We have some very good news for those of us with a love for the Common Desktop Environment. I'm a huge fan of CDE - I've even dedicated an article to it - so I'm excited about this. CDE has been released as open source under the LGPL, and can be downloaded as of today for Debian and Ubuntu. Motif will follow later.

"Quick - name the most important personal computer of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those of you who mentioned the legendary Apple II - that's fine. I respect your decision. Forced to think objectively in 2012, I may even agree. But if you just named Radio Shack's TRS-80, you made me smile. Your choice is entirely defensible. And back in the TRS-80's heyday, I not only would have agreed with it but would have vehemently opposed any other candidate."

This tweet from Tom Warren made me smile. So, it's 2012 and tablets are finally able to do what the Amiga did in 1985. Seems like a bit of a stretch to be excited about that, right? Sure, until I caught myself getting excited - only a bit, but still - by this piece of news. Update: removed me being an annoyed child.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins: "We took the conscious decision not to go Android. If you look at other suppliers' ability to differentiate, there's very little wiggle room. We looked at it seriously - but if you understand what the promise of BlackBerry is to its user base it's all about getting stuff done. Games, media, we have to be good at it but we have to support those guys who are ahead of the game. Very little time to consume and enjoy content - if you stay true to that purpose you have to build on that basis. And if we want to serve that segment we can't do it on a me-too approach." As a geek, I applaud the decision not to go with Android, since it's already way too dominant as it is. If I were to have a specific interest in RIM's survival, though, I'm not sure I would be applauding.

Now that Windows 8 has gone gold, Microsoft can move on to other things. With Windows 8, the most important of these is probably to make sure people know how to actually use it. Metro is filled to the brim with hard-to-discover features, but Microsoft has a plan. Will it be enough?

"Has Mountain Lion been feeling faster for you compared to Lion on the same machine? It's probably not just you: Mountain Lion appears to include improved graphics drivers and low-level graphics subsystem improvements. According to our testing, these improvements result in an approximate performance increase of up to 10 percent. Those improvements can make your current hardware feel faster despite the fact that your CPU can't magically crunch numbers any faster. The changes also lay the foundation for Apple to update OS X's OpenGL support in a more timely manner, which could potentially lead to better graphics performance in the future."

"After leading the design of Apple's mobile processors, which have powered the iPhone and iPad over the last few years, chip architect Jim Keller is returning to AMD to head up its microprocessor core design team, the chipmaker announced today. Keller is an industry veteran who brought plenty of experience to Apple's mobile processors. He was previously vice president at P.A. Semiconductor, which Apple acquired in 2008 for $278 million, and he went on to serve as a director of Apple's platform architecture group."

"KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform. Version 4.9 provides many new features, along with improved stability and performance."

I had the chance to attend the bike industry’s annual DealerCamp in my hometown of Park City, Utah last week. It’s an event where dealers and manufacturers can meet up, and everyone can try the latest bicycle technology on the roads and trails. While there, I took a particular interest in electric bicycles, which were represented by several vendors. Electric bicycle tech has made some major strides in the past few years, but still has a long way to go, in particular on the software side.

Microsoft has just announced that Windows 8 has gone gold - or, in Redmond parlance, RTM. "Today, I am excited to announce that Windows 8 has been released to manufacturing (RTM)! This means we've completed the product development and testing of the product and have started handing off the final code to our OEM partners. They can now begin preparing new Windows 8 PCs and devices they'll introduce starting with General Availability." Anybody got a spare MSDN account?

Low End Mac's Sebastian Patten takes a look at MorphOS 3. "MorphOS is for Amiga users. Period. And it's for those Macintosh users who like to experiment and experience a new operating system on their PowerPC Macs. That's where I see myself, and I had a lot of fun playing around with MorphOS on my eMac. It is not a full OS X replacement, but it can come close to it, depending on your computer needs."

Another batch of open source webOS components released - but there's some bad news. "For Open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC's support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated. Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel (but of course, there is the Community Edition for those interested in improving the TouchPad)." So, which future hardware platforms? They must have something in mind, right?

It might be a cliche, but sometimes, a picture says more than a thousand words. Over the years, I've often talked about how the technology world is iterative, about how products are virtually always built upon that which came before, about how almost always, multiple people independently arrive at the same products since they work within the same constraints of the current state of technology. This elementary aspect of the technology world, which some would rather forget, has been illustrated very, very well in one of Samsung's legal filings against Apple.

Groklaw nails it: "In other words, want to disarm the companies that got there first, built the standards, and created the field, while the come-later types clean up on patents on things like slide to unlock or a tablet shape with rounded corners. Then the money flows to Apple and Microsoft, and away from Android - and isn't that really the point of all this, to destroy Android by hook or by crook? The parties who were in the mobile phone business years before Apple or Microsoft even thought about doing it thus get nothing much for their earlier issued patents that have become standards. Apple and Microsoft can't compete on an even field, because the patent system rewards the first to invent (or now, after the recent patent reform, the first to file). Neither Apple nor Microsoft got there first. Samsung was there, since the '90s." To illustrate: Apple is demanding $24 (!) per Samsung device for design patents, while at the same time, Apple also demands that Samsung does not charge more than $0.0049 per standards essential patent per device. This is absolutely, utterly, and entirely indefensible. And then Apple and its supporters have the nerve to claim Samsung is ripping them off. Yes, this pisses me off, and no, that's not because it's Apple doing it (Microsoft is just as guilty). It's because this is plainly, utterly, clearly, and intrinsically unfair.