AmigaOS 4.1 update 5 has been released. It's a bug-fix release, but does contain new features as well. For instance, Amiga 68K emulation has been improved, and a full Workbench 3.1 installation is now included, as well as several authentic Amiga ROMs and Workbench files. Available for free for eligible platforms, including SAM devices.

Microsoft has made Windows 8's final release available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, so if you are one of those - have fun. The 90-day trial has also been released, so us mere mortals can have a go at it as well. The evaluation version is Windows 8 Enterprise, so it contains a number of features regular users normally won't see. As far as I can tell - it's a bit unclear - the trial version cannot be upgraded to a final version a few months down the line. Happy testing!

"Unsurprisingly, Gram is dropping any pretenses of producing consumer hardware. Instead the company is going to focus on software, user experience, the cloud, engineering, and partnering. If you're wondering exactly what that means, you're as in the dark as we are, though apparently webOS and Enyo, as well as the webOS group's own cloud services team (said to still be quite large with respect to the overall size of the unit), will play some sort of role." Uh.

You wouldn't believe it, but something actually, truly interesting came out of the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit yesterday. Apple had conducted a survey to find out why, exactly, consumers opted to go with Android instead of the iPhone. The results are fascinating - not only do they seem to invalidate Apple's claims, they provide an unusual insight into consumer behaviour. The gist? People choose Android not because it's an iPhone copy - they choose it because of Android's unique characteristics.

"According to an inside source, a session was held at Microsoft's recent TechReady15 conference in which all the launch details were laid out. If things go according to the plan detailed then, the Surface for Windows RT tablet will be launching October 26th - no surprise there - at a compelling price of $199." My wallet just squealed in pure bliss.

"Back in 2005, we charted 30 years of personal computer market share to show graphically how the industry had developed, who succeeded and when, and how some iconic names eventually faded away completely. With the rise of whole new classes of 'personal computers' - tablets and smartphones - it's worth updating all the numbers once more. And when we do so, we see something surprising: the adoption rates for our beloved mobile devices absolutely blow away the last few decades of desktop computer growth. People are adopting new technology faster than ever before." BeOS not mentioned. Would not read again. 2/10.

"I cannot help but speculate on how the software on the Curiosity rover has been constructed. We know that most of the code is written in C and that it comprises 2.5 Megalines of code, roughly. One may wonder why it is possible to write such a complex system and have it work. This is the Erlang programmers view."

One of the major patents being discussed in the Apple vs. Samsung cases all around the world is inertia scrolling. Apple claims to have invented it, but in fact, Sun was working on a PDA in the early '90s called the Star7, which had inertia scrolling. In a demonstration posted to YouTube, you can see this device in action, including the touch screen inertial scrolling. James Gosling (yup, that one), the narrator of the video, even mentions it specifically. This looks like a case of prior art for this patent, and serves to demonstrate that, no, despite all these grandiose claims, Apple did not invent this at all, which further illustrates the complete and utter lunacy of the patent system in the software world. The Star7's interface is reminiscent of Microsoft Bob, and makes me want to forcefully introduce my head to my recently-painted walls. Still, it's an interesting device; 1992 is when the first fully touchscreen PDA was released (the Tandy Zoomer, by what would eventually become Palm), and a year before the Newton arrived on the scene. Luckily for us, the Star7 never made it to market. That interface gives me nightmares...

"I decided to write this post after having too many heated discussions with many users across many blogs. After hearing repeatedly; 'The iPad will have a better display' or 'It sucks because it's not Retina' I figured it was time to break the argument down and dispel the 'Retina' myth." Fantastic post at The Verge.

" tonight Apple entered into evidence in its trial with Samsung a document showing that it offered the South Korean company a licensing deal on some of its key technologies. Specifically, Apple offered to license the portfolio of patents if Samsung would pay $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet." $30-40 per device is a lot of money for some trivial features (rounded corners, slide-to-unlock etc). No wonder Samsung declined.

Since QNX - understandably - lost any and all interest in general-purpose computing, I kind of lost track where it was going (I used to have such fun with it - yup, 2004, before I even joined OSNews). Apparently, they just released version 6.5 SP1. It contains optimised memory performance, better networking and USB stacks, improved file system performance, and more. I'm sure these are all things we'll see trickle down to BlackBerry OS 10.

"ICS, we hardly knew ye. Builds for CyanogenMod 9 stable will be rolling out to our servers tonight. As noted before, this will be the end of the line for the ICS branch of our code; only critical bug fixes will be merged moving forward. Tonight's release is for the majority of our ICS supported devices, the stragglers will catch up, and we will leave the door open for merging in additional devices from maintainers, external and internal. The team itself, will focus solely on Jelly Bean and maintenance of the CM 7 codebase." Already running the CM10/Jelly Bean previews on my SII, and while clearly not as polished yet as CM9, it works just fine. Great work.

Digia has announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Digia has sent a letter to the KDE team that it intends to pretty much continue what Trolltech and Nokia built up, so not a whole lot ought to change for KDE - luckily.

HelenOS 0.5.0 was released today. Some of the noteworthy new features of this major release are USB support, reimplemented networking stack with full TCP support and new network drivers (including Realtek RTL8139 and Intel E1000), read-only ext2 and ISO 9660 file system support, read-write MINIX FS support and several ported applications (GNU Binutils, PCC, MSIM). For a complete list of user-visible changes, see the release notes. The release files can be downloaded from the download page.