Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple's Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006. "Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."

A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.

"Linux: If a lack of third-party plug-in support (i.e. Flash) kept you from trying out Chrome on your Linux system, then avoid no longer. The 'early developer version' now supports many plug-ins, and they seem to work pretty well. You'll need to add --enable-plugins to your Chrome shortcut's command line operation to get the 'buggy' plug-in support, but it seems worth the hassle, as YouTube videos are playing relatively stable and smooth. Google's updated their alpha-level Chrome builds to include the newest start page tweaks as well, and it's generally a browser worth checking out, even if a few standard settings and convenience items are still missing."

In this exclusive interview, Rich Sharples, Product Management Director at Red Hat, talks about OpenJDK. the free and open source implementation of the Java SE platform. The IcedTea project, one of Red Hat's major contributions to the OpenJDK ecosystem, has done a great deal to enable upstream adoption of Java on the Linux platform; however, the question remains whether Java would've been more ubiquitous throughout the Linux universe had Sun open sourced Java much sooner than it actually did. Rich discusses some of these issues and talks about some of the new features in OpenJDK 7, as well as the impact that dynamic languages, increased modularity and virtualization will have on the Java platform. He also describes the impact he thinks Oracle's acquisition will have on licensing options around OpenJDK.

With Apple doing really, really well, and with Microsoft having its first sets of negative figures since the company's founding, Microsoft CEO points his arrows towards Cupertino. In a talk to members of the press and analyst community, Ballmer talked about Microsoft vs. Apple.

Intel had to hustle to catch up with competitors in developing chips for mobile devices like smartphones, but the effort led to the development of the highly successful Atom chip, an Intel exec has revealed. Intel kicked off the Atom project in 2004, when it was doing work on developing Arm chips in parallel. At the time the company was "running like crazy" to develop a chip for mobile devices to catch up with the fast evolution of wireless devices, especially voice services, which were peaking at the time.