I'm sure most of you are aware of the advertisements going back and forth between Apple and Microsoft. Apple started out with the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campiagn, and Microsoft responded - after a long wait - with the "Laptop Hunters" ads. Recently, Apple made some price cuts, and according to Microsoft, the Cupertino company's lawyers contacted Microsoft, demanding they take down the ads.

It's time for another "OSNews asks" item. This time, I want to focus on something that I've been wanting to talk about with you all before, but never found the time for. The question is simple: which feature(s) from other operating systems would you like to see in your own main operating system?

Earlier this year, it became known that the Palm Pre, engineered by a number of ex-Apple engineers, could interface with Apple's iTunes as if it was an iPod. Everybody more or less expected Apple to block the Pre from syncing with iTunes, but I don't think any of us had anticipated just how forthright Apple would be about it.

One of the problem with operating system updates is that you often need to reboot the system. While this is nothing but a minor nuisance for us desktop users, it's a bigger problem when it comes to servers. Ksplice is a technology that allows Linux kernel patches to be applied without actually restarting the kernel.

"Want to give Google Android a try, but don't feel like buying a T-Mobile G1? LiveAndroid lets you download a LiveCD disc image of the Google Android operating system. Just burn the image to a disc, stick it in a CD-ROM drive, and reboot your computer and you can check out Android without installing it or affecting any files on your PC. You can also use the disc image in a virtualization application like VirtualBox or Microsoft Virtual PC if you want to try the operating system without even rebooting your computer."

"Microsoft has announced pricing for Azure that marginally undercuts Amazon on raw computing for Windows-based clouds but remains more expensive than the mega book warehouse's Linux option. The company has said it will charge $0.12 per compute hour for its Windows Azure Compute. Amazon's price for an ondemand Windows instance starts at $0.125. Amazon's Linux-based service undercuts Windows, with pricing starting at $0.10 per computing hour. Add in storage, and Azure's price will creep up further against Amazon: Azure will charge $0.15 per gigabyte stored versus $0.10 per gigabyte each month from Amazon."

You might have missed while being in shock and awe over our excellent review of the sam440ep and AmigaOS 4.1 (I'm joking, people), but there's a bit of a riot going on in Microsoft blogging circles about the "RTM" date for Windows 7. A classic case of 'air, meet heater'.

Microsoft plans to use Windows Embedded to combat rival operating systems in smartbooks and a number of other devices meant to always be connected to the Internet that Microsoft calls CIDs, or consumer Internet devices. In this interview Kevin Dallas, the general manager of Microsoft's Windows Embedded business, discussed Microsoft's strategies for smartbooks and other devices, such as the company's Haiku concept device.

It is not a secret that Apple is showing resistance to supporting Adobe's flash on the iPhone and that their efforts to add new features to HTML/CSS is driven towards reducing their dependence on Flash. Going further in that direction, the new hardware accelerated 3D CSS visual effects proposed for standards inclusion will be supported in Snow Leopard's Safari (it is already available in the latest Webkit nighty builds). An new impressive demo of the technology is available at Charles Ying blog.

That was my first reaction when I saw the headline. Should Hannah Montana and Linux even be allowed to be in the same sentence? Someone apparently thinks so. According to IT Knowledge Exchange, Hannah Montana Linux, obviously designed with Hannah Montana fans in mind, emerged recently on Twitter, being tweeted and re-tweeted so many times. It's been hosted at SourceForge and is currently available for download, but you had probably get your copy quickly because I'm sure the long, iron arm of Disney will find out about this project and quickly shut it down. Big companies are often touchy about their trademarks.

We keep this week's podcast simple. Just two topics: Mono (finally some movement from Microsoft!) and Google's vapid Chrome OS announcement. However, to top this up with a full bodied flavour, we cover your feedback on last week's show.

Mark Shutttleworh, the head honcho over at Canonical and Ubuntu, has given an interview to derStandard.at during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. He talks about GNOME 3.0, the struggle to improve the user experience on the Linux desktop, as well as various other things.

EA has already redesigned a group of its games specifically for the iPhone, and the company's been pretty successful in its plight thus far. However, they're changing their focus to design entirely new games specifically for the iPhone platform, and they've made an entire (small) studio, called 8lb Gorilla, to design and deploy said games. The first iPhone title coming from the group is, of course, all about zombies and the splattering thereof.

It seems like only yesterday when Haiku was nothing more than a mere promise. Oh how the times have changed, as evidenced by yesterday's news: Colin Guenther has ported the FreeBSD WiFi stack to Haiku, and managed to get a connection, browse the internet, and download a large file.