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."

Today Jeff Roberson committed his patches to FreeBSD 9 for adding journaling to UFS. No more background fsck after unclean shutdowns! This is a major landmark in the history of UFS, with 11000 new lines of code (and about 2000 removed). Much of the work was done in collaboration with Kirk McKusick, the original author of FFS and Softupdates, under sponsorship form Yahoo!, Juniper and iXsystems. Jeff's blog contains quite a lot of technical information of his work. There's also information on the FreeBSD mailing lists.

Last Monday we reported that Synaptics would be releasing its Gesture Suite for use by Linux OEMs, so they can add multitouch and gesture features to touchpads on Linux laptops. Since many people install Linux by themselves, I wondered if they would make the Suite available for individual users as well - I posed them the question, and the reply is that they're looking into it.

So, we have Microsoft slowly but surely trying to be a better citizen in the computing world - with the emphasis on trying. After years of dragging their feet, the company is finally implementing web standards in Internet Explorer, there's a boatload of interoperability information now, that sort of stuff. And then, just when you think they're starting to get it - they go behind our backs to do something incredibly insipid. It's small, you'll barely notice it, but dear lord, it's really, really annoying.

"Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official told CNET on Friday. Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney's office, the source said. Apple's Cupertino headquarters is in Santa Clara County, about 40 miles south of San Francisco." Update: "We haven't been contacted by law enforcement," said Gaby Darbyshire, chief operating officer of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo.

"After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which is held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16. We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments."

In the past few months, especially after CES in January, there were some stories about a number of new display technologies for colour e-books. IEEE Spectrum ran this thorough article that explains it all.

Yesterday Phoronix showed proof of Steam's Linux client existence via its Mac OS X launcher that is currently in closed beta, then this morning they showed further signs of Linux support. Since 2008 it was known that Steam and the Source Engine would come to Linux. As an update, they even pointed out the download link for the Steam Linux binary from their store.

"With much easier comparisons from a devastating period last year and an upswing in PC sales, Microsoft posted solid third-quarter earnings today after the markets closed. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said it had revenue of $14.5 billion in the quarter ended March 31, a six percent rise from a year ago. Net income was $4.01 billion, or 45 cents a share. That's despite forking over $78 million to Yahoo in the quarter, as part of its online search and advertising partnership with Yahoo. That handily beat Wall Street expectations of $14.4 billion and 42 cents a share."

Let me take you by the hand and lead you into cell phone land. Dell - of all companies - has "leaked" its line-up of upcoming Android and Windows Phone 7 phones, and contrary to any common sense, they're stunning. On top of that, Android has been ported to the iPhone (dual-boot capable, baby), and a clever tool has been released that completely automates overclocking your Palm Pre (Plus).

Well, you can classify this under the double-you-tee-eff header. There is rampant speculation in London's financial district that Apple may be planning to buy ARM, the processor design company many of us have a soft spot for. Shares of ARM went upwards quickly when the speculation started, making it the biggest winner of London's FTSE.

The tools used to boot Linux are changing. Specifically, the Grand Unified Bootloader is now officially in maintenance mode only, and GRUB's developers have abandoned the original GRUB in favor of an entirely rewritten package, known as GRUB 2. Discover GRUB 2's new capabilities and how to use it.

"Linux vendor Red Hat today released the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, giving observers a look at what's to come in the next version of its flagship operating system platform. The new release takes advantage of a long list of new Linux kernel improvements for performance and scalability while also providing new technologies for security, management, and virtualization."