As it turns out, the relationship between Apple and Palm is even less amicable than we already thought it to be. Bloomberg got their hands on communications between Ed Colligan, then-CEO of Palm, and Steve Jobs in which Jobs made a proposal in which the two companies would promise to refrain from hiring each other's employees. Colligan, however, rejected the proposal, calling it wrong and "likely illegal".

"The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new - largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore's Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines. Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod. Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before."

On August 4 we discussed the possibility of openSUSE defaulting to KDE during the installation routine. This was raised as a feature request within the openSUSE community, and quickly gained the favour of many, become the most popular request. The openSUSE board and variousother leader within the project have discussed the issue, and have decided that yes, from now on, openSUSE will default to KDE during the installation process.

Apple's iPhone has completely destroyed the status quo that existed in the mobile operating system world before the iPhone arrived on the scene. The iPhone made it easier for people to get on the web while on the go, and despite ridicule before it was even released, it has revolutionised the industry, forcing other manufacturers to get a move on.

"Apple today released Hard Drive Firmware Update 2.0, addressing issues with certain hard drives on the latest MacBook Pros models. Apple had been reported last week to be working on the issue, which involves intermittent 'beeping' noises and occasional brief system freezes on machines using 500 GB, 7200 rpm hard drives."

What else would we talk about other than the massively article about X.org last week. We try and address a number of concerns about the article and common lines of reasoning / misunderstanding. Lastly, we move onto something completely different with topics on Google Chrome on Linux, IE6 and the two details we know about RockMelt: Rock. Melt.

The Linux Foundation has made some analyzation the past two years into just how much code is being added to the project and who is doing that contribution. This year's report is out, and the results are actually quite smile-worthy if you're a Linux advocate: the increase in code contributions is phenomenal, the rate at which these contributions are being submitted is faster, and there are more individual developers than previously.

"The many thousands of free games available for Linux has made it difficult to select which ones deserve a special mention. For this article, our objective is not to necessarily select games which have flawless graphics and sound, but instead to identify games which are highly addictive and have great playability. It has taken us weeks of heated discussions to whittle down the games into just 42 titles. We have tried to cover a wide range of game genres. Hopefully there will be something in this article which will be of interest to any type of gamer."

"The PySide project provides LGPL-licensed Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. PySide Qt bindings allow both free open source and proprietary software development and ultimately aim to support all of the platforms as Qt itself." Previously, the PyQt bindings were not licensed LGPL. If one wished to make a commercial application, then one previously had to purchase a commercial license for PyQt. Now it is possible to dynamically link to the LGPL-licensed PySide bindings instead. The PySide bindings are API compatible with PyQt.

"We've been doing some investigating, friends - making phone calls, demanding answers. And it was worth it. We can confirm something very few people get to confirm: British shoppers aren't going to be totally shafted over software pricing for once. Full versions of Windows 7 Home Premium are going to cost us half as much as they cost Americans."

Following the three-months release schedule, version 9.08 of the Genode Operating-System Framework has been released, bringing improvements all over the code base and introducing new features such as a dynamic linker, and long desired support for super pages and write-combined I/O access. As described in the release notes, the overall theme of this release had been refinement, resulting in much improved implementations for key parts of the framework. In particular, Genode's synchronization primitives such as locks and signals had received much attention, and the central timer service have been replaced by a much improved implementation.

Last week we talked about what Linux (well, okay, X) could learn from Windows Vista and Windows 7, focusing on the graphics stack. A short article over at TechWorld lists seven things Windows 7 should learn from the Linux world. Some of them are spot-on, a few are nonsensical, and of course, and I'm sure you have a few to add too.

It's been a long time, but Palm has finally announced it is accepting submissions for its App Catalog. It's still in beta, and the applications will be only available for US customers. The details are on Palm's developer network.

The MIT Technology Review, one of the world's first technology magazines still around, has named Adam Dunkels, author of the Contiki embedded open source OS, as one of this year's top 35 young innovators.