Google today announced a new Google Music Store, with partnership of 3 out of the 4 major labels, and lots of indie ones. Additionally, they announced free cloud music service for up to 20,000 songs, and lots of exclusive content, and "social" features like "free streaming for your friends after you buy a song or album". Read on for a short commentary.

Almost two weeks ago, the European Union announced that it had started a preliminary investigation into the use of standards-essential patents in all the legal cases between Apple and Samsung. Everybody assumed this was a response to an official complaint by Apple, but the EU has now clarified that it started the investigation on its own accord. In related news, Samsung has circumvented Apple's injunction in Germany by slightly altering the design of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 - the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N is now, once again, for sale in Deutschland.

DigitalPersona has open sourced its new MINEX-certified FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology. FingerJetFX, Open Source Edition (OSE), is free, portable software that device manufacturers and application developers can use to convert bulky fingerprint images into small, mathematical representations called fingerprint "templates" for efficient storage or comparison.

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Oracle NoSQL Database, the company's take on the distributed key-value data store for the enterprise. 'There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects. You get a number of different options for increasing the durability in the face of a node crash or trading that durability for speed,' Wayner writes. 'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role. Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance to the sweet spot of the enterprise market.'

OSNews writing about social networks? Yes, it happens, and today is one of those days. We all know Facebook is king here, with a massive userbase and a seemingly unbreakable hold over the market, with Twitter covering the more public side of social networking. Google does some stuff in a fringe somewhere with something called Google+ which tries to combine Facebook and Twitter, but it's effectively a ghost town with a confusing interface. So, if you're Microsoft, what are you going to do? Well, build your own social network, of course!

You may not realise it, but today one of the most important pieces of technology celebrates its 40th birthday. In November 15, 1971, a company called Intel released its Intel 4004 processor - the first single-chip microprocessor, and one of the most important milestones in computer history.

Finally! Jean-Baptiste Queru (yes, husband of) has announced the source code release for Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich (technically, it's 4.0.1). Naturally, this code dump also happens to include the source code for Honeycomb - however, due to Honeycomb's incomplete nature, there's no tags available for it. Not interesting from a let's-build-it-and-code-point of view, but it is interesting for ROM hackers - bring it on, ICS for my Galaxy SII!

It's no secret OSNews has a bit of a thing for the BeOS. I can only speak for myself, obviously, but relatively speaking, BeOS was the best operating system ever made. The man who started all this was Jean-Louis Gassee, former executive at Apple, who founded Be, Inc. in 1991. In the second half of the '90s, Apple was looking for a replacement for its heavily outdated Mac OS, after several failed attempts at developing its own - it came down to Steve Jobs NeXT, or BeOS. Be didn't make it, and Gassee is happier for it.

Via Ivan Voras' blog (yes a few days late....but this place needs more BSD news). Michael Dexter of CFT has published a tutorial on FreeBSD's upcoming type 2 hypervisor known as BHyVe. The article guides the reader through the procedures to configure, build & boot a hypervisor capable host and guest system. BHyVe currently only supports Intel's x86 virtualization hardware & the project itself is still currently under early development.

According to InformationWeek: "Just over a hundred days after Google last provided an update on the status of Google+ for businesses, the company has introduced a way for companies to participate in its social network. Google+ Pages, like Facebook Pages before them, provide businesses and brands with a place to promote conversations related to their products and services." A number of U.S. government agencies are trying out Google+, including NASA, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the National Nuclear Security Administration. Since release of initial Google+ components on June 28 2011, the product is claimed by Larry Page to have over 40 million users, versus some 800 million for Facebook.

"At long last, it looks like there is an adequate solution to the Active State Power Management (ASPM) problem in the Linux kernel , a.k.a. the well-known and wide-spread power regression in the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which has been causing many laptops to go through significantly more power than they should. This is not another workaround, but rather a behavioral change in the kernel to better decide when the PCI Express ASPM support should be toggled."

Remember yesterday when I said Solaris 11 goes way over my head? Well, today we're talking about where operating systems and biology intersect. Scientists at the University of Nottingham are trying to develop the in vivo biological cell-equivalent of a computer operating system. The project's name is AUdACiOuS.

"HTC has become the top seller of smartphones in the US with a strategy that's precisely the opposite of Apple's. Where Apple is secretive, HTC is open. Where Apple is exclusive, HTC works with all carriers. Where Apple is proprietary, HTC is collaborative. Where Apple customizes for no one, HTC customizes for everyone. It's the anti-Apple and, so far, it has worked." I'm not enamoured with HTC's product design as of late (too soft, too 'rounded'), but as far as companies go, HTC is one of the good guys. Amazing to see such behaviour rewarded - and once again proves what I've been saying all along: in the end, openness and choice always wins.

Way back in 2002, MIT decided it needed to start teaching a course in operating system engineering. As part of this course, students would write an exokernel on x86, using Sixth Edition Unix (V6) and John Lions' commentary as course material. This, however, posed problems.