Now this sucks. We've encountered several 'leaks'over the past few months regarding a 'secret' project within Microsoft called Courier. The demonstrations showed a highly innovative dual-touchscreen tablet thingamabob that combined multitouch and pen input to create a completely new user interface. Today, Microsoft confirmed the project's existence (yay!)... By cancelling it (boo!).

It's that time of year again: a new Ubuntu release (or Kubuntu, if that's your thing). Canonical has just released Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. This is a long term support release, meaning its supported period is far longer than that of normal releases. It comes with the latest and greatest the Free software world has to offer, while also adding some Ubuntu-specific features, of course.

"In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser across our most popular desktop platforms we have reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to final release quality, meaning that a 10.5x release for these platforms will happen as soon as feasibly possible". Opera assure us that this will have no effect on the existing Linux and UNIX ports.

I think it's about time we got an Adobe category. Apple recently made public an API to allow OS X software access to hardware H.264 acceleration (albeit such acceleration is only available on chipsets since the Nvidia 9400M--early 2008) and Adobe have already baked this in to a beta preview of Flash 10.1 "Gala"! Update: Steve Jobs himself weighs in on Flash (via Engadget): "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

So, the deal with HTC isn't the only partnership Microsoft entered into today. The Joomla! project has announced that Microsoft has signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement, meaning the Redmond company is now a contributor to this GPL project. Microsoft code has already found its way into the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 release, and closer cooperation between Joomla! and Microsoft will follow.

Yeah, we're continuing with the mobile news for now. As it turns out, there are two ways to deal with ever increasing competition. Where Apple sued HTC, Microsoft has decided to do what it does best: they're trying to extract some form of profit out of the rising popularity of Android phones. This morning, the Redmond giant announced it signed a patent licensing agreement with HTC.

Piggybacking on the N8 launch, Nokia provided the first public release of the Nokia Qt SDK (beta). In essence, this product is the Qt Creator 2.0 (with the usual support for desktop development), enhanced with features necessary for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo development: easy hardware debugging, as well as a simulator that mocks screen size and various hardware events like location changes.

The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure version 2.7 has just been released. It includes a new open source BSD licensed C/C++ compiler, clang. "This includes significantly better generated code, improvements to debug information generation and a broad number of new features in the core infrastructure. One exciting feature is that Clang is now able to bootstrap itself, a major milestone in any compiler's development and particularly notable considering the complexity of implementing C++!" LLVM also has a new official blog.

The inventor of the Ogg container format, Monty "xiphmont" Montgomery, has written up a remarkably detailed article refuting every complaint Mans Rullgard has posed in his anti-Ogg articles. "Mans Rullgard has written two long rants about the Ogg container in the past few years. One made it to Slashdot apparently based on the drama potential alone. If you don't know what I'm talking about below, don't worry about it, tl;dr. I'd not originally intended to respond to open trolling. The continued urging of many individuals has convinced me it's important to rebut in some public form. Earnest falsehoods left unchallenged risk being accepted as fact."

People have often rightfully pointed out that we here at OSNews do not seem to pay a lot of attention to RIM and its BlackBerry mobile operating system. Those people are right, but it stems from the fact that I simply have never actually seen, let alone used, a BlackBerry, which makes it very hard to write about. I'm hoping this will go a little way into turning that frown upside down: today, RIM demonstrated version 6.0 of its BlackBerry operating system. And it's on OSNews' front page.

Well, this is unexpected. The iPhone 4G saga just got a whole lot crazier - dare I say it, a whole lot more ridiculous. Have you ever reported anything like a phone or something similarly small stolen to the police? What was their reaction? Did you ever get the device back? Did they send an army of officers to get your device back? No? Odd. They raided Jason Chen's house, and took four computers and two servers. Update: And thus our true colours reveal. "The raid that San Mateo area cops conducted last week on the house of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen came at the behest of a special multi-agency task force that was commissioned to work with the computer industry to tackle high-tech crimes. And Apple Inc. sits on the task force's steering committee." Update II: According to TechCrunch, the investigation has been put on hold while the DA ponders Gizmodo's shield defence. Update III: Some legal insight from a constitutional law and first amendment expert and a law professor. The gist? The DA has said no one has been charged with anything here, making this just an investigation - however, this makes the search and seizing of material worse. "If the police are literally just gathering information, with no suspect targeted yet, then a subpoena against a journalist would have probably been smarter than a search warranted that resulted in the front door of Chen's home being bashed in."

"Many of you may already know that Microsoft has been hard at work on the next version of Windows Home Server. We are excited to announce today that the beta of this next version (code name 'Vail') is now available. We invite everyone to check it out by downloading the software from the Microsoft Connect site (English language builds are available now)."

Invented by IBM, the death knell sounded by Apple. Sony has announced it is going to cease selling diskettes altogether, with the last bastion being Japan. Sales will be ceased there too, even though Sony still managed to sell 12 million of them there last year. While Memorex and Imation still produce and sell diskettes, this move by Sony surely means it won't take long for the rest of the market to vanish, too.

A major milestone for the x264 project - and for Free software in general. "Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264's Blu-ray compliance. With x264's powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it's quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality. With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user."