Just as Apple wraps up one lawsuit with Nokia, they have been hit with another one by a Phoenix based company named iCloud Communications. iCloud Communications, a VoIP vendor, claims that Apple's new iCloud causes confusion with competing products, and has harmed their image because anytime someone hears the name 'iCloud', they will now think of Apple instead of iCloud Communications. Super-Instant Pre-publication 5000W Turbo Update from Thom: ...and we have another one.

Microsoft has released a beta SDK for Windows, allowing Windows developers to officially make use of the XBox Kinect hardware. From their own press release: "The Kinect for Windows SDK, which works with Windows 7, includes drivers, rich APIs for Raw Sensor Streams, natural user interfaces, installer documents and resource materials. The SDK provides Kinect capabilities to developers building applications with C++, C# or Visual Basic using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010."

"Remember KQ Infotech? KQ Infotech was the Indian company that ported the ZFS file-system to Linux as an out-of-tree kernel module (after deriving the code from the LLNL ZFS Linux work) and KQ's interesting methods of engagement in our forums. The company was successful in delivering an open-source ZFS module for Linux that performed semi-well and didn't depend upon FUSE (the file-systems for user-space module) like other implementations. However, this ZFS Linux code appears to no longer be worked on by KQ Infotech."

The Syllable project has released a live CD for Syllable Desktop 0.6.6. It has been a long time since the last live CD, so Syllable 0.6.5 was skipped. The creator of the original live CD left the project, without releasing the build scripts. Further it turned out that a needed patch to Syllable wasn't available, either, so the project had to create a whole new live CD, including a modified kernel. Also, some eighty SDL programs were recently ported to Syllable (video of the Power Manga game).

Well, the first of the big patent litigations is over. Since this one involves Apple, the big winner is obviously the highly innovative company from Cupertiono, right? The company from which all others copy, right? Well, no, not exactly. The big winner is Nokia.

There's a full-blown panic going on in Microsoft's core third party developer community. After the big Windows 8 demonstration earlier this month where HTML5 and JavaScript were touted as a new way to create applications for Windows 8, speculation has gone through the roof - with developers panicking in the streets about the end of Silverlight and .NET and a HTML5/JS-only Windows 8 release. Looking more closely at the whole situation, though, it would seem that what we're dealing with here is a miscommunication - one that Microsoft desperately needs to address since the web is blowing it way out of proportion. The tl;dr: no, HTML5 and JS are not going to be the only ways to write applications for Windows 8.

In an attempt to be current it's a new OSNews podcast episode! Trendy, current topics covered thus, are: A little bit of pre-banter on Windows 8, Microsoft's purchase of Skype for 8 BILLION DOLLARS, Apple's iOS5 / iCloud announcements, and repetitive imagination strain going on at E3.

Lots of feedback from Alfman in the previous article's comments meant that it was time for another version of my article on my RPC-based daemon model, and as such another iteration towards a final design of my OS' core IPC mechanism. Not a full rewrite this time, but rather incremental improvements on specific points, which include a choice of naming (nonblocking RPC it is), an improved coverage of pointers, shared memory, and the currently envisioned design limits of those, and explicit support for dynamic setup of RPC calls and graceful server death handling.

So, yeah, uhm, I bought an iPad 2 today. I still don't think anyone really needs a tablet, but that doesn't mean I didn't want one. I wanted to wait until the HP TouchPad was announced, but now that it has, it seems it won't be coming to The Netherlands any time soon. As such, the iPad 2 it was. A few quick fist impressions.

"Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the patent infringement lawsuit that Lodsys slapped on seven iOS developers last Tuesday. The company maintained that its license for Lodsys patents allows developers to use in-app purchase APIs, and that it has a right to intervene since its licensed technology is at issue."

"When it comes to adopting the newest technologies, Fedora is always at the front among the major Linux distributions. Well, Fedora might very well do it again by adopting a new file system for its next release. According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple switch' - it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users."

"The Supreme Court ruled against Microsoft on Thursday in its appeal of a record $290 million jury verdict for infringing a small Canadian software firm's patent. The justices unanimously upheld an appeals court's ruling that went against the world's largest software company in its legal battle with Toronto-based i4i Limited Partnership. The smaller company had argued that Microsoft Word had infringed its method for editing documents. Microsoft contended that i4i's patent was invalid."

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Palm HP has finally officially announced the release of the TouchPad! Sadly though, it will only see a phased roll-out over the remainder of the year, and the number of countries actually getting the TouchPad is remarkably limited. Somewhat of a downer, really.

"In an attempt to woo its Android developer base, Samsung recently shipped a number of its smartphones to members of a highly popular phone modification group. On Monday, four members of the CyanogenMod software team received Galaxy S II smartphones in the mail, direct from the company at no charge." Step by step, hardware makers are getting the message.