InfoWorld's Galen Gruman provides a look at the best features Mac OS X Lion has to offer, as well as the biggest disappointments of Apple's latest OS. Whole disk encryption, the new Server application, automatic file versioning and locking against accidental saves, iOS-like configuration policies for IT, automatic syncing across Mac OS X and iOS 5 are among the key new features of Mac OS X. But many of the even the best new features still fall somewhat short, including the new contextual scroll bars, issues with sharing automatically versioned documents, the lack of external disk encryption after the fact, and the complexity of new Mac OS X Lion Server app.

"Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2011 third quarter ended June 25, 2011. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion and record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $15.70 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.7 percent compared to 39.1 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter's revenue. The Company sold 20.34 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 142 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 9.25 million iPads during the quarter, a 183 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 3.95 million Macs during the quarter, a 14 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.54 million iPods, a 20 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter."

BlackBerry Tablet OS v1.0.7 is released today. New features and enhancements include: more flexibility around where and how you save attachments for viewing and editing, ZIP attachment support, portrait support in pictures app, pinch to zoom in video app and additional languages support.

For the first time, Google has opened its mouth against the patent trolling by Apple (and by proxy, Microsoft) against Android manufacturers. By way of Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, the company took stand against the legal actions, and stated they aren't too worried. If need be, Google will ensure HTC doesn't lose the patent case against Apple.

So, Google has come under scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission for possible anti-competitive practices. While I would say the FTC has far larger threats to competition to worry about (the inevitable p-word), it would appear there's sufficient suspicion to take a gander at Google's business practices.

InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp provides an in-depth tutorial on how he rooted and upgraded his Motorola Cliq XT, one of many Android phones made infamous for not receiving further Android updates beyond 1.5. 'It turned out to be quite an odyssey, with twists and turns I describe here in order to help those who wish to embark on a similar journey,' Yegulalp writes. 'Was it worth the trouble? Yes, in the sense that learning how to jailbreak your own phone is a valuable skill, and I got much more functionality out of the Cliq, when I was expecting to simply junk it. '

It's strange. Microsoft has been patent trolling the heck out of the Linux kernel for a long time now, and is still using these patents against Android today in its protection money scheme. However, as LWN.net illustrates, Microsoft makes quite a few contributions to the Linux kernel. Shouldn't this invalidate their patent claims?

"Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything. The C-64 would send commands to the drive which in turn would then execute them on its own, reading files, and such, then send the data to the C-64, all over a propriatory serial cable. The manual for the 1541 mentioned, besides the commands for reading and writing files, that one would read and write to its internal memory space. Even more exciting was that one could download 6502 code into the drive's memory and have it executed there. This got me hooked and I wanted to play with that - execute code on the drive. Of course, there was no documention on what code could be executed there, and which functions it could use." Very interesting. I'm most interested in how he describes others taking his work, and making it better. This would be impossible today, thanks to Microsoft, Apple, and other patent trolls.

"Plan 9 has been forked to start a development out of the Bell Labs (or whatever they are called these days...). This true community-approach allows further development of Plan 9, even if the shrinking resources at Bell-Labs for Plan 9 are vanishing. The homepage and the code can be both found at Google code. You can boot 9front from the regulary built live cd or build the binaries in your existing Plan 9 installation. Installation instructions and further information can be obtained at the 9front wiki."

"App developers are withdrawing their products for sale from the US versions of Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market for fear of being sued by companies which own software patents - just as a Mumbai-based company has made a wide-ranging claim against Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and a number of other companies over Twitter-style feeds, for which it claims it has applied for a patent."

Patent term calculation is complicated in the US because there are essentially two different systems and quite a few corner cases. Even with a list of patents, it can be tricky to determine when the patents are all expired. Since I am a computer programmer (and not a lawyer), I created a program to try and automate this. This paper discusses how patent term calculation works, and some results from a combination of hand and automatic term calculation for MP3, MPEG-2 and H.264.

"Apple participates in the Web Application Working Group. In application of the exclusion rights they have according to the W3C Patent Policy, Apple Inc. excluded Patent Nr. 7,743,336 and Patent Application 20070101146 from its Royalty Free commitment given upon joining the Web Applications Working Group. According to Apple Inc., both read on the Widget Access Request Policy Specification. Apple Inc.'s exclusion triggered a Patent Advisory Group (PAG). The PAG is using this page to collect links and hints to technology that may help to circumvent the patent. This information may be useful to help the Web Applications Working Group to design around the excluded patent and allow for a Royalty Free Widget Access Request Policy Specification."

Both IDC and Gartner have released their PC shipment analyses again, and as it turns out, worldwide PC sales are on the rise. Gartner: "Worldwide PC shipments surpassed 85.2 million units in the second quarter of 2011, a 2.3 percent increase from the same period last year, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. These results are below Gartner's earlier projection for 6.7 percent growth." IDC, too: "Worldwide PC shipments increased 2.6% in the second quarter of 2011 (2Q11), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker." From large to small, the world's largest PC manufacturers are HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, and Toshiba. Lenovo demonstrated the largest growth worldwide (+22% compared to Q2 2010). Apple did quite well in the US, but doesn't register on the worldwide scale.

I've been sitting on this item all day. Technically, it's about patents and the like, and even I understand I've been beating this dead horse so often it almost looks like it's alive. However, this is an interesting opinion piece by Craig Hockenberry, long-time employee at The Iconfactory, one of my favourite software development houses - these guys breath software and beautiful design, and employ one of my favourite artists, David Lanham. The gist of his story? Software patents are killing the independent developer scene.