint net neutrality policy proposal, in which the FCC would play a central role in governing the internet, I mentioned how the the FCC might not be the kind of institution you'd want to hand over control to over your pornography life line (also known as the internet). Over the past few days, the FCC pretty much reiterated just why they are no the right people to govern the web.

I'm not really sure what to do with this. I mean, I know how popular the Commodore 64 was and still is, and how significant a machine it really was. So, when Commodore USA sends out a press release that it has acquired the rights to produce an exact replica case of the C64 (but with Intel Atom innards), I knew a lot of people would like this. At the same time, Commodore USA's website always seemed a little... Sketchy to me.

At the Hot Chips 2010 conference, IBM announced their upcoming z196 CPU, which is really, really fast. How fast? Fastest chip in the world fast. Intended for Z-series mainframe computers, the Z196 has a clock speed of 5.2GHz. Measuring just 512 square millimeters, the Z196 is fabricated on 45nm PD SOI technology, and on its surface contains almost one and a half billion transistors. My... Processor is bigger than yours.

The OpenSolaris governing board fell on its collective sword Monday and resigned en masse after Oracle continued to ignore its ultimatum to appoint a liaison guy to work with it on the future of the open source project. The move was anticlimactic to say the least. Oracle last week leaked an internal e-mail into the wild effectively saying OpenSolaris is dead. The news of the mass resignation, coupled with Oracle suing Google claiming Android infringes on its Java patents, had Adobe's director of open source and standards David McAllister casting Oracle as the New Microsoft and saying "the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so".

We haven't talked about this one for a while, but now there's news from the MPEg-LA camp. The MPEG-LA, known patent troll and chief supplier of FUD for well over ten years, is apparently feeling the pressure from Google's WebM project, and has done a complete 180. While promising earlier this year not to charge royalties for internet video that is free to end users until the end of 2015, they've now extended this promise to eternity. This may sound like a big deal, but it changes nothing - H264 is still a legal minefield even lawyers and the MPEG-LA itself have trouble understanding.

"Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer's microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don't spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, 'wouldn't it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?' Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail."

The InfoWorld Test Center rounds up of the past year in open source, highlighting the best open source offerings in several software categories: "The word 'best' here can mean many things. It is sometimes equivalent to 'most promising', 'most surprising', 'most subversive', 'most unnerving', 'most opportune', 'most happening', or some weird, inchoate mixture of them all. The one thing it always means is 'most useful' - to developers, IT administrators, and users on a business network." From enterprise apps, to app dev tools, to platforms and middleware, to networking software, the list is expansive, including 39 hybrid license and community offerings.

I came across a news entry at Phoronix about a new init replacement, systemd, and curiously started a read into the surprisingly heavy matter. Systemd is by no means as simple as upstart. It does far more things far more straight and in more detail. The differences are so significant that they enforce quite different configuration strategies. One can argue for both, depending on the goal to reach. However, that's not what I want to write about. After having read what systemd is capable of, and how it does it, I began to put the existence of all system daemons - in their today's forms - in question. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

A couple of days ago we talked about how the RIAA and NAB are planning on asking US Congress to mandate FM radio chips inside every cell phone. This plan was met with some ridicule, so the NAB decided to write a blog post addressing the critics. Most of the post is overshadowed by an overdose of America's favourite national pastime: WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE. 9/11!

Today, Mozilla released the fourth beta of Firefox 4.0. After a period of what I would call stagnation, the Mozilla team are back on track with delivering interesting UI concepts. They were sensible enough to copy Chrome's excellent tabs-on-top UI, but have now also added something called Panorama, a new and very interesting way of managing your open tabs.

"Intel Corporation announced an important advance in the quest to use light beams to replace the use of electrons to carry data in and around computers. The company has developed a research prototype representing the world's first silicon-based optical data connection with integrated lasers. The link can move data over longer distances and many times faster than today's copper technology; up to 50 gigabits of data per second. This is the equivalent of an entire HD movie being transmitted each second."

"You can't say that AMD is ever boring. The company says its next-generation Bulldozer CPU core will take a unique approach to computing that goes beyond Hyper-Threading, which some believe could offer phenomenal performance."

In what has surprised me greatly, nobody has submitted anything to us regarding this day in the history of computing. Sure, memories of her may not be fond, and with the magical unicorn power of hindsight you'd rather forget you ever dated her so intensely, but she served a purpose. She led a revolution that changed the world forever, and while you may have hoped for a more charismatic leader, I think it's unfair not to honour the fact that she turned 15 today.

Upgrading all those countless Android devices to version 2.2, or Froyo, hasn't exactly been an easy task for many device makers and carriers. Between flat-out denying devices from Froyoness and already having Froyo updates sent out, Motorola has pretty much lost it. Where companies are incompetent, the geeks that roam the 'net seek to provide solace. What do you do, then, as a company? Why, you threaten your loyal customers with legal action, of course.

Upgrading all those countless Android devices to version 2.2, or Froyo, hasn't exactly been an easy task for many device makers and carriers. Between flat-out denying devices from Froyoness and already having Froyo updates sent out, Motorola has pretty much lost it. Where companies are incompetent, the geeks that roam the 'net seek to provide solace. What do you do, then, as a company? Why, you threaten your loyal customers with legal action, of course.

Upgrading all those countless Android devices to version 2.2, or Froyo, hasn't exactly been an easy task for many device makers and carriers. Between flat-out denying devices from Froyoness and already having Froyo updates sent out, Motorola has pretty much lost it. Where companies are incompetent, the geeks that roam the 'net seek to provide solace. What do you do, then, as a company? Why, you threaten your loyal customers with legal action, of course.

OSNews patent watch, at your service. Lexmark, apparently under new leadership who can't recall the defeat the company suffered back in 2005, is undertaking yet another attempt to block third party cartridges for Lexmark printers to enter the market. Instead of invoking the DMCA, they got clever this time and are claiming patent violations.

Earlier today I bought a $10 album from iTumes, which I wish I hadn't. The reviews were glorious, and the previews not indicative. Listening to the album all I could hear was hipster drivel. Obviously, I wanted my money back. Well, bad luck. iTunes won't give refunds. I tweeted about it, and a friend suggested Rdio. Rdio, a brand new streaming service, currently offers a 3-day free trial -- without the need for a credit card. For $5 let's you stream their huge library on your desktop via an Adobe AIR app or browser, and for $10 let's you also stream from Android/BBerry/iOS, plus be able to sync your music with you offline on these devices. Unlike Last.fm and Pandora, Rdio let's you stream on-demand. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

A rumor has been going around for about four months now that Valve is coming out with a Linux version of Steam and had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. However Valve have officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear - there is no Linux version of Steam in development.

"Researchers in South Korea have built a networking router that transmits data at record speeds from components found in most high-end desktop computers. A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology created the router, which transmits data at nearly 40 gigabytes per second--many times faster than the previous record for such a device."

Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, wrote a blog post yesterday about the upcoming revolution of the TV. A sentiment that I of course agree with. However, trying to think one step ahead, it makes sense to envision that the next big device that will get "smart," is the car. And when this happens soon, everything else will follow. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Can you believe it's been only six months since Microsoft first unveiled its brand-new and most likely last-ditch effort to regain some significance in the smartphone market? Well, today the company announced that the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools will go gold September 16, and applications submissions will be accepted from early October onwards.

Authorities investigating the 2008 crash of Spanair flight 5022 have discovered a central computer system used to monitor technical problems in the aircraft was infected with malware.

Here's the dirty little secret about Android: After all the work Apple did to get AT&T to relinquish device control for the iPhone and all the great efforts Google made to get the FCC and the U.S. telecoms to agree to open access rules as part of the 700 MHz auction, Android is taking all of those gains and handing the power back to the telecoms.

Lennart Poettering has posted a status update about systemd, an init/upstart alternative. systemd is able now to replace /etc/fstab and cron, and it seems it will be the default init system for Fedora 14. He has also written a post about systemd for administrators.

"Maverick Meerkat is set to become the last version of Ubuntu that'll run on Oracle's Sparc, ending a four-year relationship. Also getting canned is Ubuntu running on Hewlett-Packard's Itanic 64-bit challenger. Meerkat is currently in feature-freeze ahead of October's official launch, and apparently nobody's stepped up to maintain the Linux ports to either Sparc or Itanium. The Ubuntu Sparc port has fallen out of use and updates have slipped, meaning it's fallen below the level of quality needed for an Ubuntu port. Ubuntu on HP's IA64 is in slightly better shape, but - still - nobody's actively maintaining it."

"This is a minor release of Vim. It consists of Vim 7.2 plus all patches, updated runtime files and some more, see below. It has been two years since the 7.2 release, thus it's not that 'minor'. But not 'major' either. Something in between, don't know how to call that."

On the NetBSD Blog, there's an in depth article about how rump can be used for testing and debugging the NetBSD kernel in userspace. "This article explains how rump is the enabling technology for a safe, fast and run-anywhere kernel test suite which requires absolutely no configuration from the person running the tests."

"AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn't yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration."