Fedora 12 has been released today. "I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 12, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat."

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is currently under way, and as usual, the technical fellows at Microsoft gave speeches about the deep architecture of Windows - in this case, Windows 7 of course. As it turns out, quite some seriously impressive changes have been made to the very core of Windows - all without breaking a single application. Thanks to BetaNews for summarising this technical talk so well.

"Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100000 iPhone apps, will continued migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?"

The beta for Atlas has been launched on November 15. Atlas is a visual development tool for creating web applications using the Cappuccino framework. "Atlas is a development tool for building Cappuccino applications. In addition to managing your project files and editing code, it includes a powerful visual layout tool for designing your interfaces without ever having to touch code. Designers are empowered to interact with their designs instantly, which means programmers get to finished applications faster."

This weekend, Palm launched its second webOS phone, the Palm Pixi. At the same time, the company also released webOS 1.3.1 for Pre owners in the US (other countries will follow later this month). At the same time, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein talked to The New York Times about his company.

OSnews Publisher David Adams and I discuss the mobile computing landscape, how the emergence of mobile computing is changing our lives and changing the design and market share of operating systems. Is there room in the market for 7 competing mobile phone platforms? Are we just repeating the 1980s PC market again?

Thom's down with flu, so to avoid moving a lot of interesting news to pg.2, I am creating a combined item here covering a number of Microsoft related news items submitted to us.

Google engineer (and my husband!) Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Queru just open sourced the latest Android version, codenamed "Eclair". This will open the doors for device manufacturers to get the latest version of Android. You can read all about it in his message here.

Techvideoblog has a video review of the Menq Easypc E760, an $80 ARM-based laptop that runs Android. From the looks of it, I don't think this is a very good gadget, because it's slow (less powerful than an iPhone 3GS, but of course also a lot cheaper), but I agree with the Techvideo guy: the Easypc is important because it's the vanguard of a likely wave of cheap, ARM-based devices that will very soon have the necessary power for a pleasant and productive web browsing experience. Once that happens, a sizable portion of the current laptop and netbook userbase will move downmarket, and some of the constituents that the OLPC program was trying to serve (young students and the lower economic stratum) will have a network communication device available to them that's more accessible.

As regular readers on OSNews will know, I'm quite opposed to the concept of post-sale restrictions, but also the insane countermeasures undertaken by the film and music industry against individuals who illegally download content. The reason I'm so opposed to these things is not because I approve of the act of illegal downloading - no, it's all about the slippery slope effect.

GNOME 3, the much talked about next generation GNOME introduces a radical shift from the interface found in GNOME 2.x. Digitizor has a quick visual tour of GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 9.10.

Google have created a new HTTP-based protocol "SPDY" (pronounced "Speedy") to solve the problem of the client-server latency with HTTP. "We want to continue building on the web's tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers. So over the last few months, a few of us here at Google have been experimenting with new ways for web browsers and servers to speak to each other, resulting in a prototype web server and Google Chrome client with SPDY support."

Intel and main (and only?) rival AMD have long been embroiled in legal battles regarding antitrust and patent issues. On top of that, antitrust regulators all over the world are investigating Intel for possible antitrust violations, so it looks like Intel needed to close off at least one flank: the company has reached a settlement with AMD, ending all legal disputes between the two chip makers. Intel will pay 1.25 billion USD to AMD.

According to a message on one of the development mailing lists, Google seems to be planning a beta of Chrome to appear sometime in December. There isn't any set date, and the message wasn't even addressing the release of a beta for Mac, but Nick Baum, a Google Chrome product manager, also the author of the mailing list post, let word fly. "Why make the switch now? The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December. We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that. If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"