In an industry dependent on intellectual property, Microsoft's fight against "theft" has implications beyond the bottom line. "Intellectual property is a critical engine of economic growth," says Microsoft's anti-piracy chief, "That's not just for large companies, but also for small businesses and entire countries. We work with governments that are realizing this is in their best interests."

Symbian has had a bit of a string of bad news lately, but starting today, things might just start looking up again. Major changes have been announced with regards to the Symbian Foundation and Nokia's involvement with the platform, which all basically come down to this: Nokia is taking over development of the platform, while the Foundation focusses on licensing.

SweClocker has just posted what might be the first video of the anticipated Bios replacement UEFI .

"I had reduced the size of my ongoing Z80 project down to something more wieldy by using CPLD chips, but it was still a bit too bulky to fit into an acceptably sized case. The next step was to look into FPGAs and see where they could take it. One thing led to another and I ended up building a self contained post modern home computer laptop.. thing." Kroc: Can I haz port of BBC BASIC plz?

"The first person who figures out how to build an open-source driver for Microsoft's much-hyped new Kinect motion controller could win a USD 2000 bounty offered by a leading open-source hardware developer. Kinect is currently available solely for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and may well someday be extended to the Windows platform. But for New York-based Adafruit Industries, that's not enough. And that's why Adafruit - led by MIT Media Lab alum Limor Fried and Make magazine Senior Editor Phillip Torrone - is offering two grand to someone who can figure out how to decouple the hot new device from Microsoft's gaming machine." Bah, motion controllers. Evolutionary dead end. A shiny object already on its way out. People play games to unwind, not to look like idiots flailing their arms and legs around.

Finally. Finally the leader of a major distribution who has the guts to stand up and say what a lot of people have known for a long time, but didn't dare to say because it usually leads to a storm of criticism. Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will be moving away from X.org, opting to go with Wayland instead.

Steve Jobs recently told a Mac user, enquiring about the probability of USB3 on Macs in the near feature, that the technology is not ready because Intel has yet to adopt the platform. A recent rumour slated Intel to integrate USB3 it into its chipsets by no earlier than 2012. LaCie electronics, however, is not prepared to wait around until 2012, and has just released an USB3.0 driver for Mac OS X. Just one catch: it only works with LaCie's hardware.

"For a fairly scruffy looking guy, I have a surprisingly healthy approach to organising my files. However, I'm constantly pushing up against the limitations of a system that is based around directories. I'm convinced that Linux needs to make greater use of tagging, but I'm also beginning to wonder if desktop Linux could abandon the hierarchical directory structure entirely."

A little over two months ago, OSNews had a bit of a run-in with Commodore USA's CEO, about how I felt about the company and its rather dubious business practices. This led to a legal threat we laughed away here at OSNews, but laughable or not, a legal threat is a legal threat, and it never sat well with me that it was never retracted or apologised for. Well, that changed today.

Fedora 14 has been released. "The Fedora Project today announced the availability of Fedora 14, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. The Fedora Projects leads the advancement of free and open source software with a new distribution released approximately every six months."

"Today, KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. This update is the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.5 series. 4.5.3 brings bugfixes and translation updates on top of KDE SC 4.5 series and is a recommended update for everyone running 4.5.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE SC 4 is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come."

"The Jack PC from Chip PC Technologies offers a neat and novel thin-client desktop computing solution where the computer doesn't just plug into the wall, it is the plug in the wall. Running on power provided by the ethernet cable that also connects it to the data center server, the computer-in-a-wall-socket supports wireless connectivity, has dual display capabilities and runs on the RISC processor architecture – which gives the solution the equivalent of 1.2GHz of x86 processing power."

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."