TechCrunch broke the news today that Google has bought Gizmo5, the popular VoIP SIP provider, for $30 mil cash (not confirmed officially yet). The company was led by Michael Robertson, known for his times on mp3.com and Lindows. What does this mean for Google Voice? Read on.

Over the past few years, there have been persistent rumours that NVIDIA, the graphics chip maker, was working on an x86 chip to compete with Intel and AMD. Recently, these rumours gained some traction, but NVIDIA's CEO just shot them down, and denied the company will enter the x86 processor market.

Hands up if you use Firefox. Have used it? Know about it? Heard of it? 'Sites up and down the World Wide Web today will be celebrating five years of Firefox. When I sat down to write this I worried about having to list the history of its features and landmark events and the news of the past five years. Other sites will be comprehensively doing that, there is nothing I can add to that list that Google can't surmise. Instead I will be telling you what Google does not know, my story of Firefox and what Firefox has meant to all of us.

Despite reports to the contrary, current Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard builds do not support the Intel Atom processor. The report that support had returned is a fake, and the most recent build 10C540 still does not support the Atom processor. C'est tout.

It was actually quite a relaxing week on OSNews, with few big news stories going on. We talked about Psystar, the need (or not?) for ZFS to have an fsck tool, the end of the FatELF project, and the release of Mandriva 2010.0, among other things.

Is complexity (and wearing this on the outside) an inherit part of open source design? FactoryJoe compares the OpenOfficeMouse (a mouse with 18 programmable buttons and even an analogue joystick) and the Apple Magic Mouse-"To me, the OpenOfficeMouse seems like such a typical product from the open source community."

Debian GNU/Hurd can now be installed a little easier. "This month Philip Charles created a new installation CD, the L series, for the Hurd, which brings us a big step towards installing the Hurd from the Hurd (without the need of a Linux-based installer). If you enjoy testing stuff, please give it a try."

Every now and then you come across these news items that make just too much sense to be true. Earlier this year, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry threatened Norway's largest ISP, Telenor: block access to The Pirate Bay within 14 days, or face legal action. Telenor refused to comply - so it went to court. In what can only be seen as a major victory, the judge sided with Telenor.

Whether you like Microsoft or not, the Redmond giant does have one thing going for it: the company's research division. Working together with several universities and other institutions, Microsoft Research works on the soft and hardware of the future, ranging from research operating systems to insanely cool things like what Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie showed off during the Microsoft College Tour '09 (more videos).

"The Moblin project steering committee today announces the project release of Moblin v2.1 for Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettops. This project release includes the broadest feature additions, customer requested improvements, and overall polish to date. With this community release you will see significant feature additions and improvements including enhanced browser functionality and plug-in support, UI enhancements, support for 3G data connections, Bluetooth device management, input method support for localized languages, integrated application installer for the Moblin Garage, performance and stability improvements, and additional overall help and documentation."

"As a major Linux vendor, one might expect that Red Hat's new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers solution would be able to run on Linux servers. You'd be wrong. Not only is that not the case, but the Management Server piece of RHEV, which provides virtualization management capabilities, requires users to be running Microsoft's Windows Server. That's no typo: A Linux vendor is requiring its users to run one of its key new products on the rival, closed source Windows operating system. According to Red Hat, the plan is to have a Linux version ready by some point in 2010. But in the meantime, Red Hat customers who want to run the virtualization manager must purchase or already own a Windows server."

"For weeks, the major governing institutions of the European Union have been locked in a battle over three-strikes laws, Internet disconnections, and the appropriate role of judges in the process. Just after midnight last night, the deadlock was broken and all parties agreed to a new 'Internet freedom provision' that reinforces the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, and the right to judicial review under any Internet sanctions."

A few weeks ago, we asked you for ideas on interesting interview subjects. You had a lot of great ideas, and we started contacting people. We'll probably be working through that list for many months. We've decided to start with three interviews: Timothy Normand Miller from OGP, Michael Dexter at Linux Fund and the Arch Linux Team. We've created a "conversation" for each interview subject over at our conversations area. For the next few days, we're going to collect interview questions in the comments of those conversations.

As we all know, Mac OS X has support for what is called 'fat binaries'. These are binaries that can carry code for for instance multiple architectures - in the case of the Mac, PowerPC and x86. Ryan Gordon was working on an implementation of fat binaries for Linux - but due to the conduct of the Linux maintainers, Gordon has halted the effort.