Now that the holidays are upon us (happy holidays!) and the year is about to end, we at OSNews thought it time to finally lift the veil a little bit on the next version of OSNews - OSNews 5. I've hinted at this next version of OSNews here and there in the comments, but we think it's time to make it all a little bit more official by taking in some initial feedback.

In the final years of my high school career, more concerned with going out and drinking three times a week than with actually doing anything meaningful at my supposedly posh gymnasium, I rediscovered my love for computing - a love lost during the onset of aforementioned going out and drinking. Realising I would hit university soon, I saved up 2000 guilders, ordered the parts for a brand-new computer, and thanks to this then state-of-the-art computer, old flames were rekindled. Since this pun is burning a hole in my pocket - it was an enlightening experience.

"Engineers at Motorola are hard at work on a sophisticated handset, to be released next year, that parent Google hopes will provide more potent competition for devices like Apple's iPhone, said people familiar with the matter." Well, paint me red and call me a girl scout. This is more fascinating: "Motorola also ran into difficulties when it looked into using a bendable screen and materials such as ceramics that would allow the company to make the X Phone more stress resistant, use more colors and mold into different shapes, these people said." Bendable displays could be a huge turning point for mobile - and not because they allow new shapes. No, the killer 'feature' of bendable displays will be their resilience.

"In a move that has raised eyebrows, Microsoft has submitted a patch to the WebKit project to extend the open source rendering engine with a prototype implementation of the Pointer Events specification that the company is also working on together with Google, Mozilla, and Opera. WebKit is the rendering engine used in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers, making Microsoft's work a contribution to products that are in direct competition to its own."

"By the time I reached my office, I liked the name. Really liked it. I was committed. I could imagine seeing 'Safari' in the Mac OS X dock. I had to tell the team right away and, if necessary, convince them that they liked it too. Fortunately, and to their credit, they didn't need much convincing." Like I said - I love stories like this. Never liked the name 'Safari', though.

As the Syllable project predicted many years ago, version 3 of the REBOL programming language has finally been open sourced, under the Apache 2 licence (screenshot on Syllable Desktop). Also, the alpha version of the high-level Red programming language, supporting Syllable Desktop, has been released, by now in version 0.3.1 (screenshot, demo program, video at the Science Park in Amsterdam).

"America's broken patent system needs major reform to protect innovators and the public. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is announcing a major new boost to its patent work: a half-million dollars in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban and game developer Markus 'Notch' Persson." Notch putting his money where his mouth is. Classy guy. Even if a creeper literally just blew up the front of my house.

Digia, Qt's new owner, has announced the release of version 5 of the framework. "Key benefits of Qt 5 include: graphics quality; performance on constrained hardware; cross-platform portability; support for C++11; HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2; a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs; ease of use and compatibility with Qt 4 versions."

"Everyone from CNET to the BBC is freaking out today about Instagram's new terms of service. The new terms, they claim, allow Instagram to sell user's images. Users are understandably upset. Wired published a tutorial on how to download all of your Instagram photos and delete your account. But long-time Instagram users should think twice before pulling the trigger. The truth is that Instagram has always claimed full rights to your images, but has just re-worded their terms of service to make their intentions clearer." People should stop obsessing over individual service's privacy terms. There's a very simple rule on the internet that everyone ought to be aware of: the moment you put something on the web, it's no longer your property. Deal with it. Coincidentally: nobody cares about your stupid Instagram photos.

Lots of news about Apple vs. Samsung (and vice versa) in both the US and Europe today. In the US, judge Koh dealth two blows: one to Samsung (no retrial based on juror misconduct), the other to Apple (no permanent sales ban). In Europe, in the meantime, Samsung announced it will cease all lawsuits injunction requests against Apple... But only in Europe.

"In this article I'm going to talk about what flat design is, review what other designers are saying about it, and offer some tips on how to achieve it in your own designs." I give you one attempt to guess which 'design aesthetic' the next version of OSNews is inspired by. And yes, we will eventually get it done.

"With fond memories of educational titles like 'Granny's Garden', and less educational ones like 'Pole Position' and 'Boffin', the BBC B seemed like a worthy machine to bring back to life inside an FPGA." The Hacker News thread has links to more FPGA implementations of older home computers.

"Unfortunately, many of the logic chips that make up Pong are no longer readily available. There are newer parts that will perform the same function but they have different pin connections. I started by re-drawing and adapting some the circuits to the available parts." Recreating Pong from scratch. In its original hardware form. Crazy cool.

"Starting today, Walmart has dropped prices on both the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S, with the 16 GB iPhone 5 now on sale for just $127 and the iPhone 4S coming in at $47." I'm sure a 33% price cut right ahead of the holidays is totally normal for a product of which demand outstrips supply. Right?