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.

While I'm still chipping away at my AmigaOS 4.1/sam440ep review (try writing a thesis and a large review at the same time), Cloanto released AmigaForever 2009. AmigaForever is a very full-featured AmigaOS emulation tool, packed with various different ROMs and AmigaOS versions (1.3-3.x), as well as tons and tons of included games, software, and demos. This new version comes with even more stuff.

There haven't been too many iPhone exploits, it seems, despite the popularity of said devices. However, Charlie Miller, a security researcher, recently uncovered a vulnerability in the iPhone OS that could possibly "allow an attacker to run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator's network. The malicious code could include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet." Scary, isn't it? They say it's not very likely that others will exploit it even on a small scale before Apple issues the patch, but having a hole like that just sitting there makes me glad right now that I don't own an iPhone.