Google's recent move of revealing the Chrome OS to a suspecting public has put a great many people on alert. Some say it's a major privacy issue, some say Google oughtn't to become more and more monopolistic, while others think that the wide array of popular Linux distributions shouldn't become even more fragmented than it already is. "Google's decision to create its own Linux distribution and splinter the Linux community decisively once again can only be seen as foolhardy and self-obsessive. Instead of treading its own path, Google should have sought to leverage the stellar work already carried out by Mark Shuttleworth and his band of merry coders and tied its horse to the Ubuntu cart."

When I read this item in the backend submission queue, I must admit that I thought it was a fake, and I must say that I'm still not confident enough about this one. A Korean company held a press event today during which it launched its Tmax Window operating system. Built on in-house technology, they claim it has 100% compatibility with Windows software. Update: A lot more information in this article.

Pirates vs. Ninjas has already been decided. Now it's the pirates vs. the clones or more technically The Pirate Bay and Mac Clones with a bit of HTML5 Video and Linux inbetween. No music this time again as the show is late, and some changes to the recording method (mentioned in the show) that made the edit take longer.

Web browsers have become ever more important for our computers. Instead of the browser displaying static HTML pages, they now handle complex web applications, ranging from social networking to text editors to online banking, and everything in between. While some browsers have finally started treating the browser more like an operating system (Chrome and Internet Explorer 8), those are just baby steps. The real thing is coming with Microsoft's Gazelle, a research project which applies operating system concepts to the browser.

It almost sounds like a joke, but it's true enough. Ever since Gmail was instituted in April of 2004 with the invitation scheme, it and many other of Google's Apps have been wearing the beta tag. At long last, however, Google's ripping it off like a bandage.

Finally, the Palm Pre has been announced for European markets. The Pre will arrive via Telefonica to some European countries (O2 in the UK/Ireland/Germany, and Movistar in Spain) before the end of the year. This Pre will obviously be GSM/HSDPA variant of Palm's saviour (at least, it hopes so).

"CompuServe, the first commercially successful online and email provider in America, has been shut down by AOL after 30 years of service. The original CompuServe — later renamed CompuServe Classic — was laid to rest July 1, 2009. In a message sent to its remaining subscribers, AOL urged customers sticking with cheap dial-up to move on to the company's surviving sub-brand ISP, CompuServe 2000."

The Android operating system provides a powerful, open platform for mobile development. It leverages the power of the Java programming language and the Eclipse tools platform. Now you can add the Scala programming language to that mix. In this article, see how you can use Scala as the primary development language on Android.

We've already seen some heavy discussion on Mono and C# here on OSNews the past few weeks, as it became clear the patent situation regarding the ECMA parts of Mono was anything but faith inspiring. This issue seems to be resolved now: Microsoft has made a legally binding promise not to sue anyone who uses or distributes implementations of said ECMA standards. Following this news, Mono will be split in two; the ECMA standard parts, and the rest.

It was more or less not a question of if, but when, and now we're here: the US Department of Justice is said to launch an investigation into the US telecommunications industry to see if the two biggest players, AT&T and Verizon, are abusing their market position. Even though Apple is not a target for the probe, the usually trustworthy Wall Street Journal states that the iPhone/AT&T deal will also come under scrutiny .

We all remember the saliva-inducing CrunchPad whose photos were "leaked" back in April; the tablet has a yummy 12" touchscreen, boots straight into a customized Webkit browser running atop a Linux core, has an Intel Atom processor, and is designed to be sold for under $300. As it turns out, it's nigh on to be released as Michael Arrington, the one behind the idea, will be debuting the device at "an event" later in July or early in August. After that, the tablet is supposed to be available "as soon as possible," though just when and where is still unknown. Hopefully "as soon as possible" is a matter of a few weeks after the event. The sub-$300 idea is giving me itches for it to be on sale now.

"Lately, the Falcon Programming Language has attracted growing interest and excited a deal of curiosity. In this article I'll document some unique features of Falcon that allow users to build easily what I define as a 'second order virtual machine'."

The team behind ReactOS, the NT-compatible open source operating system, have released ReactOS 0.3.10, which comes with many improvements aimed towards making it easier to run ReactOS on real hardware.

Time for another Week in Review. We had a fairly regular week this week, with the focus somehow being Mac cloners, The Pirate Bay, Mono, and Browsers were also in the spotlight this week with the release of Firefox 3.5, disagreements on the video tag codec, and talking about KHTML.