Microsoft has released new details on an experimental operating system concept named Drawbridge. In early March Microsoft researchers presented a paper entitled Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down. The paper describes a new interaction between a user-level application and its OS. The paper can be found at the ACM Digital Library . It describes an ambitious plan to separate the traditional API parts of an OS from the underlying kernel of the OS. But a full analysis requires some background.

Intel has just announced its new line of processors, called Ivy Bridge, which uses a new type of transistor to reach the 22nm production process as well as maintain Moore's Law. They call it the 3D transistor, and in all honesty, this stuff goes way over my head. Even the incredibly cheesy n00b-video from Intel doesn't really make any lightbulbs appear in my head. So...

The first major effect of Attachmate buying Novell (and thus, SUSE) has come into, uh, effect. Novell, of course, is the birth place of Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. Reports indicate Mono developers have been fired as part of the streamlining process, but according to Attachmate's CEO, they weren't fired because of Mono.

Surprising it is not, but unfortunate it remains. Carriers in the United States have started working together with Google to block tethering applications in the Android Market from running on certain Android devices. While this pretty much seems like a US-only thing, it's still bad.

"A possible landmark ruling in one of the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. may spell the end of the 'pay-up-or-else-schemes' that have targeted over 100,000 Internet users in the last year. District Court Judge Harold Baker has denied a copyright holder the right to subpoena the ISPs of alleged copyright infringers, because an IP-address does not equal a person."

Research In Motion is holding its big event right now, BlackBerry World 2011, and some interesting things have already come out. First, RIM is entering into a rather pervasive partnership with Microsoft to make Bing the default through all levels of the BlackBerry operating system (includig the QNX-based one). Second, the first piece of videographic evidence of Android applications running on the PlayBook.

"Nikkei.com on Monday reported that an online Sony gaming network has once again fallen victim to a cyberattack. This time, the attack may have exposed the credit card numbers of thousands of Sony customers from around the world. According to the report, over 12,700 customer credit card numbers were stolen during a breach of Sony’s online gaming network, Sony Online Entertainment. According to Nikkei.com, Sony discovered the possible attack on Sunday."

Like Britney Spears, Jeff Johnson did it again and decided to fork rpm once more. Following a week long outage of the main website, he announced on the Mandriva development mailing list the launch of rpm6.org, without giving much explanation. Without more information, some people speculate this was caused by an intrusive merge by a Mandriva coder without discussing beforehand, while some others speak of the heavy criticism due to the migration, which still causing issues after several months.

Well, this is a bit surprising. Research In Motion, which isn't exactly doing well at this point, has just launched version 7.0 of the BlackBerry OS. Curiously enough, this release has nothing to do with the QNX-based operating system of the PlayBook.

OpenBSD 4.9 release is ready, now with enabled NTFS by default (read-only), SMP kernels can now boot on machines with up to 64 cores, maximum allocation size for i386 bumped to 2G, added support for AES-NI instructions found in recent Intel processors, further improvements in suspend and resume and much more.

Attachmate now owns Novell and therefore, by extension, also owns SUSE and openSUSE. With Oracle currently doing everything in its power to thoroughly destroy what's left of Sun's open source commitments, scepticism abound about the future of SUSE, and more specifically of openSUSE. Attachmate's CEO has answered some questions about the future of SUSE and openSUSE, and as far as words go, it's looking good.

Between all this bickering over who's peniphone is the largest best, it's always nice to be able to post a positive story, a story which shows that for every abusive company, there's one that shows the world just how it's done. This time, it's Bose. Founder and primary stockholder of Bose, Amar G. Bose, has donated a large number of non-voting shares of the company to MIT, where he spent his university career. Dividends over these shares will be paid each year to MIT, which will use it for research and educational purposes.

This is interesting. I've been saying for a while now that both Apple and Microsoft are hard at work making Android as undesirable as possible. Sadly, they're not doing this by making their own products better, but by trying to make it seem as if Android isn't free due to patent costs and such. It looks like Barnes & Noble is the first company to openly say the same.

In a move touted as one to "make Apps easier to adopt and manage", Google has announced that it will reduce the number of free users from 50 down to just 10 before businesses have to sign up for its paid service. This follows a previous reduction from 100 to 50. Google claims that existing users won't be affected, but we'll just have to wait and see how long that lasts. And if you don't want your whole life tracked and sold off to the highest bidder by Google's "free" and "open" technologies but would like access to actual free or low cost services there is a decent article here that shines some light on your options.