"Back in mid-2001, when the news that Be Inc. had sold its intellectual property to Palm hit the streets, what many had suspected and rumored for quite some time - that BeOS development was headed towards closure - finally became a reality. This news and the sad realization that it ensued hit hard the developers and users of BeOS; but many of them did not give up on the idea of letting the operating system of their dreams die, and instead embarked on the daunting task of recreating BeOS in an open source fashion. This is how OpenBeOS - now known as the Haiku Project -- was born."

We're still in the slow news period, so let's talk about something we discussed before: blocking advertisements on websites. Up until, well, today, I didn't block ads - not because of some ethical objection or whatever, but simply because I couldn't be bothered to setup AdBlock. Today, after taking a closer look at some of the websites I frequent, I decided to take the plunge and install AdBlock on all my machines. The following set of screenshots should pretty much explain why.

"Microsoft has released new previews of two of its server products: the first beta of the new cloud-based Small Business Server Aurora, and an updated beta of the second version of Windows Home Server, codenamed 'Vail'."

Mark Shuttleworth has just announced the codename of the next Ubuntu release after Maverick. Ubuntu 11.04 will be called Natty Narwhal. The name follows the usual Ubuntu naming tradition of the codename consisting of an adjective and a name of an animal starting with the same letter, and following an alphabetic order. Continue reading to know more about the Narwhal.

"Debian turns 17 today. Yes it has really come a long way from being Ian Murdock's pet project back in 1993 to being the distribution on which the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is based on now." Let's go through some interesting history of Debian.

In June 2009 we had some very good news about the integration of multitouch events support inside the Linux kernel. Since then, many multitouch device drivers were developed, mostly in collaboration with LII-ENAC, to take advantage from this. All the work was kernel-based, and multitouch supports needs more components to be added in a stack to get multitouch working out of the box. Canonical got interested in providing the needed user experience for multitouch by developing a new gesture engine that recognizes the grammar of natural hand gestures and provide them upstream in the stack as new events.

With the release of Internet Explorer's first beta upon is, it's a good time to look back upon the history of Microsoft's web browser. As it turns out, Internet Explorer turns 15 today, with the first version released August 16, 1995. Pretty turbulent history, there.

I've seen it so many times in the movies and TV: a person wakes up in this futuristic world, walks by his kitchen, and a computerized voice is telling him that someone is calling him. But instead of picking up a receiver, the call is actually a video-call, and his TV is used for the conversation. If you put 2 and 2 together, this is not really that futuristic. Having a camera attached on your TV, and a VoIP SIP or Skype connection with it, is not mad science. So why don't we already have this on our TVs?

While I was away from OSNews, FreeBSD 8.1 was released. Nobody posted it on OSNews, so here I am, a little late (my apologies). It's got all sorts of improvements, like support for UltraSPARC IV/IV+ and SPARC64 V processors, SMP support for PowerPC G5 processors, GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5, and much more.

KDE reaches out to another device form factor. Plasma's plugin-based design is at work again, after launching KDE special netbook interface. This time around, the KDE team presents its Plasma Tablet interface.

We're far from done with the Oracle v. Google lawsuit. The search giant has responded to the lawsuit, and Miguel De Icaza has provided a very interesting insight into the case. His report has been confirmed by James Gosling, known as the father of Java who left Sun right after the merger. Icaza speculates that the potential to monetise on Java by suing Google was pitched by Jonathan Schwartz during Sun's sales talks with Oracle. Oh boy.

Well, Oracle went from one of those big enterprise-serving companies most of us don't deal with to one of the more hated companies in our little community. Not only did they just sue Google over Android and its use of Java-related technologies, they also just officially killed off OpenSolaris. Solaris will still be open source, but source code will only come after each major release - development will happen behind closed doors.

I'm supposed to be asleep right now, but this news kind of hit me like a ton of bricks: Oracle is suing Google over its Android mobile operating system, claiming it infringes on its patented Java technology. Not a good week to be Google, is it?

Google and Verizon's joint statement on net neutrality and the internet (which apparently consists of three separate internets) wasn't particularly well-received. Google has gone into damage-control mode, defending the policy proposal in a sort of get-the-facts-like weblog post.