There are several options out there if you wan to run Mac OS X on your non-Apple labelled computer, but one of them appears to be in serious trouble. It has been uncovered that the EFI-X module is nothing more than a USB stick with a DRM chip, with code from the hackintosh community on it - without attribution. On top of that, its firmware update utility uses LGPL code - again, without attribution.

The whole saga around the rejection of the official Google Voice client for the iPhone continues to play a prominent role on many websites. We all remember that the FCC had asked the three companies involved, AT&T, Google, and Apple, to answer a number of questions, but Google had censored a part of its letter. The censored section has now been published by Google.

There are several things which take quite some getting used to when switching from any platform to the Mac. There are things like the universal menubar, the dock, Expose, and many more. One of the things that often leads to confusion for new users is the installation process for applications. Mozilla developer Alexander Limi talks about the problems Mozilla runs into when it comes to Firefox' installation process on the Mac, and a possible solution. Update: A possible solution?

We all know (and love?) ARM as the company which focusses on licensing designs for power-efficient yet still powerful processors, mostly used in embedded devices. The Cambridge company has been looking to expand into the netbook market, and has now announced a new step in this process with a number of new multicore Cortex-A9 designs.

This week in Greece Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor shared the latest Eurobarometer (a series of surveys regularly performed on behalf of the European Commission) findings that show that 2/3 of European Union citizens are very concerned about the security and privacy of their information. The figures are even higher in Austria and Germany, with over 90% respondents sharing their concerns on these important topics. Countries like the United Kingdom do this kind of research on a yearly basis and the results show the same trend in awareness of data security and privacy issues.

During the first two weeks of its release, Snow Leopard outsold Apple's two previous operating systems by a wide margin and set a record for the Mac maker. Sales of Apple's latest OS were more than two times higher than its predecessor, Leopard, and almost four times more than Leopard's predecessor, Tiger, according to the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales, excluding online sales.

Palm has announced the financial results of the first quarter of the 2010 fiscal year (ending August 31 2009), and the company has beaten estimates and has seen a strong increase in sales (but only quarter-over-quarter). However, Palm is still seeing losses, but these losses were less than expected. During the conference call following the presentation of the results, Palm CEO Rubinstein also announced that Palm will completely abandon Windows Mobile in favour of the webOS.

"Starting October 1--and for a limited time--those in the U.K. will be able to preorder Windows 7 for 30 British pounds, according to a Microsoft Web site. In a Twitter posting, Microsoft said that U.S. college students will be able to get the software for $30, but the Web site it linked to does not yet have details on the offer. 'This offer is specifically designed for those students who are not planning to purchase a new PC this year but would still like to take advantage of what Windows 7 offers,' a Microsoft representative said. Those who order the software will be able to download it when Windows 7 ships on October 22. Students interested in the deal need a valid college e-mail address. Microsoft plans similar offers in Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico, France, and Germany, though the prices will vary somewhat."

"Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, 'Handelsblatt' reports that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM's in-house Lotus software. The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past... IBM's management have obviously decided to practice what they preach. 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony, reports the newspaper. The motive for the migration appears not to be the saving of license fees, and according to an IBM press officer, the move is a clear statement in appreciation of open source standards."

The first netbook preinstalled with Moblin v2 for Netbooks will launch next week, possibly at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, or else the Linux Foundation's LinuxCon in Portland. Then, within the next couple of weeks, the Moblin Project will release the first stable release of the Moblin v2 Linux distribution, which began beta testing in May. Will Linux prove a viable alternative to Windows 7 on the low-powered, low-cost computing devices released for this holiday season? We should know pretty soon.

"The KOffice team is happy to announce the second Beta of the upcoming 2.1 release that implement the KOffice 2 vision. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to fixing the remaining bugs. As can be seen in the full changelog the bugfixing is very active in all parts of the suite. Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters."

"Watching Steve take the stage and roll out a new version of iTunes got us all nostalgic for the old days, when iTunes logos changed color and our jukebox looked like it could withstand a bomb blast. Below is the history of the application that is running more than any other on our Macs. It spawned the iPod, iPhone, Apple TV and gave us an excuse to throw out those ugly CD towers that resided in the corners of our houses in the 90s. The ever present, iTunes."

While we often focus on the desktop offerings from Microsoft, the company of course also plays a role in countless other markets. The most prominent of those is probably the server market, where Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 are now facing a number of support changes - important stuff if you manage Windows servers. The biggest news? There will be no third service pack for Windows Server 2003.

Sometime ago I conjectured that Microsoft made certain changes to IE8 to force web standards forward and drop backwards compatibility as default (a very un-Microsoft move) because of the need for the web to break out of the blinkered IE6 / Desktop-Browser view of content otherwise Microsoft would find itself unable to compete in the mobile space. It's been over a year since that article and in such a short period of time it has become ever clearer that Microsoft's mobile offerings, and their overall mobile platform strategy are failing against the dominant iPhone, the newcomer Android, and a re-invigorated Palm with WebOS.