Spanish Firm Wins Patent Suit Filed by Apple

A Spanish judge has overturned an injunction Apple won against a Spanish Android tablet maker, N-TK. "A small Spanish company has won a legal case against Apple Inc. and will now be able to sell a tablet computer that the U.S. technology giant had claimed infringes on the iPad patent." N-TK only sold about 200 of these tablets due to Apple's legal nonsense, a lot less than their 15000 unit target. As such, NT-TK is going to sue Apple for damages.

OpenBSD 5.0 Released

"OpenBSD 5.0 has been published, six months after the release of version 4.9. The OpenBSD project's newest release of the free BSD based UNIX-like operating system includes a number new and updated drivers, performance improvements and new features. OpenBSD 5.0 includes the GNOME 2.32.2, KDE 3.5.10 and Xfce 4.8.0 desktop environments. It also contains a number of new and updated packages including versions 3.5.19, 3.6.18 and 5.0 of the Firefox web browser, PHP 5.2.17 and 5.3.6, LibreOffice 3.4.1, and Chromium 12. The release includes September's release of OpenSSH 5.9." GNOME 2 you say? Huh. Interesting.

The Inside Story of How Microsoft Killed its Courier Tablet

"Steve Ballmer had a dilemma. He had two groups at Microsoft pursuing competing visions for tablet computers. One group, led by Xbox godfather J Allard, was pushing for a sleek, two-screen tablet called the Courier that users controlled with their finger or a pen. But it had a problem: it was running a modified version of Windows. That ran headlong into the vision of tablet computing laid out by Steven Sinofsky, the head of Microsoft's Windows division. Sinofsky was wary of any product - let alone one from inside Microsoft's walls - that threatened the foundation of Microsoft's flagship operating system. But Sinofsky's tablet-friendly version of Windows was more than two years away." I'm still mad at Microsoft for this one.

Calexda’s New Quad-core ARM Part for Cloud Servers

"On Tuesday, Austin-based startup Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM system-on-chip for cloud servers. At first glance, Calxeda's SOC looks like something you'd find inside a smartphone, but the product is essentially a complete server on a chip, minus the mass storage and memory. The company puts four of these EnergyCore SoCs onto a single daughterboard, called an EnergyCard, which is a reference design that also hosts four DIMM slots and four SATA ports. A systems integrator would plug multiple daughterboards into a single mainboard to build a rack-mountable unit, and then those units could be linked via Ethernet into a system that can scale out to form a single system that's home to some 4096 EnergyCore processors (or a little over 1000 four-processor EnergyCards)."

White House Responds to Petition to End to Software Patents

So, the White House has this site where American citizens can set up petitions, and once they've gained enough support in the form of signatures, the White House will respond. One of the very first petitions added to the site called for the abolition of software patents - both issued and for the future. The petition gained enough support, so the White House has responded. Hit read more for a summary of the respons.

It May Be A While For WebM In Adobe’s Flash

While Adobe previously said it would support Google's WebM video format within their Flash Player software, it doesn't look like this support will be arriving soon. Adobe's MAX 2011 conference took place last week in Los Angeles. During a Q&A session, WebM support in Flash was talked about. After Adobe was questioned about the WebM support, the response was, "Yes, on the priority list it's not very high because we don't have a lot of customers or real customers who want to do production with WebM. The problem on the production side is that encoding WebM is simply too slow, it's not real time. And it's not JDI too (just do it). Yes, it's a lot of work for us."

Managing Macs In The Mac OS X Lion Era

User interest and bring-your-own-tech policies are pushing Macs beyond their traditional business niches. InfoWorld's Ryan Faas provides a Mac management guide to help you extend your existing support strategies to Mac workstations, providing tips, techniques, and a list of 22 essential Mac tools for embracing Macs as they become more prevalent in your business environment. 'Macs can no longer be managed independent of other processes and infrastructure. They must be integrated with your existing directory service. They require an efficient, scalable deployment model that hooks into asset management. They require secure, auditable patch management and a device and user management solution that secures each Mac's core OS components and apps.'

Raspberry Pi To Embrace RISC OS

Sometimes, on a rather boring and run-of-the-mill Monday, I get news in the submission queue which just puts a gigantic smile on my face. We've talked about the Raspberry Pi before on OSNews, and other than reporting that everything's on track for a Christmas launch, it has also been announced that the Raspberry Pi will be able to run... RISC OS. A British educational ARM board running RISC OS? We have come full circle. And I couldn't be happier. Update: Theo Markettos emailed me with two corrections - Markettos isn't actually a representative of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the quoted bits are transcribed, they're not Markettos' literal words. Thanks for clearing that up!

“Fun with ‘Fragmentation’ Charts”

"Let's not mince words here: This 'Android and iPhone Update History' chart is not a good chart. Oh, it's a pretty chart, to be sure artfully illustrated and researched. But this chart - done up by Michael Degusta at The Understatement and reposted by anyone unable to think clearly, apparently - is not a good chart. Or at the very least, it fails to recognize a fundamental difference between Android and iOS and the iPhone."

Visopsys 0.71 Released

Version 0.71 of Visopsys has been unleashed into the wild. "The bulk of this release consists of general bug fixes, and improvements to hardware detection and device drivers, with particular focus on USB. New features include the ability to boot from a USB device (a new USB image is available for download) and the ability to power down the system."

pfSense 2.0 Released

After three years of hard work and many enhancements, pfSense 2.0 has been released. Of the more impressive stats, more than 108,000 unique IP addresses have downloaded the snapshots during 2011, resulting in some amazing testing, feedback and now reliability with the 2.0 release. Among the many notable features and enhancements: Based on FreeBSD 8.1, Enhancements to IP Aliases, dashboard and widgets, SMTP and growl alerts, new traffic shaper, Layer 7 protocol filtering, major improvements to NAT engine and configuration, certificate manager, VPN improvements, virtual wireless AP support and many others.

Apple’s Lossless ALAC Open Sourced

Apple has open sourced ALAC. "The Apple Lossless Audio Codec is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format and WAVE files. A description of a 'magic cookie' for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license."

Samsung Surpasses Apple as World’s Top Smartphone Seller

Remember when Apple surpassed Nokia to become the world's best-selling smartphone manufacturer? Well, Apple only had one quarter to enjoy this title, since Samsung just soared past them by quadrupling its smartphone shipments, making Samsung the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Update: As was noted in the comments, Apple also uses shipments - they just call them sales. Straight from their SEC filing.

Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support

"The announcement that Nexus One users won't be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google's support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I've been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers." I'm happy the modding community takes care of orphaned devices, but a solution it is not. I'm hoping the crop of Android phones released this past year - which were not included in this analysis - fair better. If there's one thing Google should steal from Apple, it's their iOS update support.

Interview: Pavel Fedin, AROS Developer

Obligement has an interview with Pavel Fedin (the original French version is also available), a key AROS developer. "Current pace of AROS' development can be perceived on www.ohloh.net/p/aros. Though as can be seen here, the Russian developer Pavel 'Sonic' Fedin is alone responsible for more than 3400 commits in eleven years, while the other four most important AROS contributors are inactive or almost since five years (apart of Georg Steger who was still active one year ago)... One can then see how much Pavel is important in current AROS evolution." Note that the English version is a translation by a non-native speaker.