OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."

"Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. Similar to Eclipse with the ADT Plugin, Android Studio provides integrated Android developer tools for development and debugging." Lots of ooh's and aah's from the developer crowd as this one was demoed.

"The major functionality - gaming - is all there. Shield runs 'stock' Android, but NVIDIA's TegraZone curated app space is downright beautiful. Some thought was put into that UI. From there, you can play your Shield-optimized games, purchase new ones, and (if you have the proper NVIDIA graphics card on your PC), use Shield to control games being played on a PC gaming rig. The latter feature will launch in beta. We've used it twice now, and it's surprisingly lag-free, though it does have the occasional connection hiccup." I don't really know what to think of this thing. It looks insane and I don't see it competing with smartphones and other handheld gaming devices, but it does have some cool technology and I must admit that as a gamer, I'd love to have one. I have no idea where this will go.

"Today at the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston, Tami Reller shared with the audience that the update previously referred to as 'Windows Blue' will be called Windows 8.1 and will be a free update to Windows 8 for consumers through the Windows Store." They really didn't have much of a choice, but good news anyway.

"Most people understand that Windows is used by a variety of people who have a variety of needs, ranging from corporate server to workstation to POS terminals to home PC and beyond. Most people accept that whenever Microsoft updates Windows, it has to balance the competing requirements to find some kind of workable compromise. There is however another set of competing requirements that many do not really register, even those that call themselves power users or are IT admins. It is a conflict between developers/programmers and Microsoft itself."

"Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening." That's one way to start an insider explanation of why Windows' performance isn't up to snuff. Written by someone who actually contributes code to the Windows NT kernel, the comment on Hacker News, later deleted but reposted with permission on Marc Bevand's blog, paints a very dreary picture of the state of Windows development. The root issue? Think of how Linux is developed, and you'll know the answer.