European antitrust regulators have fined nine semiconductor manufacturers more than USD 404 million following a years-long investigation into price fixing in the market for DRAM memory chips. The European Commission said all of the companies submitted settlements admitting their liability for infringement. The companies fined are Samsung Electronics, Infineon, Hynix Semiconductor, Elpida Memory, NEC Electronics, Hitachi, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric and Nanya Technology. A tenth company, Micron, escaped a fine since it told the Commission about the cartel in 2002.

OpenBSD 4.7 is the newest installment in the proactively secure UNIX-like operating system. With 4.7 comes a range of new features including support for the Loongson 2E and 2F MIPS-compatible processors. See the release page for a complete list of new features.

IBM has updated its System x iDataPlex servers to include graphics processors from Nvidia. The new servers are aimed at organizations that want to run scientific and commercial applications on graphics processors.

Despite its recent feud with Apple over HTML5 and Flash, Adobe will add HTML5 and CSS3 support to its Dreamweaver HTML authoring tool. With the Adobe HTML5 Pack extension for Dreamweaver CS5, developers leveraging HTML5 and CSS3 gain such capabilities as code-hinting, in which the tool helps finish lines of code based on what already has been entered on the keyboard. HTML5 Pack extension also features WebKit engine updates and improvements to support video and audio in the Dreamweaver Live View capability for previewing designs. Also, HTML5 starter layouts are featured.

Remember MacOS 9, or Classic as Apple named it once Mac OS X was released? On PowerPC Macintosh machines, you can install a Classic environment which launches a virtualised instance of MacOS 9 whenever you launch a Classic application. This environment has been dropped from Intel releases of Mac OS X, but thanks to SheepShaver, you can still set it up yourself on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and even BeOS if you want to. I decided to try SheepShaver on my Ubuntu machine, and discovered just how easy it really is.

Yes, I broke my own rules and used a "breaking" modifier for this story (let me have my fun for once). Here we have it, as the rumour mill suggested, Google has released the On2 VP8 video codec as open source (royalty free, BSD-style), while also launching the WebM container format which combines a VP8 video stream with Vorbis audio. Support for WebM has been enabled on YouTube's HTML5 beta, and you can download patches against ffmpeg as well as DirectShow filters for Windows (Gstreamer plugins are labelled as "coming soon"). Mac users are out of luck for now; no QuickTime plugins have been announced yet. Update: The WebM blog is now open - and the list of partners is pretty decent already. It includes ARM, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and many others. Update II: VP8 will be baked into Flash. Update III: The Opera labs version with WebM support has been released too, for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

"Google's hackles are raised over Microsoft's claim that Google Docs doesn't work well with Office files, and in fact, has a tendency to butcher Office's page design elements. Alex Payne, Director, Online Product Management, Microsoft, said Office and Google Docs don't play well together because Google Docs converts Office files into a different file format for viewing and editing, which strips out fonts, styles, charts, and other page elements. On Wednesday, Google said it has made a lot of progress in maintaining document fidelity when importing Microsoft Office documents into Google Docs. But Google apparently also sees some irony in Microsoft's reasoning."

"No, Fedora 13 Linux is not coming out today. The release was pushed back by a week to fix a number of blocker bugs, among them is an interesting one that many users might simply consider to be just a papercut nuisance."

While I was too young to experience its heyday, I have heard a lot of people wax lyrically about Apple's HyperCard. Even Steve Jobs himself said, earlier this year, that he'd love for a HyperCard-like environment to come to the iPhone, but that someone would have to build it. Well, someone did indeed build it, called it revMobile, but Apple has rejected 'it' from the App Store (i.e., applications developed using revMobile) because it violates section 3.3.1 of the iPhone SDK agreement. The team behind Unity, however, are luckier: Unity games are still being accepted into the App Store, and as such, they're not worried.

Ah, American society and sex. For the number one producer of pornography, American society sure doesn't tolerate sex. We already have Steve Jobs going the 'think-of-the-children' route, and now it seems Google has similar problems - Google is banning so-called "cougar" dating sites from advertising via its network, while on the other hand, it does not have a problem with ads where older men can seek younger women. Hypocrisy, thy name is society.

Linux 2.6.34 has been released. This version includes the distributed filesystem Ceph and LogFS, a filesystem for flash devices. Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance, the VMware ballon driver, the "kprobes jump" optimization for dynamic probes, new perf features (the "perf lock" tool, cross-platform analysis support), support for GPU switching, several Btrfs improvements, RCU lockdep, asynchronous suspend/resume, several new drivers and many other small improvements. You can peruse the full changelog as well.

The folks at WineHQ are gearing up for the second release of Wine. "The 64-bit support is now more or less complete, and we have most of the fancy new icons, so it's time to think about the next stable release. Unless some major problems come up, 1.1.44 will be the last of the 1.1.x series. The next release will be 1.2-rc1, which will mark the beginning of the code freeze. This should result in a 1.2 final sometime in June."

And here's to the good stuff. When HP bought Palm a few weeks ago, the computer giant made it very clear they are going to put the webOS on a tablet, and maybe even on a netbook. While it has never been a secret that the webOS actually runs just fine on x86, nobody ever tried to actually boot it on real hardware. Until now, that is - and it works, without any modifications.

FreeBSD developer Robert Watson has announced an Apache GCD MPM that uses Apple's Grand Central Dispatch concurrent programming framework, and cites 1/4 the number of lines of code for threaded MPMs to accomplish the same goals. Currently, the MPM is being distributed on Mac OS X Forge, and runs on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Apache developer Paul Querna has proposed merging it to the Apache trunk. There are also ongoing efforts to port libdispatch to Solaris and Linux, so hopefully it will work there soon as well!