There's fail, there's epic fail, and then there's Sony. You may've thought it wasn't possible, but Sony has just outdone itself on the fail scale, forcing us to add yet another notch. During the congressional testimony this morning, Dr Gene Spafford of Purdue University revealed just how badly Sony managed its Playstation Network servers. It's... Bad.

"With the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion this summer, Apple will make the switch to a new kind of digital distribution for its operating system upgrades by releasing the software first through its new Mac App Store, AppleInsider has learned. The Mac App Store, available to all users running the most recent version of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, will become the de facto method for obtaining the Lion upgrade, people familiar with the matter have revealed. Users will be able to upgrade instantly without the need for physical media by purchasing Lion through the Mac App Store." The old-fashioned regular disc version (and hopefully, on a USB drive for Air owners such as myself) will still be available.

Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets. The RISC-based processor is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip, and can sit alongside CPUs to provide real-time execution of diverse applications. The processor can accelerate tasks like hand gesture recognition, face matching or face tracking, but is not designed to be a full-fledged CPU.

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.

"Music service Spotify has decided to target iTunes users by introducing iPod syncing capabilities to its own software. That's not all, though: Spotify is introducing its own MP3 download store, and can now wirelessly sync MP3s to iPhones and Android devices." Well, if they manage to build client software that's better than iTunes, then more power to 'm. Ah what am I saying, it would be a bigger achievement to write client software that's worse than iTunes.

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.

"New Wikileaks cables indicate that the US has been keeping a close watch on IP enforcement policy in New Zealand, going so far as to propose funding anti-piracy efforts there to the tune of around $427,000. US diplomats have also offered to help New Zealand rewrite its 'three strikes' illegal file sharing law."

"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."

Apple has updated its line of iMac desktops, with new processors and bumped graphical specifications. They also includes an HD FaceTime camera, which is certainly useful. The most interesting feature is, of course, that they include Thunderbolt ports - one on the 21.5" model, and two on the 27" model.

"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."

"IonMonkey is the name of Mozilla's new JavaScript JIT compiler, which aims to enable many new optimizations in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. InfoQ had a small Q&A with Lead Developer David Anderson, about this new development that could bring significant improvements in products that use the SpiderMonkey engine like Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acrobat, MongoDB and more."

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.

"Qubes OS comes from an elegant concept: if you can isolate functional components within disposable containers, and you can separate those components that can be tainted through their interaction with the outside world from the core subsystems, you stand a good chance to preserve the integrity and security of the base Operating System at the possible expense of needing to jump through some hoops to move data around the system. All in all it sounds like a good proposition if it can be demonstrated to be practical." Read the full review.

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.