It seems like the first battle in the patent dispute between Nokia and Apple has been in Nokia's favour. The staff of the US International Trade Commission has sided with Nokia, stating that either the claims in Apple patents were invalid, or they were not infringed upon. All this was detailed in a memo, but for some reason, nobody is actually linking to said memo, making this story a little sparse on details (cookie if you can find the memo).

"Under an initiative sponsored by the European Commission, the Symbian platform was this week endorsed by the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative and specifically identified as a unique technology that is a vital focus for European-centric mobile software development. As a result, a total investment of over EUR 22 million has been committed to the development of next generation technologies for the Symbian platform. This development project is being led by the Symbian Foundation as part of a consortium of major European technology organisations. The consortium is made up of 24 organisations from 8 European countries, comprising major mobile device manufacturers, hardware and service integration professional services, major consumer electronics companies, mobile network operators, application developers, universities and research institutions."

Well, this is a fun little trick. You can disable the fancy Zune shell on your Zune HD and end up with the default, old-school Windows CE-look. While not all Windows CE applications will work, some do, including things like Foxit Reader, Opera Mini, Pocket Word, and others. Supports GDI, DirectDraw, and OpenGL ES 2.0.

Every now and then, you get these news item that make you feel like something's wrong. The item doesn't make sense, shouldn't be possible, and yet it is. Despite Microsoft's newfound commitment to web standards, it's still incredibly unnerving to see things like this - the W3C's first HTML5 compliance test, in which Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 6 outdoes all other browsers.

That is without a single shred of doubt the most awesome headline I ever got to put on OSNews. This headline is so awesome I don't even need to write anything else, because it would just detract from the awesomeness. Cue Johnny Guitar, with a lone wanderer riding his horse towards a Mojave sunset, after just having... Wait, where were we? Right. Yes, Google has sued the US Department of the Interior because its Request for Quotation regarding a messaging solution demanded the use of Microsoft software.

MIPS Technologies has said it will put its processor architecture in tablets and smartphones as it prepares to duel rivals Arm and Intel in those fast-growing markets. In September, MIPS released the MIPS32 1074K family of application processors, which it hopes to push into mobile devices. The 1074K is scalable up to 1.5GHz and is capable of multithreading, which the company claims will give it a leg up on Arm processors.

OpenBSD 4.8 has been released. The main feature of this release is the ACPI suspend and resume for laptops with Intel or Ati graphic chipsets. If anyone is knowledgeable enough about OpenBSD to write a long item about it, feel free.

Do you like VLC on your iPhone or iPad? You don't yet have it installed, but want to? Well, then you'd better be quick about it, as some VLC contributors are unhappy with the fact that VLC is distributed through Apple's App Store, violating the GPL the video player is licensed under. At least, that's what some think.

Ambition. Too little, and you stagnate. Too much, and you end up stumbling. Keep this in mind. KDE4 was, and is, a very brave and ambitious effort, and while in my personal opinion they've still got a long way to go, especially in the performance department (I regained some hope lately), they're getting there. Imagine my surprise that after the recently announced overhaul of Plasma, a rather wild idea has popped up that would mean Qt5 and KDE5 - assuming the idea gets enough support, of course.

Gutenprint has been ported to Haiku. "Michael Pfeiffer (wait, what?) intends on ironing out the configuration options and fixing any bugs that users experience. Please test out Gutenprint on Haiku with your supported printer and report back here, or file a bug report if you encounter problems. Anyone with a colour cartridge?"

Last week the openSUSE conference took place in Nuremberg, Germany. Instead of deciding to fork a major desktop, the conference focused on 'collaboration across borders' and the results are showing. Fedora visitors worked with openSUSE developers to integrate systemd and dracut in openSUSE 11.4, LibreOffice held their first conference track, project Bretzn (let's make developers' life easier) was announced and it became known that Mageia discusses use of the openSUSE Build Service.

The 2.8.2 release of DragonFly BSD is now available, featuring significant advances in multi-processor performance based on DragonFly's signature soft token locks. It also includes many feature advancements including: pf from OpenBSD 4.2, the Wifi stack from FreeBSD and DataMapper from NetBSD (with significant enhancements). This release also marks the return of the GUI image. See the release notes for full details.

Yesterday, we discussed the claims made by Oracle about Google allegedly copying their code, and quickly enough, the web - I included - concluded that it looked like the code in question originally came from Apache's Harmony Project - although no one could find it in the current code repository. Earlier this morning, I contacted the Apache Software Foundation, and they cleared everything up: the contested class library does not, and did not, come from the Apache Harmony project.

The Army is 20 years and a half-billion dollars into a star-crossed effort to build custom communications and digital-mapping gadgets for its soldiers. Special Operations Command, on the other hand, is taking a simpler approach: They’re planning to use Android phones.