Two weeks ago, my grandmother passed away - the last grandparent I had left. As those of you with experience in dealing with deceased family members know, the funeral is only the start; the next part is taking care of the deceased's affairs, which includes going through all their belongings to determine what to do with them. I took care of my grandmother's extensive book collection, and while doing so, I hit something that fascinated me to no end: a six-volume Christian Encyclopaedia from 1956. In it, I found something I just had to share with OSNews.

"A few weeks ago, we shared our plans for the Express editions of Visual Studio 2012. As we've worked to deliver the best experience with Visual Studio for our platforms with Windows 8, Windows Phone, and for Web and Windows Azure, we heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level. Today, I'm happy to announce that we will add Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop to the Visual Studio 2012 family. This will bring to the Visual Studio Express family significant new capabilities that we've made available in Visual Studio 2012 for building great desktop applications."

LinuxQuestions.org has an in-depth interview with Patrick Volkerding. "The goal back when the project was started was to make it easy, and to keep things simple. But to paraphrase Einstein, you want to make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. There's a point of diminishing return when adding additional layers and interfaces, especially when it comes to system configuration. I've seen automated configuration do things like strip out all the comments in a config file, or worse just completely rewrite the thing because you had the nerve to try editing it outside of the approved system. And I do feel like Slackware has been shafted in some of the reviews over the years, largely because there's a tendency to review only the installer and not the system itself. There is certainly a learning curve, but that's true for all versions of Linux. We've never tried to make things hard, but perhaps we also haven't tried to prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot. Things like aliasing rm to 'rm -i' don't help the user learn to be careful." Patrick gets it.

"If you're an aspiring Android developer, it may have been discouraging to read some of the recent conversations about what it's like to develop for Android. With the number of different Android smartphones and tablets growing - by OpenSignalMaps' count, 3997 distinct devices - the app-building process might seem complex, frustrating and, if you have to buy all these devices, way too expensive. But having just come off a successful Android launch for Pocket, and having supported Android devices since our Read It Later days in 2010, my message for you is this: fear not." Lots of interesting bits of advice, but as a user often encountering horrible software on any mobile device, this one stands out as the one most mobile developers seem to not understand: "It may seem obvious, but if you want to develop for Android, become an Android user yourself." Replace 'Android' with any other mobile operating system and it'd be just as valid.

Exactly six months ago, Eric Schmidt made a remark that in the near future, developers might want to focus on Android first, instead of iOS. While developers haven't moved to Android-first, iOS-later en masse, there's no denying that we're seeing more and more former iOS exclusives move towards Android.

Infoworld: "After years of battling Linux as a competitive threat, Microsoft is now offering Linux-based operating systems on its Windows Azure cloud service. The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery and be charged on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis." SmartGlass on iOS and Android, Office supposedly coming to iOS and Android, Linux on Azure... It's almost as if Microsoft finally got the memo that 'Windows everywhere' can't be a reality any longer.

Five US carriers, nearly identical devices, millions and millions of pre-orders, virtually simultaneous launch - and that's just the US. The Galaxy SIII might be hideous, Samsung is still doing something right here. No surprise, then, that Apple has, once again, decided to compete in the court room instead of on the shelves: they're asking for a US import ban on the SIII .

Bad day for LinkedIn: not only did 6 million of their passwords get stolen and published online (as SHA1 hashes, but still), their iOS and Android applications uploaded your calendars to LinkedIn (after opting in, though). The Sensationalist Headline of the Day Award goes to Ars Technica. I guess everyone's starting to feel the sting of The Verge's fully deserved success.

One tiny thing I wanted to mention about Windows 8: ever noticed how context menus in Metro appear above the mouse cursor instead of underneath? I'm assuming this is done because of finger input (by opening above, your finger and hand doesn't cover the menu), but with a mouse, it's just plain weird. Fun little detail though - shows you how much thought has gone into the touch aspect of Windows 8.

If you're a Palm fan, you might want to look away - or not. Chris Ziegler has written a fantastic article on the short rise and eventual demise of webOS, and with it, Palm. I'm generally not a fan of companies, but I have my exceptions - and Palm is one of them. Correction - Palm was one of them.

"More than 100,000 applications have now been published in the Windows Phone Marketplace and new content is currently being added at the rate of 313 applications per day. At the time of writing, 100,145 applications have been published. Of these, 26,493 were added in the last three months and 9,391 were added in the last month. These applications come from just over 23,825 different publishers." Is there anybody out there who still places any value on these numbers, whether they be for Android, iOS, or WP7? Considering virtually all Android, iOS, and WP7 applications are useless, ugly, buggy crap (with only a few being somewhat tolerable - never actually good, because good software doesn't exist), I honestly don't really care. But hey, another check mark on the list of PR talking points.

"I got interested in the Soviet space program and was interested to discover that the software on the Buran spacecraft circa 1988 was written in Prolog. Does anyone know what languages might have been used in earlier missions, especially the Mars PrOP-M rover missions of the early 1970s which were somewhat autonomous and could navigate obstacles?" Absolutely fascinating.

"The Oracle v. Google patent and copyright trial is over, resulting in definitive wins for Google on both fronts. Ars interviewed two Google attorneys - general counsel Kent Walker, and litigation counsel Renny Hwang - asking for their sense of what the case could mean beyond its effects on the companies themselves." Would love to get Oracle's input on the matter (insert schadenfreude-tastic snicker).

"Microsoft's Windows 8 will activate its built-in antivirus software only if it senses that the PC is not protected by another security program, according to AV vendor McAfee." That's one way to appease antivirus companies, I suppose.