Apple has responded to Psystar's new lawsuit today, stating that it is nothing but a stall tactic on Psystar's end. While I could just paraphrase whatever the filing reads, I decided to take this opportunity to address a number of sentiments and analogies often made in comment threads (not necessarily on OSNews).

The Genode project has published its second ready-to-boot Live CD featuring a bunch of graphical demonstrations such as Qt4 applications and Linux running on top of Genode. Immediatly after the latest release of the Genode OS framework the new Live CD demonstrates some of the framework's features. The Qt4 demo utilizes the freshly integrated dynamic linker in order to reduce the size of applications. Another scenario demonstrates Genode's ability to launch Linux. Beside these new features, the portability properties of Genode are demonstrated by an application scenario that can be executed on top of different microkernels, namely OKL4, Pistachio, and Fiasco.

David Chisnall casts a critical eye over the GNU General Public License and asks whether it's done more harm than good for the Free Software movement. "Looking back, has the GPL been a help, or a hindrance? And will it continue to be a help or hindrance in the future?"

In sync with its release schedule, the KDE team has released KDE 4.3.1, the latest and greatest in the KDE line. This monthly release includes fixes for many outstanding bugs, including several crash fixes, and support for transferring files over ssh via KIO::Fish. Those who use KDE can wait for it to be updated on its own or can always download it themselves. On a sadder note, a family member of one of the developers on the team recently passed away; this release is dedicated to her. "KDE 4.3.1 is dedicated to Emma Hope Pyne, the daughter of Michael Pyne. Emma Hope suddenly passed away last week. The KDE community feels incredibly sad about this loss and wishes Michael and the family and friends all the strength needed to cope with the loss of Emma Hope." Our best wishes go out to Michael and his family.

Ars writes: "The final release of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (1541.1MB) has been posted on the Microsoft Download Center. This release of Microsoft's standalone virtualization server for small- and mid-sized business customers is a vast improvement over the first version."

"US-based company Genesi, which builds ARM Cortex-powered appliances that could be compatible with the RISC OS Open Beagleboard work, is said to be in talks with RISC OS companies over a possible port of the OS to its products. It's hoped ROS 5 could be made to run on the lightweight EFIKA MX Open Client, which sports a 800MHz Cortex-A8 processor, 3D graphics hardware, 512M RAM, wifi networking and more. Genesi analyst Matt Sealey said: 'RISC OS is really popular in the UK and the last dedicated RISC OS box - the Iyonix - has been discontinued for six months. We are currently questioning the relevant companies in the UK, including Castle, about collaboration and marketing efforts, and the support they'd need to make it a reality.'"

Ars Technica's John Siracusa has published his in-depth review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. As always, this is the only review you really need to read. Great stuff, as usual - even if you don't care about or don't use Mac OS X. He concludes: "Snow Leopard is a unique and beautiful release, unlike any that have come before it in both scope and intention. At some point, Mac OS X will surely need to get back on the bullet-point-features bandwagon. But for now, I'm content with Snow Leopard. It's the Mac OS X I know and love, but with more of the things that make it weak and strange engineered away."

With the imminent release of the Haiku Alpha, Haiku-Files is now releasing ISO images for testing. Note that these are not the actual alpha release, but only daily builds of the branch which will eventually become the alpha! "With the upcoming release of Haiku R1Alpha1, we are providing candidate imagefiles. They are X86 GCC2 Hybrid images and provided as Raw HD, VMware, and ISO images. As per the R1Alpha1 specifications, they are built from the releases/r1alpha1 branch code and utilize the alpha-* build profile."

According to Apple, the netbook market is not a market they want to partake in, because they believe the current crop of netbooks is not good enough. Well, good enough or not, netbook sales are still growing like crazy, according to the latest figures from DisplaySearch.

While browsing the ever-wider world web today, I came across a story about IBM's patent of a sort of "Facebook Remote Control." It was appalling. Do we seriously need more single-purpose devices that will enable us to sit around more wasting more time than we already do? Does anyone really need to seclude themselves from the world even more to publish their lives on yet another teen-infested network? Must we really always be connected to the net? Read on for my ramble concerning a dark side of technology.

It was a sad day when the Eee Keyboard's initial release date of sometime in August was (which, unless it magically appears for sale today, it's not going to happen) was delayed. The drool-worthy piece of work, which we detailed some months ago, just arrived at the FCC. "Interestingly, the test reports indicate the presence of a UWB radio in addition WiFi and Bluetooth, so it looks like we'll see the planned wireless HDMI model even after the spec pretty much hit the skids earlier this summer. We'll see how it goes -- and if we get that interesting Moblin version alongside the Windows edition when this thing eventually ships." Rumors have been floating around about an October release. Hopefully that's the case (or sooner). Pocketbooks at the ready, gentlemen and ladies.

Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV have announced the immediate availability of eComStation 2.0 Silver Release for download on August 28th, 2009. This beta release RC7, codenamed "Silver Release", is available to Software Subscription subscribers. This release of eComStation 2.0 has been under development for a long time. This is demonstrated in the amount of issues resolved and the amount of code committed. For example, 259 bugs were resolved, of which 174 were "fixed" since the previous beta release (eCS 2.0 RC6a). Over 1450 commits were made since the release of eComStation v2.0 RC6a (beta).

It's time for another week in review. This was decidedly the Snow Leopard week, but we also talked a lot about Linux, Psystar, and even SCO resurrected from the dead to continue its litigation about UNIX.

Some detailed benchmarks of Snow Leopard. "The performance improvements we encountered in Mac OS X 10.6 through our benchmarks we were quite astonishing. Thanks to the introduction of the Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit migration, OpenCL support, and other refinements made "under the hood" of Snow Leopard, this is one hell of a fast operating system. We were quite appalled with multiple tests exhibiting nearly 50% performance boosts over Mac OS X 10.5.8. While that was an extreme improvement, many other tests ran 10~16% faster. In a few tests, the performance was the same or the delta was statistically insignificant, but in a couple tests, there were regressions."