Think of Opera what you want, but those Norwegian guys and girls know how to get publicity. The company has announced it has submitted Opera Mini to the iPhone's App Store, and it has launched a website with a count-up timer, following how long it will take Apple to approve it - if at all, of course.

It has long been known that in addition to the N900 port of Firefox (released just 49 days ago) Mozilla have been targeting Windows Mobile, drawing ever nearer to a release. They have now decided to put the port on hold, following the news of Windows Phone 7 Series at MIX (and what that holds for Windows Mobile 6.5). "While we think Windows Phone 7 looks interesting and has the potential to do well in the market, Microsoft has unfortunately decided to close off development to native applications. Because of this, we won't be able to provide Firefox for Windows Phone 7 at this time. Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don't know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold."

"Mobile software company Myriad Group announced J2Android, which will make it possible for Java-based mobile applications to run on Android-based phones, the company said on Monday. The J2Android tool converts existing Java applications, including games, to run on Dalvik, which is the virtual machine used on all Android devices. Besides converting the application, J2Android will let the application be rescaled to fit the screen of the Android device, according to Simon Wilkinson, CEO at Myriad. It can also add softkeys, if the original application was developed for phones with a numerical keypad, Wilkinson said."

Andrew Tridgell recommends reading software patents, and describes how to do it right. "That first type of defence is really the one you want, it's called: non-infringement. And that is: 'we don't do that. The patent says X, we don't do X, therefore go away, sue someone else, it's not relevant for us'. That's the defence you want. Next one, prior art: Basically the argument is: somebody else did that before. It's a very, very tricky argument to get right. Extremely tricky, and it is the most common argument bandied about in the free software community. And if you see it in the primary defence against a patent, you should cringe because it is an extremely unsafe way of doing things."

Palm. It's that big clunky part of your hand that doesn't get any of the attention - the fingers, the thumb especially, get all the glory. Just think, however, what your hands would be like if you didn't have palms, and your fingers just grew straight out of your wrist. Doesn't look so hot now, does it? Well, Palm is supposedly about to go under, if you were to believe the reports. Update: Palm has just announced that the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus will become available on AT&T in the coming months.

How surprised would you be, if I walked up to you and told you that every human needs oxygen to survive? I'm assuming that you wouldn't at all be surprised - you might start feeling a little uneasy that a random stranger walked up to you with such a crazy question, but you wouldn't be surprised by the we-need-oxygen fact. Apparently, people are surprised that Ubuntu is not a democracy.

Thanks to the efforts of Neil Cafferkey, it has been possible since early March to install and boot AROS from a USB stick (if your BIOS supports this functionality, obviously). There is an ongoing topic about this at Aros-Exec, and the Icaros Desktop Blog talks about it as well.

"I am against software patents because it is not reasonable to expect that the current patent system, nor even one designed to improve or replace it, will ever be able to accurately determine what might be considered legitimately patentable from the overwhelming volume of innovations in software. Even the most trivial of software applications involves hundreds, potentially thousands of design decisions which might be considered by those aggressively seeking patents as potentially protectable inventions. If even the most basic elements of these are patentable, as they are currently, the patent system will be fundamentally unable to scale to meet that demand. As it is today."

Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

"Many of us who tried out the Windows Phone 7 simulator were disappointed to discover the simulator didn't contain a lot of the functionality that was being shown off at Mix10. It turns out Dan Ardelean has published a modified or 'unlocked' version of the simulator that contains virtually everything that was displayed. The front page is now full of apps that work, the settings menu is a long list of options for those apps. Unfortunately the download of the .bin file has now been pulled, but I was lucky enough to get a copy. Check out the 10 minute video of Windows Phone 7 ." It even has a nice task manager and file explorer - undoubtedly for testing purposes. It's Windows CE 6.0, after all.

"There has been much speculation over what OS 6.0 could possibly look like. We were recently hit with these images of what appear to be of a device running OS 6.0 with a similar screen resolution of a storm or storm2. These spy shot images come highly regarded as real from one our best connects. We're hoping to see it soon on a physical device and so until then take from it what you will."

Now that Internet Explorer 9 has been let out its cage, we all know a great deal more about Microsoft's position towards the video codec situation with the HTML5 video tag. Microsoft has chosen for H264, a codec it already includes in Windows by default anyway. This means that apart from Firefox and Opera, every other major browser will support H264. Some are seeing this as a reason for Mozilla to give in to their ideals and include support for H264 as well - I say: Mozilla, stick to your ideals. The last people you should be listening to in matters like this are web developers.

"With chip makers continuing to increase the number of cores they include on each new generation of their processors, perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems, suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at Microsoft."

"The city of Amsterdam has been involved for several years in building Citynet, a partnership between the city and two private investors to wire 40000 Amsterdam buildings with fiber. And it's not just fiber, it's open access fiber - any ISP can sign up to use the infrastructure and deliver ultra-fast Internet access. In 2008, the European Union ruled that the city's involvement in the project was in fact legal, and that it was not improperly interfering in the market. We asked Herman Wagter, CEO of the company that built Citynet fiber project, to talk about how he got the job done, and to explain the challenges of rolling out fiber in a densely crowded European city." In case you're wondering: no, I don't live in Amsterdam. My small hick town has plans for fibre too, however.