While the world outside of OSNews is wondering whether we really need yet another mobile operating system, we here are of course happy with another contender - the more, the merrier, as it equals to competition, which keeps everybody on their toes. A day before the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona (finally a tech event in my time zone!), Samsung unveiled its Wave handset, the first sporting Samsung's new Bada operating system.

"Five years ago, the open source Xen hypervisor was the primary technology that big vendors like IBM and Red Hat were adopting and pushing. In 2010, that's no longer the case as the rival KVM effort is now getting the attention of both IBM and Red Hat, as well as many others in the Linux ecosystem. So what does this mean for the KVM community and the future of Xen? An IBM study looking at who's most involved in KVM may provide some answers."

This is part three of Ars' guide about virtualisation. "Part 1 described three ways in which a component might be virtualized; emulation, "classic" virtualization, and paravirtualization, and part 2 described in more detail how each of these methods was used in CPU virtualization. But the CPU is not the only part of a computer that can use these techniques; although hardware devices are quite different from a CPU, similar approaches are equally useful."

"Microsoft on Thursday detailed some of the new features in its forthcoming Office for Mac 2011 suite, including co-authoring tools, Web apps, and a redesigned ribbon interface more consistent with its Windows counterpart. Microsoft is a part of Macworld 2010 expo in San Francisco this week, and has used the event to divulge details on its forthcoming update to Office for Mac, expected to arrive later this year."

Sometimes, you come across news items that make you go "eh...?" This is definitely one of them: Microsoft has announced a new anti-piracy update for Windows 7 that phones home every 90 days to check for new activation cracks, but the update is entirely optional - which kind of makes me wonder about the point.

Everybody's favourite Norwegian browser maker has released the beta version of Opera 10.50, the next iteration of the featureful web browser. As Kroc already touched upon late last year, Opera 10.50 comes packed with a lot of improvements across the board, from a new JavaScript engine to an improved address field.

"Silvan Scherrer and Dmitry A. Kuminov have released the GA of the port of the Qt 4 application framework to OS/2 and eComStation, i.e., version 4.5.1 GA. The new release comes with complete support for drag and drop, session management, SQLite3, and includes the Qt Designer application."

The fact that the iPhone is a locked-down device, and that you don't really own it so much as rent it from Apple is well-known by now. The supposed reason for this lock-down is to ensure the device's stability and security - in fact, this has already become conventional wisdom. However, where is the proof that supports this statement? Is there any real-world evidence that suggests this model is better?

The Mom of all internet companies, Google, has announced today that it will effectively become an internet service provider. The company is planning on building a number of ultra high-speed broadband networks in select locations in the United States, serving anywhere between 50000 and 500000 users.

"At the Black Hat DC Conference 2010 security researcher Christopher Tarnovsky of FlyLogic Engineering has demonstrated a way to defeat the Trusted Platform Module chips widely used to secure data in computers, identity cards, gaming systems like the Xbox 360, cable set-top boxes, and other electronics. TPM modules are widely used in enterprise, health care, government, and military applications to protect data through encryption, particularly on portable devices that might be easily lost or stolen. Although Tarnovsky's process is labor intensive and requires both specialized equipment and a significant period of physic access to the device to be cracked, his step-by-step instructions do outline how to get data out of a TPM-protected system, including encryption keys and manufacturing information that could be used to create pre-cracked counterfeit chips."

"In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year's ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you're likely to see in a floorplan like the two below are cores, interfaces, and switches. Most of the discussion focuses on power-related arcana, but most folks are interested in the chips themselves. In this short article, I'll walk you through the floorplan of two chips with similar transistor counts - the Sun's Niagara 3 and IBM's POWER7."

"Every few months I make a pilgrimage to the Sysinternals website to look at its superb collection of tools. It's now hosted inside the Microsoft Technet monster since its authors joined Microsoft as employees some while ago, but the value of their site is still as strong as ever and the tools are now guaranteed not to be ignored or left to rust."

Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick. The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied. A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the "Quantum Tunnelling Composite". The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.