With every major online digital music vendor slowly but surely abolishing digital rights management, you might wonder how much sense it makes to launch a music service that locks tracks to the devices they're downloaded to. Still, this is exactly what Microsoft has done with its recent launch of its UK Mobile Music store. To make matters worse, there's a whole boatload of other weird decisions regarding this new service that makes you wonder if Microsoft UK has been in contact with anyone outside of its own main office building for, say, the past 5 years.

One of the most successful netbooks around is the Acer Aspire One. The Aspire One is a rather surprise hit for Acer, and probably has something to do with the aggressive pricing policies of the company, and the fact that you actually get a very sturdy and decent netbook for the money. Acer formally took the wraps off the Aspire One's successor, the 10" variant.

In an editorial previously on OSNews, there was some amount of detail about the upcoming US digital television switch, coming (now somewhat tentatively) on February 17th. Apparently, some 21 million Americans are still waiting for the $40 coupons the government promised but could eventually not deliver seeing as how the well went dry. These millions of Americans, assumed to not have gone out and bought a digital converter despite being coupon-less, will now be at a loss of "news, information, and emergency alerts" come the official switcheroo (but we all secretly know they mean "soaps, game shows, and sitcoms"). For this reason, some of those political fellows are vying to delay the transition to June 12th; a good idea, or will this just cause more confusion and problems with the already fuzzy topic? A great deal of money has been spent on telling the public "January 17th, 2009, folks!" for years now. Is it really worth it to delay?

For the last quarter of 2008, Google followed the example of Apple and IBM, not Microsoft and Intel, reporting financial results above financial estimates amid a grim economic environment. "Google performed well in the fourth quarter, despite an increasingly difficult economic environment. Search query growth was strong, revenues were up in most verticals, and we successfully contained costs," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement. "It's unclear how long the global downturn will last, but our focus remains on the long term, and we'll continue to invest in Google's core search and ads business as well as in strategic growth areas such as display, mobile, and enterprise."

The Ubuntu team has released the second maintenance release for Ubuntu 8.04. "The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, the second maintenance update to Ubuntu's 8.04 LTS release. This release includes updated server, desktop, and alternate installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures. In all, over 200 updates have been integrated, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS." Get it from their download page.

Four months after Mesa 7.2 was released, Mesa 7.3 has now officially surfaced. Mesa 7.3 has been in testing since earlier this month with it having gone through three release candidates. The new features found in this latest version of the standard Open-Source OpenGL stack is proper support for GLSL 1.20 and the Intel DRI driver now supports the Graphics Execution Manager and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2.

"Intego has discovered a new Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is currently circulating in copies of Apple's iWork 09 found on BitTorrent trackers and other sites containing links to pirated software. The version of iWork 09, Apple's productivity suite, are complete and functional, but the installer contains an additional package called iWorkServices.pkg." Update: A new variant has been discovered in a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop CS4, also information about one target of a DDOS attack coming from the trojan.

Guile isn't just another extension language: it's the official extension language of the GNU project. Guile makes Scheme embeddable, which makes the interpreter ideal for embedded scripting and more. The days of building and delivering static software and products are over. Today, users expect their products to be dynamic and easily customizable. Learn how, with Guile, you can interpret Scheme scripts, dynamically bind scheme scripts into compiled C programs, and even integrate compiled C functions into Scheme scripts.

Remember when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, and held it up in the air, proudly proclaiming "Boy, have we patented it", followed by a massive applause of the adoring audience? It may seem like this wasn't just an empty claim, either. During the earnings conference call yesterday, the company hinted at possible legal action against Palm were the Pre to infringe on iPhone patents.

As if we are watching an episode of The Scary Door, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth has praised Windows 7, and welcomed Microsoft's latest operating system into the fight. Shuttleworth made his remarks in a short interview with The Register.

Apple reported first-quarter earnings significantly higher than analysts had expected coming off a disappointing holiday season for most tech companies, but provided its usual conservative guidance. For the three-month period ended December 27, Apple recorded $10.2 billion in revenue, as compared with $9.6 billion a year ago, and net income of $1.6 billion, as compared with $1.58 billion a year ago. That translates into earnings per share of $1.78, far more than the $1.39 in earnings per share that analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected. Expected revenue was $9.75 billion.

The Mono Project releases version 2.2 this week with full support for SIMD extensions being one of the more interesting features (Betanews article). The extension allows SIMD code to be accelerated above and beyond the speed of past Mono and current .NET releases. Johnathan Allen from InfoQ impresses the significance of the latest Mono release in a blog entry. "It represents something bigger; Mono is outgrowing the standard. Mono is not just playing catch-up any more, it is trying to move past the CLR in many areas. And as an open source project, they can slip in new libraries at a much faster clip than Microsoft. Instead of trying to build everything themselves, they can simply pick up mature projects like Mono. Options or the collection library C5 and include them in the standard release."

AMD continues to shed assets in advance of its January 22nd earnings announcement: first it was employees, and now it is mobile graphics technology. AMD announced Tuesday that it's selling its handheld GPU technology, along with some of the handheld unit's employees, to Qualcomm for $65 million.

On September 30, 2008 Fudzilla reported that memory manufacturer Corsair did not think the time was right to enter the SSD market, but they were watching the market closely. A little under four months later, Corsair feels the time is right to enter the SSD market. Hexus.net reports the 128GB drive will be named the S128, and it will feature Samsung flash memory and a Samsung controller. Corsair decided to use the Samsung controller over a JMicron controller due to problems with the latter. Even though the drive has not been announced by Corsair, Scan.co.uk has it listed as well as NCIX.