For Microsoft, the traditional desktop is old news. It's on its way out, it's legacy, and the harder they claim the desktop has equal rights, the sillier it becomes. With companies, words are meaningless, it's actions that matter, and here Microsoft's actions tell the real story. The company has announced the product line-up for Visual Studio 11, and the free Express can no longer be used to create desktop applications. Message is clear.

Linux kernel 3.4 has been released. New features include several Btrfs updates: support of metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much improved metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools; there is also a new X32 ABI which allows to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, two new device-mapper targets, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module. Here's the full list of changes.

Apple's and Samsung's CEOs are meeting tomorrow for patent lawsuit settlement talks, and cross-licensing appears to still be an option. Me, I'm hoping the talks fail utterly. Let this mess play out in the fullest. Let the world see the ridiculousness that is the patent system. Let's see what happens when iPhones and Galaxy devices get banned from the US and US senators suddenly don't get their hands on the latest shiny toy. Let's see how that impacts this mess.

EDE is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply put, a desktop should not get in your way. This is the final 2.0 release, a major rework. Summarizing previous alpha and beta releases, 2.0 is now fully FLTK powered (eFLTK is deprecated) and freedesktop.org friendly. Specificaly, this release adds a new notification daemon, replaces the old edewm with the pekwm window manager, fixes a lot of issues and memory leaks, and more. Grab the release and try it. You can also try ede netinstall, a single command that will download and compile EDE for you.

Smartphones have become the preferred computer of the masses. Sales surpassed those of personal computers in 2010, having grown over 50% per year for several years. Nearly 500 million smartphones shipped in 2011. This radically shifts the terrain in the consumer operating system competition that was, for years, firmly decided in favor of Windows. This article analyzes the New OS Wars.

"Just days after the Mandriva community started its own plans for the next release of the French Linux distribution, its commercial sponsor has formally announced that the community will take the lead on all Mandriva Linux development moving forward. In a blog post on the Mandriva SA site, CEO Jean-Manuel Croset ceded control of the Mandriva Linux distribution back to the community at large." Take 'r 'round the shed and put a bullet 'tween 'r eyes already.

A long - very long - blog post justifying all the ideas and choices behind Windows 8. We've all been here before, but it's nice to have it all summed up once again for easy reference in case we hit another yes/no debate on Windows 8 and keyboard and mouse. Anywho, the most interesting bit is that Microsoft has updated the theme of the traditional desktop, flattening it to achieve a very nice look.

"All eyes were on Microsoft's rather important launch of Windows Phone in China earlier this year. Nokia followed up with the Lumia 800c, released on China Telecom. According to Michel van der Bel, COO of Greater China Region at Microsoft, the company has achieved 7% marketshare in the country, overtaking the iPhone (sitting at just 6%)." I'm raising an eyebrow over these figures due to their source, but assuming they're true, we get a good glimpse of how well Windows Phone 7 would handle itself in a market where the competition had less of a head start.

So, the new HTC phones are facing delays in the US, and they now ship with a slightly modified US-specific Android build which removes data tapping and sports an altered app associations screen to avoid Apple's patents. This is step one. Step two is companies avoiding the litigious and anti-consumer messes that are the US and German markets altogether. Clearly, IP laws are working to the benefit of the consumer and the market as a whole. Great work guys.

An interesting study has been making the rounds across the web these past 24 hours. The creators of OpenSignalMaps have been logging which new devices download their product, and they've collected data on 681900 devices. The results are... Diverse.

"Microsoft has greatly improved its Windows 8 multiple monitor support in the Consumer Preview version of the operating system, but the company has fine tuned this even more with the upcoming Release Preview. Mark Yalovsky, a member of Microsoft's User Experience team, has taken to the company's Building Windows 8 blog to detail a number of important improvements in the Release Preview, including improved mouse targeting on shared edges and the ability to launch Metro apps on any monitor. Although the post in question has been mysteriously removed by Microsoft, we managed to secure the details thanks to a Google cached version." Very welcome.

"Production is set to begin next month for the screens, which measure at least 4 inches diagonally compared with 3.5 inches on the iPhone 4S, the latest phone from Apple, the people said." Cue the usual suspects twisting and turning to change the very fabric of space-time so that instead of 3.5" being the optimal size, 4.0" will be the optimal size. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

A bit of a fascinating little surprise in the Oracle vs. Google proceedings yesterday. As it turns out, judge Alsup... Has done, and still does, a lot of programming, and hence, he knows just how silly the whole rangeChek issue is. Addressing Oracle's lawyer, Alsup notes: "I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?" Ouch.

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