And so, the idiocy in the mobile industry continues. Motorola has just upped the ante in this already ridiculous spider web of lawsuits by suing the pants off Apple. Eighteen patents are involved, most of which seem to be actual hardware patents, but that doesn't make some of them any less obvious (apparently, you can patent the location of your antenna). Anywho, like Nokia, Motorola claims that Apple is unwilling to license Motorola's patents, and as such, suing was the only option.

While we rail on Apple for its closed and restrictive policies regarding its iOS, with Apple you at least know what you're getting into. When you buy a mobile phone running Android, many do so because of its open and more free nature than the competing platforms - so you can imagine the surprise when the hackers at xda-developers found out the brand-new T-Mobile G2 has a hardware rootkit that will always restore the phone's original operating system upon installing a different ROM. HTC says it doesn't know of any such feature, and points towards the carrier (or Google).

Let me tell you, when what you teach and develop every day has the title "Innovation" attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth--akin to the second law of thermodynamics, Boyle's Law, or Moore's Law. But ask these same people if they understand exactly how Apple comes up with their ideas and what approach the company uses to develop blockbuster products--whether it is a fluky phenomenon or based on a repeatable set of governing principles--and you mostly get a dumbfounded stare. This response is what frustrates me most, because people worship what they don't understand.

As the third high-profile departure at Nokia in recent months Ari Jaaksi, vice president of MeeGo devices and operations, who had worked at the company since 1998, told Finnish newspaper Talous Sanomat that he resigned from Nokia last week. According to Nokia Communications Manager Tapani Kaskinen the departure will not affect MeeGo's development schedule. Nevertheless the news cast doubts on whether we'll see a MeeGo-based device from Nokia before the end of 2010.

In an e-mail to their announce mailing list, the The Document Foundation have shared details of their first week of public operation: "One full week has gone by since the announcement of The Document Foundation, and we would like to share some numbers with the people who have decided to follow us since the first day."

Since the launch of Opera 10.5 in March 2010, I've been using it as my primary browser, whether at work or at home. Using Ubuntu at work, and a Windows netbook at home, I wanted a fast browser for my netbook and a coherent browsing experience on both operating systems. And this is where Opera 10.5 (and newer) fits perfectly.

With the release of Windows Phone 7 upon us, the hype machine now goes all the way up to 11. While hype machines are generally relatively harmless and easy to poke a hole through, coordinated FUD campaigns by patent trolls are not. After Apple and Microsoft trolled HTC, and Microsoft now trolling Motorola, the actual FUD campaign against Android is in full swing.

So, Apple has to pay boatloads of money to some patent troll over cover flow and Time Machine-related patents.

InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp looks beyond OpenOffice.org to list 10 great free and open source desktop tools for word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of the featured tools provide a worthwhile alternative to expensive proprietary software, while others carve a niche all their own. All are available for Windows, and nearly all are available for Linux and Mac OS X as well. From AbiWord, to Inkscape, to Task Coach, each of the tools provides further proof that the roster of available free programs is growing remarkably -- in both the breadth and depth of functionality offered.

Yesterday MenuetOS released a kernel update that includes Fourier transform, sinc and resampling. Fourier transform is significant in that it allow for more efficient computation and is essential for high speed computing.

Once upon a time, operating systems used to matter a lot; they defined what a computer could and couldn't do... Today, there's only one operating system: Unix (okay, there are two, but we'll get to that). This is why I contend that the OS doesn't matter - or that we need to take another look at the word's content, at what we mean when we say 'Operating System'.

Last week, a study was published that showed how 15 popular applications in the Android Market shared location data with advertisement servers, while 10 shared unique identifiers with them, as well. Glad you're using an iPhone? Not so fast - another study, published over the weekend, shows that the iOS ain't much better in this regard.

So, yeah, it's been ten years in the making, including a number of rewrites, but the day has finally come: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which, surprisingly enough, form the foundation of, among other things, Enlightenment, have reached beta status. This is a major step towards the final release of Enlightenment DR17, which should hit before year's end.

If you follow the keyboard collectors market (yeah, didn't think so . . .) then you'd certainly know that the IBM model M15 split ergonomic is pretty much the most desirable keyboard out there. A small number of them were made over a short span of time (1994-1995), and their clunky plastic knob and super-adjustable design meant that over years many of them broke. So when one lands on eBay, it's a big deal.