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.

While it's just a rumour, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who hasn't been living under a rock the past five years, and in all honesty, I'm pretty sure it's actually true. AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is contemplating axing its iconic Mac Pro.

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.'

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!

"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."

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."

Big news from ARM over the past few days. The processor architecture, once strictly an embedded affair for low-power devices, is going big. Not only has ARM announced it's going 64bit, HP has announced it's going to build servers with ARM processors. It seems all the pieces are now in place for ARM.

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."

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.

"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.

"In a move that will raise eyebrows, Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited - the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site - but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users." Test pilot or not, I'm stockpiling more baked beans.

"Google's Hugo Barra confirmed that the latest version of Android will be delivered as a free upgrade to the existing Nexus S handset 'within weeks'. He said the search giant was aiming to get the software to owners of the previous flagship phone shortly after the release of the new Galaxy Nexus handset next month, well in time for Christmas. Owners of the first official Google phone, the Nexus One, will not be getting the upgrade, however. Barra said the hardware was simply too old to run the new operating system." Can someone enlighten me - the Nexus One has 512MB of RAM, a 1Ghz processor, and a 480x800 AMOLED or SuperLCD. Why on earth isn't this thing upgraded to ICS? Lameballs.

Today is the start of Nokia World 2011, the event where Nokia would unveil its first Windows Phone 7 device(s). And so they did. The Finnish mobile giant unveiled two Windows Phone 7 smartphones, as well as four new Series 40 phones for emerging markets. The most interesting thing? Pricing. Pretty aggressive. Update: Anybody want a kidney?

Ten years ago today, Microsoft launched what would become the world's most popular desktop operating system - for better or worse. Its interface colours were... Interesting (trying hard to avoid bias here, folks, bear with me now). Its early performance was... Not always entirely up to par. Its security track record was... Well, it sucked hard in that department (I tried). We're ten years down the line, and thanks to Vista, way too many people are still using this relic.