Old World 1, New World 0. The four defendants in the landmark The Pirate Bay case, taking place in Sweden, have all been found guilty, and sentenced to one year in jail. They also received a hefty fine of USD 3.58 million to 17 American media companies, among which are Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Blizzard Entertainment, Sierra Entertainment, and Activision. The defendants have already stated they will appeal the decision.

About a year ago, OSNews reported on Grape, a new way to manage your desktop. Back then, Grape was only a concept, a set of ideas without an implementation. This is different now: Grape has been turned into an actual piece of working software, and the people behind the project, Yann Le Coroller and Dockland Software's Stephane, gave us early access by means of a beta release. We are also giving away beta access, se be sure to read on to the end of the article to find out how you can get beta access (hint: post a comment). Update: The response has been more substantial than I anticipated, so the cut-off point is 50 comments. Twelve comments left, guys and girls, so hurry up! Update II: Sorry guys, we're full already (that was quick)! Thanks for the enormous interest from everyone. I'll send the invites out today! Update III: All invites have been sent out. Enjoy testing Grape, and be sure to post your findings here on OSNews. Also, report any bugs here.

In a rare case of Apple frankness, the company has allowed a PR person to make a statement to BusinessWeek about the recent Microsoft "Laptop Hunters" ad campaign. Don't read to fast, or you'll miss it: "A PC is no bargain when it doesn't do what you want," Apple spokesman Bill Evans told BusinessWeek, "The one thing that both Apple and Microsoft can agree on is that everyone thinks the Mac is cool. With its great designs and advanced software, nothing matches it at any price." That's it. Just thought you'd like to know.

Even though the old-world UNIX operating systems, like IRIX and HP-UX, have been steadily losing ground to Linux for a long time now, they do still get updated and improved. HP-UX 11i v3 is supposed to get update 4 tomorrow, with a host of new features that won't excite you if you're used to Linux, but they're still pretty useful for HP-UX users.

Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed a report that it had received a one-week extension from European antitrust regulators to respond to charges that it had sought to thwart rivals by bundling its web browser with Windows systems. "Microsoft confirms that the new deadline for the company to respond to the Commission's statement of objections is 28 April," a spokeswoman said, referring to an unsourced reference to a new deadline reported on the website of the Financial Times. A spokeswoman for the European Commission said she could not immediately comment.

Geeks.com, the popular computer parts store, sent us in the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX150 14 megapixel digicam for a spin. This camera has been a hit in the past year, both for its still capabilities, but also for its 720p HD video at 24 fps (film speed).

With a volatile economy, a lot of people are keeping close tabs on computer shipments to see if maybe, just maybe, they've finally hit rock bottom. IDC published its latest quarterly worldwide PC shipments tracker, and while PC shipments still shrunk, it wasn't as bad as forecast. Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, believes the bottom has been hit.

The rsync utility is a mandatory tool for your command-line work, and you need to learn how to use it for easy, safe, quick laptop-desktop synchronization. This article introduces rsync and mentions several related tools, all of which provide easy synchronization procedures.

PulseAudio 0.9.15 has been released with many new features. Phoronix covers the changes: "PulseAudio 0.9.15 introduces native support of Bluetooth audio devices using BlueZ, Apple Airport Express support, flat volume support (similar to Vista's audio controls), on-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices, and native support for 24-bit samples. The on-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices is great and as a result there is now proper S/PDIF support. With the release of PulseAudio 0.9.15 also comes an update to the PulseAudio Volume Control program. The PulseAudio Volume Control 0.9.8 update brings support for configuring sound card profiles and various other updates."

With the spotlight on Windows 7, you'd almost forget that there's another product category Microsoft is rather successful in: office suites. Microsoft Office 2007 was a massive change from previous versions, delivering a completely new interface that was genuinely easier to use. Office 2007 will soon be seeing its second service pack (with OpenDocument Format support for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), while the next version of of Office, dubbed Office 2010, will arrive pretty soon as well.

"Google launched their Google App Engine (GAE) a year ago. The free hosting in App Engine is allocated 500 MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Also, if you really want more you can see pricing plans. GAE will support Java going forward. Unfortunately PHP support on the App Engine is still left as the top item in the wishlist. So until Google announces their official PHP support we have a workaround to run PHP using Quercus. Quercus is basically a 100% Java implementation of the PHP language (requires JDK 1.5). Since the App Engine now supports Java this means we can use Quercus to run PHP scripts on the App Engine."

On June 29, 2007 the Free Software Foundation released the GNU General Public License, version 3. What happened since then? Federico Biancuzzi had the opportunity to discuss many subjects with the FSF's founder and president Richard Stallman.

After the rather unexpected success of the netbook, manufacturers started looking for more ways to capitalise on the cheaper end of the market. Many of them are now putting netbook internals (the Atom platform) in desktop computers, such as nettops and cheaper all-in-one solutions. According to several analysts, this is going to be one of the few places where the desktop market can grow. And while we're on the subject of hardware, TechRepublic took the Dell Adamo apart to see its internals.

At the Linux Collaboration Summit, held last week in San Francisco, an interesting panel discussion took place about Linux' position in the wider operating systems market. Included were Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation executive director, Ian Murdock, Sun community and developer vice president, and Sam Ramji, Microsoft platform strategy director. Titled "Why Can't We All Just Get Along?", the discussion focussed on Microsoft's somewhat dubious relationship with the open source community.