Another mobile Linux consortium? Yup, another mobile Linux consortium. "ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments, today announced the formation of Linaro, a not-for-profit open source software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open source innovation for the next wave of always-connected, always-on computing. Linaro's work will help developers and manufacturers provide consumers with more choice, more responsive devices and more diverse applications on Linux-based systems."

"Tuxera today announced the release of Tuxera exFAT for Android and other Linux systems. Developed using technical documentation provided by Microsoft Corp., Tuxera exFAT provides outstanding performance and stability, and meets the latest SDXC memory card standards."

Last week's release of MeeGo v1 is an effort by US chip maker Intel and European cellular giant Nokia to enter the mobile OS arena. Will it be able to compete? While Apple and Google vie for market dominance, MeeGo offers itself as a 3rd choice with strong Linux roots.

A lot of people point to a possible Verizon iPhone as the one thing that will staunch Android's remarkable growth. Sadly for those of you stuck on AT&T, there won't be a Verizon iPhone any time soon. Verizon Wireless spokesman John Johnson has said that his company has "no plans to carry the iPhone in the immediate future". Bummer for all you frustrated AT&T people.

"In this short article, we'll take a look at the legendary BFS, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features. Also included at the end of the article are two interviews: one with the person who developed BFS for Be, and another with the developer behind the open-source version of BFS."

I think that no matter which group you belong to - Apple, Linux, Windows, BeOS - we can all agree on one thing: original equipment manufacturers are terrible at writing or pre-loading software. Whether it be adding pre-exisiting software to Windows OEM installs, or software they write on their own, it is universally bad. As such, I just can't understand why Microsoft would leave creating tablet user experiences to OEMs.

Unless you've been under a rock, you're probably familiar with the fact that Flash doesn't run on any mobile Apple device. Moreover, it looks like Apple is never going to let Flash onto the iPhone/iPod/iPad empire. Rather than just whinge about the fact, the ad network company RevShock decided to do something about it by creating Smokescreen, an open source product that converts Flash to HTML5 & Javascript. While mainly designed for ads, and still very much in the testing stages, the demos certainly look very promising, and it ticks all the boxes for those who want everything to be open and free.

NetBSD 5.1 RC2 has been announced. A complete list of changes between 5.0 and 5.1 is available in diff format here for the more technical individuals. Fire up those VMs and give it a test run.

We've talked about ACTA before. ACTA is an anti-capitalistic treaty which implements several measures that will seriously hurt people's freedoms, rights, and privacy, all to, among other things, support a failing business model from an industry which has failed time and time again to adapt to a changing market. In any working free market, business models are allowed to fail, but the US/EU governments clearly don't see it that way. India has now announced that it is going to forge its own anti-ACTA coalition in an effort to undermine the new treaty.

Google said Wednesday it is planning to release its Chrome operating system, seen as a rival to Microsoft's Windows system, for free in the autumn. "We are working on bringing the device later this fall," said Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai at CompuTex Taipei, Asia's biggest IT trade show. "It's something which we are very excited by ... We expect it to reach millions of users on day one," he said.

With the explosion of (mostly Canon's) video HD dSLRs in the last few months, purchase decisions for video editors have shifted, depending on which editor can deal with h.264 the best way. Until recently, users had to either use "proxy" files, or transcode to an intermediate format. Then, Adobe's Premiere Pro CS5 came in to change this by being the first video editor to fully utilize nVidia's CUDA technology and achieve real-time playback for Quicktime dSLR, and AVCHD footage.

Well, this was pretty inevitable, wasn't it? We had Google employees detailing that their company has pretty much given up on Windows, forcing employees to use either Mac OS X or Linux. In what surely comes as a total surprise, Microsoft has responded to this report. Regarding the security claims, "the facts don't support the assertion", Microsoft states.

"In an announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference, Intel provided further details on the many-core chip that it hinted at earlier in the month. The first product based on the new design will be codenamed Knight's Corner, and will debut at 22nm with around 50 x86 cores on the same die. Developer kits, which include a prototype of the design called Knight's Ferry, have been shipping to select partners for a while now, and will ship more broadly in the second half of the year. When Intel moves to 22nm in 2011, Knight's Corner will make its official debut."

And the award for Most Boring And Non-descriptive Press Release Title 2010 goes to Microsoft for "Microsoft Outlines Business Opportunities for Hardware Makers Across Windows Platform". The press release itself appears to be about as interesting as watching paint dry, until you reach that small part where it says Microsoft has released the first community technology preview of Windows Embedded Compact 7 (1).