Intel and main (and only?) rival AMD have long been embroiled in legal battles regarding antitrust and patent issues. On top of that, antitrust regulators all over the world are investigating Intel for possible antitrust violations, so it looks like Intel needed to close off at least one flank: the company has reached a settlement with AMD, ending all legal disputes between the two chip makers. Intel will pay 1.25 billion USD to AMD.

October 2009 marked an important milestone in the history of computing. It was exactly 40 years since the first Multics computer system was used for information management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is regarded as the foundation of modern time-sharing systems. Multics was the catalyst for the development of Unix and has been used as a model of operating system design since its release four decades ago. Here is a picture gallery of Multics' history.

Google has invented a new programming language designed to reduce the complexity of coding without compromising the performance of applications. Called Go, the language has been tested internally at Google but is still at an experimental stage, so the company is releasing it as open-source code in the hope that it will get help with its future development.

Just when we were starting to worry that the OS world was becoming ossified around three increasingly-competent options, making it very boring for OS enthusiasts, along comes a re-energized mobile computing market and a furious land grab among established players and new entrants. Samsung, the #2 handset maker by marketshare, is releasing a new mobile OS called Bada and will be vying to become the seventh major mobile OS in the market.

"I've been on a mission in recent months to establish just how common and mundane GPL violations are. Since 21 August 2009, I've been finding one new GPL violating company per day (on average) and I am still on target to find one per day for 365 days straight. When I tell this to people who are new to GPL enforcement, they are surprised and impressed. However, when I tell people who have done GPL enforcement themselves, they usually say some version of: Am I supposed to be impressed by that? Couldn't a monkey do that? Fact is, the latter are a little bit right: there are so many GPL violations that I might easily be able to go on finding one per day for two years straight."

Finally the silence is broken, a new episode is here! Thom was not available again this week, OSnews reader Mike Ferland takes his place and we discuss Windows 7 and The Perfect OS (no relation).