We may have reported earlier that Apple might finally face the headwind from the economic downturn, but that's not everything there's to this story. Recent data suggests - once again - that Apple customers are very, very satisfied with their Apple purchases. In other words, most current Apple customers are very likely to buy Apple again. Interestingly, ASUS and Acer did very well in the survey as well.

"GTK+ may be called many things. I would call it 'simple' and sometimes even 'elegant', refering to its foundation of pure, elegant C. But not everyone is compelled to use those terms, using terms like 'clumsy' and 'unwieldy' instead. Yes, there is a lot disagreement. But there's one thing almost everyone would agree to: that GTK+ isn't pretty." This is about to change.

If you have ever been interested in awk and sed Unix utilities, then you probably know about the awk1line.txt and sed1line.txt files that are floating around the Internet. Each file contains around 80 idiomatic sed and awk one-liners for performing various text modification tasks.

Microsoft has achieved a major win in the "Vista Capable" class action lawsuit against the company. The suit, which is about if Microsoft knew the PCs it labelled as "Vista capable" weren't actually capable of running Vista's more advanced features, has lost its class action status.

Palm has released the first chapter of a book that details its new webOS. It answers some of the questions people had about developing applications for the new platform. "You can think of webOS applications as native applications, but built from the same standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you'd use to develop web applications. Palm has extended the standard web development environment through a JavaScript framework that gives standardized UI widgets, and access to selected device hardware and services. The user experience is optimized for launching and managing multiple applications at once. WebOS is designed around multi-tasking, and makes it utterly simple to run background applications, to switch between applications in a single step, and to easily handle interruptions and events without losing context." Ars has more.

With the economy in decline, many fear that the one company to take the financial blow would be Apple. The company focusses on the higher end of the market (at least in price), and with many people having less and less money to spend, as well as facing insecure financial prospects, people may decide to choose for a cheaper, non-Apple computer. Piper Jaffray, an Apple-friendly analyst firm, has projected that the Cupertino company is about to face a decline in year-over-year Mac sales; for the first time in six years.

Th DragonFly BSD team has released DragonFly BSD 2.2. The biggest improvement in this release is that the HAMMER filesystem is considered production ready, but there is a whole boatload of other improvements as well.

The Author's Guild has been having some trouble coping with the Kindle 2's Read to Me feature because it supposedly undermines author's rights. Their argument? "They don't have the right to read a book out loud." It sounds ridiculous; we've been reading out loud since we were wee little children, and text-to-speech has been in use since before the Google Empire (by hundreds of years technically, and by decades literally). However, after explanation by Engadget's very own pretentious ex-copyright attorney, the blurred lines of law and lawlessness gets even blurrier. Does the Author's Guild have a valid point, or are they splitting hairs?

The ArchLinux Release Engineering Team announced the official release of the 2009.02 ISO after a long period of intense development. This distribution is among the first to officially support the new Ext4 filesystem. I've always noticed that Arch seems to be quite popular among OSNews readers, and I'm interested to know from our Arch users: why? What makes Arch such a good Linux distribution?

Practically before the trial is up and running, The Pirate Bay has achieved a major victory over the entertainment industry. On day two, the prosecutor has dropped half of the charges against the bittorrent website. The remaining charges are much lighter than the ones that have been dropped.

Nvidia has said it is working with Google to build support for Linux applications on smartphones with its upcoming Tegra mobile chips. The support for the Android platform is an attempt to drive up Tegra's adoption among smartphone makers. Nvidia is displaying an Android-based phone with a Tegra chip at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Windows Mobile is a relic of the past. Especially compared to Apple's iPhone operating system, it becomes painfully obvious just how outdated, clunky, and unfriendly Windows Mobile has become. Today, Mictosoft has taken its first step in modernising the platform by releasing a sort of alpha release of Windows Mobile 6.5, with a completely revamped interface.

For years, Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge that its patent portfolio is a precursor to interoperability discussions. Monday, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization. Red Hat has long argued that patent discussions only cloud true interoperability, which is best managed through open source and open standards. Now it has got what it wanted; unlike the Novell-Microsoft agreements, there is no exclusionary patent deals or cross payments.

Late last week we ran a story on how the Google Chrome team had decided to use Gtk+ as the graphical toolkit for the Linux version of the Chrome web browser. It was a story that caused some serious debate on a variety of aspects, but in this short editorial, I want to focus on one aspect that came forward: the longing for consistency. Several people in the thread stated they were happy with Google's choice for purely selfish reasons: they use only Gtk+ applications on their GNOME desktops. Several people chimed in to say that Qt integrates nicely in a Gtk+ environment. While that may be true from a graphical point of view, that really isn't my problem with mixing toolkits. The issue goes a lot deeper than that.