Remember the good old days? The good old days when people cried loads of foul over the inconsistency in the Windows user interface? You know, applications deviating from the norm - with even Microsoft seemingly doing whatever pleased them? This was considered a huge problem, especially by those from the Macintosh and Apple camp. Oh, how the times have changed.

Google sued the U.S. Interior Department late last year and a judge has sided with Google. The WSJ reports that the judge of the case ruled the USID violated the Competition in Contracting Act by requiring all bids to include Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. No word if the USID will appeal the ruling.

After years of mixed signals, Apple has apparently opened the kimono on its enterprise intentions, announcing a "Mac in the Enterprise" campaign to help large businesses integrate Macs, iPhones, and iPads into their IT ecosystems, InfoWorld reports. "Apple's Mac focus here is particularly striking, unlike that on the iPhone, which has already made obvious inroads in the enterprise market thanks to Apple's delivery of business-class management capabilities. By contrast, the Mac's presence in the business world has been remarkably understated - despite the fact that the Mac population therein reportedly doubled between 2006 and 2008 and looks to grow even more this year."

According to data compiled by StatCounter, Firefox overtook Internet Explorer (IE) as the dominant browser in Europe at the end of 2010. During December, 38.11% of internet page views involved Mozilla's Firefox web browser, whilst Internet Explorer fell back to second place with 37.52%.

"Apple today released Mac OS X 10.6.6 which which increases the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. What's also very important in this release is the introduction of the long-awaited Mac App Store with more than 1,000 free and paid apps. The Mac App Store offers apps in a variety of categories. Users can browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what’s hot, see staff favorites, search categories and look up top charts for paid and free apps, as well as user ratings and reviews." Anyone else bothered by the incredibly shoddy user interface? What the heck is up with the entirely messed up placement of the titlebar widgets? If you ever needed proof the Mac OS X team has become a ghost town thanks to iOS, this is it.

Stuff just keeps on piling up today - and I'm trying to work through my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2 on insanity (fourth playthrough overall). I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that nobody sympathises with my problems... Anywho, Google just unveiled the tablet user interface for Android 3.0, Honeycomb. Looks pretty decent I guess - somehow, it reminds me of Tron.

Just - just hold on a second. This is big: NVIDIA, maker of graphics accelerator chips, has just announced, during its keynote at CES, that it is developing a high-performance ARM-based processor together with ARM, targeted squarely at the desktop, server, and even high-performance computing markets. That Windows on ARM thing? NVIDIA referenced it multiple times! Update: Boom, and we have a press release. "NVIDIA announced today that it plans to build high-performance ARM based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers. Known under the internal codename 'Project Denver', this initiative features an NVIDIA CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU."

All the recent hackery news regarding the Playstation 3 has culminated in the inevitable: the first custom firmware for the Playstation 3. KaKaRoTo, its creator, did not release his custom firmware; in fact, he released the tools so you can modify your own Playstation 3's firmware update package. The feature set is extremely limited - but that's kind of the point. He left most of it untouched, and refuses to implement anything related to piracy.

In the last year there have been a number of organisations offering rewards, or 'bounty' programs, for discovering and reporting bugs in applications. Mozilla currently offers up to $3,000 for crucial or high bug identification, Google pays out $1,337 for flaws in its software and Deutsche Post is currently sifting through applications from 'ethical' hackers to approve teams who will go head to head and compete for its Security Cup in October. The winning team can hold aloft the trophy if they find vulnerabilities in its new online secure messaging service – that's comforting to current users. So, are these incentives the best way to make sure your applications are secure?

Linux 2.6.37 has been released. This release includes several SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, complete removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a network device based in the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules and listing of accesible local and global variables, image hibernation using LZO compression, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers. You can read the full changelog as well.

Yes, we have the winners of the TotalFinder contest. The emails with the TotalFinder licenses will arrive in the winners' inboxes in the coming minutes. I'd like to thank BinaryAge for providing us with the copies of TotalFinder - much appreciated!

Top computer science conferences typically give an award to the best paper published that year. This page compiles the best paper awards for 16 conferences since 1996, in artificial intelligence, operating systems, databases, HCI, information retrieval, and theory. The institutions that currently hold the most best paper awards? Stanford, followed by the University of Washington, Microsoft Research, and CMU."

Apple, Roku, Google, Boxee.... They're not the only ones gunning for your big screen. Microsoft was arguably the first major company to focus on bringing digital content to your TV with Windows Media Centre, which the Redmond company launched all the way back in 2002. It never caught on, but now, the Seattle Times is reporting that Microsoft is going to make another attempt - by putting Windows Media Centre on a set-top box.

Ah, OnLive. This company is trying to bring streaming gaming to the mainstream, and has has just announced a pretty significant partnership with Vizio, the US' largest LCD TV seller. Vizo TVs, smartphones, tablets, and Blu-Ray players will all come equipped, out of the box, with OnLive's streaming service.