Jay Robinson delves into what makes up iTunes LP and comes out pleased and suprised: "The iTunes LP experience is accomplished with HTML 4.01, CSS and JS. The interface feels very Flash-like, but there is no trace of it. The CSS animations are elaborate and smooth."

Apart from Linux and the various BSD operating systems, there's another open source UNIX-like operating system (actually, it's a certified UNIX): OpenSolaris. There are a few key differences between Linux and OpenSolaris, and TuxRadar lists some of them so that Linux users can dive right into Solaris.

Getting data into (and then out of) Web-based services can be tricky or even impossible. Google today publicly committed to liberating user data in all of the company's products, making it easy to switch services.

"WebGL is basically an initiative to bring 3D graphics into web browsers natively, without having to download any plugins. This is achieved by adding a few things to HTML5, namely, defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 and letting you draw things into a 3D context of the canvas element." Also see the press release for more details.

The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku, an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. The purpose of this release is to make a stable development snapshot of Haiku available to a wider audience for more extensive testing and debugging.

Synergistically bringing together multiple topics, this week's show synergizes Palm's new Pixi, the Palm "App Catalog" and the AppStore, Microsoft's anti-Linux training, Sega's Dreamcast, Apple's Grand Central Dispatch and finally Chrome's extensions. Feel the synergy!

"For the last 12 months, I have used Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04 as my primary OSes. I remain a very happy Linux convert, but I worry that Ubuntu is being unevenly developed. Certain areas have seen great improvements over the last 12 months, while other areas have languished or been largely ignored. The purpose of this article is not to whine or rant, but to bring some perspective to the evolution (or lack thereof) that Ubuntu has experienced between versions 8.04 and 9.04."

While we at OSNews often talk about desktops, laptops, and netbooks, there is another "form factor" which is making inroads into various households: the home theatre PC, or HTPC. There are a lot of software packages out there that will aid in turning a computer into an HTPC, and since I've been testing three of them extensively over the past months, I figured we'd talk about what you use.

One of the main new features in Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system has been released as open source. Apple has released the code of the userland portion of its Grand Central Dispatch technology under the Apache License, version 2. Mac OS X also has kernel support for Grand Central Dispatch, which is also released as open source via the XNU project. While we're at it, let's take this opportunity to look into exactly what Grand Central Dispatch is.

Earlier this week, I detailed a number of things Apple could learn from how Palm handles its phones, operating system, and applications. Today, news broke out of the first application rejection from Palm's App Catalog, and from this and Palm's actions surrounding this rejection Apple can again learn a whole lot.

In an attempt to show just how slow South Africa's Telkom broadband is, a frustrated IT company had a race to see which would be faster: transferring 4GB by sending a USB drive via pigeon 60 miles away, or transferring the files via the broadband connection. There were even rules in place so as to not have any unfair advantage over the broadband such as "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within." It was faster to send the data by pigeon than by broadband. It took the bird about an hour to reach the recipient station, and it took another hour to transfer the data to the other computer. The file being transferred via the broadband connection was still at 4%. Telkom said that it is not responsible for the firm's slow Internet speed. Winston, the bird, is safely back in the IT office, probably enjoying birdseed without any performance-enhancing caplets mixed in.

Microsoft is creating a 501.c non-profit organization (called the CodePlex Foundation) that will support open source projects from the community. That's a little funny since proof was uncovered that they were providing anti-Linux training in this very same week. The foundation is different from the CodePlex website, launched in 2006. The website is rather a complementing factor to the foundation, or vise versa. A FAQ about the project said, "The Foundation is solving similar challenges; ultimately aiming to bring open source and commercial software developers together in a place where they can collaborate. This is absolutely independent from the project hosting site, but it is essentially trying to support the same mission. It is just solving a different part of the challenge, a part that Codeplex.com isn't designed to solve... We believe that commercial software companies and the developers that work for them under-participate in open source projects."

"Though the open source FreeBSD operating system has changed in many aspects over the last 16 years of its life, one item that has remained relatively static is its underlying network routing architecture. No more: It's getting an overhaul with the upcoming FreeBSD 8.0 release. FreeBSD 8.0, due out next month, will include a new routing architecture that takes advantage of parallel processing capabilities. According to its developers, the update will provide FreeBSD 8.0 with a faster more advanced routing architecture than the legacy architecture."

Linux 2.6.31 has finally been released. The list of new features includes USB 3.0 support, a equivalent of FUSE for character devices that can be used for proxying OSS sound through ALSA, memory management changes that improve interactivity in desktops, ATI Radeon KMS support, Intel's Wireless Multicomm 3200 support, readahead improvements, a tool for using hardware performance counters, a memory checker and a memory leak detector, btrfs improvements, support for IEEE 802.15.4, IPv4 over Firewire and other improvements.