Upgrade prices were mysteriously absent from Microsoft's Office 2010 pricing information, which they revealed last week. The upgrade versions of Office have been removed in an attempt to simplify the purchase process for customers, but sadly, it only makes matters more complicated. Simplification -you're doing it wrong.

"The Android variant found on Google's Nexus One handset now has an SDK, answering one of the criticisms aimed at the search giant's foray into hardware. The Android 2.1 SDK includes APIs for creating animated wallpapers, as well as some additional telephony functions and a couple of improvements to interaction with the WebKit browser, all of which are used by Google's own Nexus One applications and are now available to other developers too."

Ah, and there we have it: another chapter in the discussion between open and closed when it comes to application stores. A phishing application, masquerading as a banking application from First Tech Credit Union, made its way onto the Android Market. It was removed quickly, but the damage is done.

Intel has created a web site for its Intelligent Home Energy Management Proof of Concept. In its current incarnation, the device is a beautiful, wall-mounted Atom-based device that allows a homeowner to view and control various home-tech-related displays and dashboards. It's being promoted as primarily a home energy monitoring tool, with real time and historical reports on energy usage. Even the clock feature has an in-line graph displaying current home energy usage. Being a home automation enthusiast, though, I'm more excited about this device's potential as the interface to the home's nerve center.

"Imagine that you are a super-successful movie director, who's been given hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of whiz-bang technology to make a cinematic epic. Sounds good? Not once you are told that people will have to watch it on fuzzy old black and white television sets. Something similar happens to the text that appears on your computer screen whenever you log on to a Web site. The site's owner has so little control over the fine details of what you will see that the typeface in which the text appears is bound to be distorted. Pity the poor designer who struggled to perfect it."

"At one time or another you may have used a rented-out Windows PC, be that at business kiosks or Internet cafes. Technically speaking, though, doing so has never been legal. As of January 1, 2010, the licensing terms for Windows and Microsoft Office have been tweaked so that those that wish to rent, lease, or outsource desktop PCs to third parties with either software can do so by paying an extra fee."

A few weeks ago, we asked for the OSNews community to help with some questions we were going to ask Aaron Griffin from the Arch Linux team, and the response was glorious and somewhat phenomenal. We added those questions to our own and sent them on over, and then we were surprised by receiving not only Aaron Griffin's responses but answers from various individuals from the team.

"Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology cliches to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living."

I followed the hype: Reddit, Slashdot's front page, months of thumbs up on my blog and various video forums by Linux users for OpenShot. Given that I'm longing for a usable Linux video editor since 2003, and given that OpenShot version 1.0 had just been released, I naturally gave it a go, by also downloading its provided dependencies on my Ubuntu Linux 9.10.

The round table changes again this week, Kroc Camen is joined by Tess Flynn and David Adams--sorry, no Thom this time. We discuss the mobility of personal computation machines once more with the fresh topics in the news this week. Google's Nexus One phone, Palm's developer announcements, some Microsoft / HP thing that happened or something, and the sound of inevitability: the Newton Apple Tablet.

"Microsoft has filed a second appeal in their XML patent case, claiming the original ruling could be dangerous for future patent cases. Last month, the software giant lost to tiny Canadian company i4i, and removed all infringing custom XML editing abilities from its Office 2003 and 2007 suite. Microsoft also paid USD 290 million in damages."

Songbird, the open source iTunes alternative (which we reported on earlier), has landed a big deal with Philips. The Dutch electronics manufacturer will bundle Songbird with its GoGear line of .mp3 players as the music management and sync tool. While this is good news for Songbird, there are is a catch.

"Open source has dramatically reshaped the software development landscape. Yet is it enough to help propel the Web itself forward for the next decade? That's what Mozilla believes. After having been synonymous with open source for over a decade, thanks to its efforts behind the popular Firefox Web browser, Mozilla is now creating a new effort to help shaping the Internet's development using the same sorts of techniques that have made open source a success. The goal of the new Mozilla Drumbeat effort is to go beyond open source code to encourage and nurture projects that help to expand understanding and participation in the open Web. While Drumbeat is today only in its early stages of development, Mozilla is budgeting more than $1 million in funding for the effort - a project that it thinks could help to direct the very future of the Internet."

"Among the most widely deployed embedded operating systems on the planet is Wind River's VxWorks real-time OS. This week, Intel's Wind River division is updating VxWorks to version 6.8, providing new multi-core and 4G wireless capabilities. The new VxWorks release comes as the competitive market for embedded operating systems is changing, with the acquisition of rival MontaVista software by chip maker Cavium. MontaVista develops an embedded Linux operating system release that Wind River competes against, with both VxWorks and Wind River's own embedded Linux release."