"Intel has provided the first hands-on demonstration of a laptop running its Light Peak technology, at the company's inaugural European research showcase here in Brussels. Light Peak is an optical interconnect that can transfer data at 10Gbits/sec in both directions. Intel hopes Light Peak will one day replace the host of other PC interconnects, including USB, DisplayPort and HDMI. The demonstration laptop was sending two separate HD video streams to a nearby television screen, without any visible lag."

CNet investigates whether H264's licensing is really a legal minefield. John Gruber, proponent of H264, concludes from the article, which uses the MPEG-LA and several legal experts as sources, that no, it is not a legal minefield. He's probably been reading a different article than I did, though, because even the legal experts have trouble understanding the licensing structure. Heck, even the MPEG-LA's head of licensing's language is remarkably unclear and broad. So, is it a legal minefield? Most certainly - this article does nothing to quell the worries.

Well, this is interesting, and, I must say, rather surprising: the New York Post is reporting that the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are looking into launching an antitrust probe into Apple's policies. You'd expect this to be about iTunes, but that's just the thing: it's about the Adobe-Apple spat. Update: Since I'm not familiar with the entire US media landscape, I was unaware the New York Post is considered less than reputable. Still, Reuters has confirmed the Post's report, so maybe it's true after all.

Remember how Mark Shuttleworth justified moving the window titlebar widgets to the left by claiming the space freed up on the right side could now be used for something else? On his blog, Shuttleworth unveiled what, exactly, Ubuntu's plans are: window indicators, or 'windicators'. In a nutshell, it comes down to having a tray area in every window.

"The KDevelop team is proud and happy to announce that KDevelop 4.0 is finally available as stable release. KDevelop comes with lots of innovative features, even though many features from the 3.5 series were dropped due to a nearly complete rewrite. In particular the developers have focused on building an excellent C++ IDE instead of trying to integrate lots of languages and features halfheartedly. Of course KDevelop 4 also builds an excellent basis for other languages, the best proof for that is the PHP plugin that is released alongside KDevelop 4.0. KDevelop 4.0 has an excellent C++ code understanding engine, which allows the IDE to understand your code better than you do, and which is then used to assist you by releasing you from tiresome tasks."

So, what's up with Windows Phone 7? Luckily for us, we're not left in the dark, since Microsoft regularly posts updated developer tools and emulator images for us to download. The latest release includes the new Microsoft Office functionality and integration, and after a little magic to unlock this functionality within the emulator image, you'll find Microsoft has taken an interesting approach to Office on the phone.

Whew, what a week. In a week of threats, patents and doom and gloom, we are joined by Tess again to discuss desktop computing. Is it going the way of the dodo, or will it turn into something else? (what with all this mobile-computing hype) Also discussed is the ongoing H264 minefield that THREATENS TO DESTROY US ALL *ahem* before meandering off to something more positive: HP buys Palm; assuring us that there is good in this world.

When computers--evolutive machines which may be reprogrammed at will--became widely available, it generated a well-deserved buzz. Some (scientists, banks, insurance companies) felt like they were dreaming, others (like some SF writers) rather thought of it as a nightmare. Today, like it or not, they're everywhere However, part of the individual-oriented computers are going rather far from the original programmable machine model. They rather look like usual tools, with a fixed use. Their customizable internals are only accessible to the people who engineered them. Is there no market anymore for general-purpose personal programmable machines, able to do about anything? I'll try to answer this question, taking into account two major trends in the personal computing market : touchscreen-powered devices and cloud computing.

Hello all. Over time we have had every imaginable claim of bias levied against us. We are routinely called pro-Apple, anti-Apple as well as pro-Microsoft and anti-Microsoft (even within the same discussion thread!). OSNews is an editorial site where the content is selected by a core team of volunteers who either write up news articles themselves, or take links or submissions from users on the site. Read More for the full statement.

"Android is fairly unique in the ways it allows multiple applications to run at the same time. Developers coming from a different platform may find the way it operates surprising. Understanding its behavior is important for designing applications that will work well and integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Android platform. This article covers the reasons for Android's multitasking design, its impact on how applications work, and how you can best take advantage of Android's unique features."

Via LWN: "Lennart Poettering has put up a lengthy post describing the 'systemd' project, which is creating a new init system. The whole thing is an interesting discussion of how system initialization should work. Upstart maintainer Scott James Remnant has posted a response to the announcement."

This blog post details how the Gentoo Developers have added a "deblob" USE flag to remove any non-free code within the Linux Kernel. Its goal is to "remove binary blobs from kernel sources to provide libre license compliance". While we're at it, Kernel News has an in-depth look at Gentoo Linux.

I am almost flabbergasted by the spin and blunt-face upon which this news is delivered. We were just discussing the pot calling the kettle black with Apple / Adobe and now Microsoft have also come out in favour of a closed video format for an open web--IE9's HTML5 video support will allow H264 only. Update Now that the initial shock is over, I've rewritten the article to actually represent news rather than something on Twitter.

This article examines the implications of 4KB-sector disks, including benchmark tests illustrating the likely real-world effects on some common Linux file systems. As disks with 4096-byte sectors become more common throughout 2010 and beyond, strategies for coping with these new disks will become increasingly important.