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.

An eventful little week this was, but mostly because Apple grabbed the spotlight in various different ways. For the rest, we focussed on Microsoft's proposed browser ballot screen, we took a look at KDE 4.3RC3, and Microsoft and Yahoo finally got to do their thing.

"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."

Apple's rejection of the Google Voice iPhone application and the removal of 3rd party clients proved to be the last straw, and now the Federal Communications Commission is involved. The FCC has begun an investigation into the matter. "The Federal Communications Commission has a mission to foster a competitive wireless marketplace, protect and empower consumers, and promote innovation and investment," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said, "Recent news reports raise questions about practices in the mobile marketplace."

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.

Michael Arrington didn't feel like joining my revolution (officially, at least) but he did decide he'd had enough, and claims that he's paying a termination fee and dropping his iPhone. He'll be using an Android handset instead from now on. TechCrunch has been the epicenter of griping about Apple's handling of the App Store, and I don't imagine that just because Arrington is leaving his iPhone behind that they'll quit covering the issue over there.

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.

"The name Windows Phone applies to Windows Mobile 6.1, 6.5 and multitouch Windows Mobile 7. At least something in the Windows universe is forwards and backwards compatible. Features of the new platform (that is WM 6.5, a.k.a. Windows Phone) include back-up of all SMS and email content into Microsoft's cloud, remote disabling of the handset and inclusion of an iTunes-alike Windows Mobile software repository called Market Place."

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.

I think I'd like to start an internet movement. Due to Apple's recent actions regarding the Google Voice app, I intend to criticize Apple every day at OSNews for 1984 days, or until they perform a very subtle and simple act of contrition. I'd like to enlist the help of every tech journalist, blogger, twitterer, Facebook denizen, and person who ever talks to another person. I'm that girl in the running shorts with the hammer, people! I'm throwing the hammer at the big creepy guy on the screen! We don't have to be slaves anymore! Read on for the full manifesto.

The CentOS project, the Linux distribution aimed at the enterprise built from Red Hat's freely available source code, has hit a significant bump in the road: the project's main administrator, Lance Davis, has gone missing-in-action. This is kind of a problem as Davis is the sole administrator fo the CentOS.org domain, the IRC channels - and the CentOS funds.

Valerie Aurora has published a great article in LWN about btrfs: "You probably have heard of the cool new kid on the file system block - after all, Linus Torvalds is using it as his root file system on one of his laptops. But you might not know much about it beyond a few high-level keywords - copy-on-write, checksums, writable snapshots - and a few sensational rumors and stories - the Phoronix benchmarks, btrfs is a ZFS ripoff, btrfs is a secret plan for Oracle domination of Linux, etc. When it comes to file systems, it's hard to tell truth from rumor from vile slander. In this article, we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of btrfs on many levels."

This morning Intel has announced the release of Clutter 1.0.0, the graphics library that is gaining speed within the GNOME development community (it is used by Gnome Shell). "This toolkit provides a library/API for creating rich user interfaces in a relatively easy to use way that conceals much of the challenges of programming your application to directly use OpenGL or OpenGL ES. Clutter is already being used within Moblin V2 and its user interface is very impressive."

"Windows 7 Ultimate has been cracked. The pirate milestone, reached almost three months before Windows 7 is set to hit General Availability on October 22, 2009, was achieved via OEM instant offline activation that passes Windows Genuine Advantage validation and keeps the operating system permanently activated. Previous cracks weren't as solid: while they may be working now, they can easily be disabled by Microsoft. This one won't be so easy."