It seems like Microsoft is accepting the outcome of the appeal case yesterday. The company has released an update for OEMs in the United States that strips the infringing feature from the ubiquitous word processor. "The following patch is required for the United States."

Good news for those interested in continuing use of the OpenStep operating system: Atomic Object has posted a new version of the community VMware driver for OpenStep on github. You can read more about it in the blog post or the forum announcement over at nextcomputers.org. The update includes support for high-resolution video modes.

Earlier this year, a judge ruled that Microsoft willfully infringed on an XML-related patent held by i4i, and ordered the company to pay 290 million USD. In addition, if the Redmond giant didn't comply within 60 days of the ruling, Word would be banned from the US market. Microsoft later received a stay on this injunction, pending appeal. This appeal failed for Microsoft, as the earlier ruling has been upheld.

One of the many issues plaguing the App Store for Apple's iPhone platform is that of 'app spam'. Now that Palm is busy dotting the i's of its own offering, the App Catalog, discussions have erupted about how Palm should combat this problem - if at all.

With the end of the year in sight, the great list-making time has come upon us. Newsweek makes ten predictions for 2010, and at number 9, they predict the end of the road for Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. I never really thought about it that much, but if you line up Microsoft's failures over the past years, it's actually a miracle his head hasn't rolled yet.

Wired has a very interesting article detailing the demise of 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever, the iconic game that never was. "It was never completed. Screenshots and video snippets would leak out every few years, each time whipping fans into a lather - and each time, the game would recede from view. Normally, videogames take two to four years to build; five years is considered worryingly long. But the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie - Toy Story - and Xbox did not yet exist."

"Dan O'Bannon, the man who gave the world Alien and Total Recall, has died aged 63, the New York Times reports. O'Bannon passed away at his home in Santa Monica, California, last Thursday, as a result of the gastrointestinal disorder Crohn's disease, which he'd suffered for 30 years."

"Intel has revealed the launch specs for the first-ever line of x86 products that contain both a GPU and CPU on the same die. Pine Trail, the next-generation Atom platform, will pave the way for future integrated CPU/GPU parts from both Intel and AMD."

We recently asked the OSNews community for input to create questions to send over to the folks at Linux Fund. The questions were compiled and sent over to Michael Dexter, program director at Linux Fund, and he graciously complied in addressing them and clarifying just what it was we all wanted to learn.

Early this year, we reported that the alpha versions of REBOL 3 ran on Syllable Server, based on the unmodified Linux version. Now we have followup news. R3 has been split into its planned core interpreter library and an open source host environment for integration with as many systems as possible. Kaj de Vos has got this version to work on Syllable Desktop (screenshot). This is the first time that a version of REBOL can run there (besides emulating a complete other operating system on Syllable Desktop), so this is a major step towards the project's REBOL cross-platform strategy.

As a result of the MPX integration in the mainline X.Org Server, the French-based ENAC Interactive Computing Lab produced a new video showing off the new multi-touch capabilities using Fedora 12 with its X Server 1.7 and Linux 2.6.31 kernel.

In a very unsurprising move, Psystar is closing up shop. It will fire its eight employees, and be done with it. There isn't more to say, really, except this: one down, at least four to go, of which three in Europe. Good luck bullying those three, Apple. Update: Psystar's lawyers have stated that the original story wasn't true. Psystar will continue to litigate the legality of Rebel EFI through the motion process described by Judge Alsup. They will also continue the Florida case.

"The Mozilla development community has rolled out the latest beta of its Firefox 3.6 browser. In addition to the usual round of bug fixes, Firefox 3.6 beta version 5, comes with a number of new features and performance enhancements. The browser offers the ability for users to easily reskin the browsers with a new visual theme. The new version can also run scripts asynchronously, which should speed load times of pages that have multiple scripts. The new release also aims to appease cutting-edge developers, with support for various new standards."

"If you run Itanium-based servers in your data center, 2010 has a surprise for you. The dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat, is not going to be supporting its future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on any Itanium platforms, old or new."