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.

You all know that I don't particularly like Opera. I find the product to be lacking polish, over-complicated and without the marketing pizazz that has made Firefox a household name. That's just my personal opinion, and that opinion has garnered many complaints of unjustness. To that end, to present a fairer discussion I would like to put a simple question to the community: "What should Opera do?".

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.

"Apple's rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone went all the way to the top - the bad news was personally delivered to Google by none other than Apple's Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller. New details of the controversial decision came to light today when the FCC released an unredacted version of Google's own confidential letter to the agency. Google replied to a set of FCC questions about the Google Voice app rejection on August 21, but requested that the letter be kept private due to the 'sensitive nature of commercial discussion'. Interested parties immediately filed Freedom of Information Act requests to get at the juicy tidbits that might be found in such a letter; rather than fight the request, Google waived its confidentiality."

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.

This is an article which discusses the increase in storage capacity while performance and hard error rates have not improved significantly in years, and what this means for protecting data in large storage systems. "The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable."

"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."

Yesterday we ran an editorial about Microsoft's failing policies in the mobile space, and today, we have an assorted collection of stories that only strengthen this perception. The upcoming Marketplace for Windows Mobile has a number of rigorous restrictions, the Zune lives in a bubble of its own, and free applications for the Zune come with full-screen video advertisements. There are also a few things Microsoft seems to be doing right, however. Instant update: Another Windows-based mobile phone platform. I actually want that one, though.

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 draft of the HTML5 specification has been under discussion for a while now, but despite the fact that it's not yet finished, all major browsers have implemented at least the most important aspects of it - except Microsoft. The company did provide substantive criticism of the specification in early August, but now the company has also endorsed the video and audio tags.

"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."

The DragonFly 2.4 release was released just today. One can choose from a bare-bones CD ISO, a DVD ISO that includes an X environment, and a bare-bones bootable USB drive image. In addition, this is the first time DragonFlyBSD has had a 64-bit ISO. 64-bit support is stable, but there will only be limited pkgsrc support in the current release. All versions of the release can all be downloaded from one of the many mirrors.

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.

Start tuning your Linux system for power efficiency. This article will get you up to speed on the components and concepts you need to fine-tune a Linux-based System x server for power efficiency. Learn how to enable the Linux CPUfreq subsystem, get instruction on C and P states, and determine which of the five Linux in-kernel governors you need to boost power efficiency on your system