"Sun Microsystems' product plans are up in the air pending its acquisition by Oracle, but the company's chip engineers continue to present new designs in the hope they'll see the light of day. At the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Tuesday, Sun presented plans for a security accelerator chip that it said would reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking Web sites. The chip, known as a coprocessor, will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls, the code name for the follow-on to Sun's multithreaded Ultrasparc T2 processor."

The Finnish company behind the open-source file system NTFS-3G, Tuxera, has announced it has signed a confidential intellectual-property agreement with Microsoft about creating a Linux exFAT driver which they will sell to Linux OEMs. They are in talks with Microsoft about an open source exFAT driver.

Not too long ago we had a semi-loss for The Pirate Bay in The Netherlands, which was convicted 'by default' because the defendants did not show up in court to plea their case. Today, The Netherlands once again saw a ruling in a high-profile piracy case, and again, there's a loss for the defendants. Update: Oh, and by the way - thought about putting some lyrics you like on your website or blog? Think again. We live in a crazy world, people.

With Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system arriving on people's doorsteps over the coming weekend, you'd think that all the new features are known by now, and there will be no more major surprises. Well, that's not entirely true: on Intego's Mac Security Blog, it is reported that Snow Leopard comes with anti-virus/malware functionality built-in. Update: Snow Leopard testers on MacRumors confirmed the functionality. How, exactly, it works, is not yet known, however.

Opera 10 has hit the release candidate status. "The Opera 10 release candidate is feature complete, with a surprising array of new features, a fresh look and feel, a new application icon, and enhanced speed and performance. Opera 10 features Opera Turbo, the new bandwidth-booster for slow Internet connections. It also features a significantly improved Opera Mail, Opera's built-in e-mail client. Tabbed browsing enters the next phase of its evolution with resizeable, thumbnail tabs. The upgrade of Opera's Speed Dial now gives users a chance to personalize their favorite online destinations and the overall look and feel of their start page. Finally, Opera has always been about speed and performance. Opera 10 is now much faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook and is more than 40% faster than Opera 9.6. Web developers can enjoy Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and new SVG improvements."

Not too long ago, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw explained he had found the perfect husband for Lara Croft: Jason Voorhees. They both have way too many sequels all following a default plot, they both murder a lot and spend a lot of time underground, but most of all: none of them will ever just die. In that light, I suggest another husband for Miss Croft: Darl McBride. Instant update: Darl McBride responds. See inside.

Another week, another instalment in the Apple vs. Psystar soap opera. Last week, we left off when Apple was accusing Psystar of destroying evidence, and even though we had a blunt response to El Reg in which the clone maker denied ever having done such a thing, we did not yet have an official court filing from them. Well, we do now.

In what can surely be called a surprise move, Nokia has announced that it will enter the netbook market with an Atom-based netbook which will ship with Windows 7. While many of the components appear relatively normal compared to other netbooks, it does come with a few features that will set the device apart from the rest. Instant update: Ars believes this is the first Intel Pine Trail netbook.

Qt usually takes the boring memory allocation and deallocation from you, either through its implicitly shared containers, or with QObject's parent child relationship model. But every once in a while, we need to allocate something on the heap, and then the stress starts - where do we delete it, and how do we make sure to not leak the memory? To fix this problem, QScopedPointer was born. It will delete the object it is pointing to automatically when it goes out of scope.

True to the "under-promise and over-deliver" mantra, Apple has announced that it will start shipping Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard August 28. The original release date was announced to fall somewhere in September, so Apple is delivering ahead of schedule.

A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks? My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?

PC gamers vs. console gamers. There's this assumption that PC gamers are capable of playing more complex games than console gamers. The games industry itself has picked up on this assumption and generally dumbs down games for the consoles because they assume us poor console gamers are not capable enough, and as the consoles have increasingly become the focal point of the industry, PC games also started suffering from the dumbing down effect. That's why the developers behind Sacred 2 deserve all the more praise for not assuming all gamers on consoles are 13-year-old Halo-addicted kids by releasing a traditional top-down hack and slash game with an incredibly detailed world and intricate character development.

Like any true geek who's addicted to online presence, a VoIP SIP, Twitter, and a multi-protocol IM application are the first kinds of apps I am trying to locate when jumping smartphone platforms. The iPhone is currently my platform of choice, and the AppStore has its share of such communication applications. So I decided to give a whirl to Acrobits' Softphone, set it up with Gizmo5 and Google Voice, and use it to call my family in Greece or more rarely, my husband at work. Update: New version is out, fixing most of the things mentioned in the review below, and implementing PUSH.

Oracle on Thursday said the U.S. Department of Justice has approved its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, although the deal is subject to certain conditions and still needs the blessing of European regulators. Oracle first announced its bid in April and Sun shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16. The combined company will give Oracle an array of new assets, including a stake in the computer hardware market, the open-source MySQL database and stewardship of the Java programming language. Sun would be just the latest in a long string of companies gobbled up in recent years by Oracle.