Soft and hardware makers, closed ones that is, are extremely secretive over their code and hardware. If there's a flaw, bug, or error, you are at their mercy to fix their code or issue a recall or something; you can't fix it yourself. In fact, fixing your own hardware will most certainly void warranty. Since we haven't had a decent car analogy on OSNews in a while, US Congress handed us one on a silver platter.

Phoronix provides a status update on the Wayland Display Server project. The Wayland Display Server aims to be a mini-display server which makes use of the latest X and kernel technologies such as the Graphics Execution Manager and kernel mode-setting. It also comes with its own built-in compositing manager.

Thanks to documentaries like Jump London, free running was all the rage a couple of years ago on TV. Since the gaming industry is more or less completely void of creative thinking these days, it was only a matter of time before someone would take free running, and shoehorn it into a game. Behold, Mirror's Edge.

When Dell announced a shift in its Linux strategy last week, accompanied by a new netbook, many wondered why Dell insisted on pre-loading Ubuntu 8.04, instead of newer versions of the popular Linux distribution such as 8.10 or 9.04. BetaNews contacted Dell about it, and Dell replied explaining their rationale behind opting for 8.04.

While we are all well-behaved boys and girls, patiently waiting for an onslaught of Via Nano-based netbooks and low-cost laptops so we can give the, well, you know, to Intel and AMD, those sneaky people over at Dell have unveiled an entirely different type of computer using the Nano platform: a server.

Yes, yes, Slackware has gone 64bit. "Ready or not, Slackware has now gone 64-bit with an official x86_64 port being maintained in-sync with the regular x86 -current branch. DVDs will be available for purchase from the Slackware store when Slackware 13.0 is released. Many thanks go out to the Slackware team for their help with this branch and a special thank you to Eric Hameleers who did the real heavy lifting re-compiling everything for this architecture, testing, re-testing, and staying in-sync with -current."

Six months ago, a certain security flaw in Java was fixed by Sun. This flaw was present in OpenJDK, GIJ, icedtea and Sun's JRE, but it got fixed in those. There's one important shipping Java implementation that still has not been fixed to remove this security flaw: Apple's Java.

"We first got excited for Moblin 2.0 back in January when seeing how fast this Linux distribution had booted on Atom-powered netbooks. This Fedora-derived distribution booted even faster with a newer development release that came out this past March. While Moblin 2.0 final is not yet released, there is now more to get excited over than just amazing boot times. Moblin 2.0 will introduce a Clutter-based user interface and from our initial encounters with this release, it is very impressive! In this article we have more information on this new Moblin UI along with screenshots and videos."

After a whole boatload of rumours, Twitter posts, and what not, we finally have an official release date for Palm's Pre, the phone and platform that is supposed to save Palm from a fairly certain doom. Sprint, Palm's partner announced the release date, pricing information, and plans today, with Palm's official blog following soon after.

If you thought Psystar was the only company making Macintosh "clones", then you are seriously mistaken. There is also German PearC, and the latest addition to the clone family is a Russian company called RussianMac, who debuted several Mac clones this week.

Someone at Nokia has leaked information about the plans to ship Maemo phones, eventual interest in replacing S60 with Maemo, etc. The same article links to a screesnhot of the future Qt-based "Harmattan" platform. It has not been confirmed whether the screenshot is real or not.

The two organizations haven't been what you'd call snuggle-buddies, but they're certainly adamant about certain aspects of software enough to agree and collectively petition a legal group for redress of a document. In a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have joined forces in writing and signing a letter to the American Law Institute asking for the group to hold off on submitting a document entitled "Principles of the Law of Software Contracts" for adjustments.

The data search and computation engine Wolfram Alpha has gone live. The web-based application, which is billed as a 'computational knowledge engine', went live for testing on Friday and was officially launched on Monday. "Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they'd be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer," Stephen Wolfram, the founder and chief executive of Wolfram Research, said in a statement. "I'm happy to say that we've successfully built a system that delivers knowledge from a simple input field, giving access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms."

As expected, Microsoft has released Beta 1 of its Visual Studio 2010 tool set along with the first beta of the NET Framework 4.0. The software represents the next major version of Microsoft's flag ship software development environment.