An interesting NYT Bits blog entry covers Opera's mobile browser. Buried in the middle of the article is this quote: "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser." It also talks about Opera on the Wii and browsers in cars. A good read. My Take: But back to the iPhone. As tempted as I am to just shrug it off, since Apple is free to run its App Store any way it pleases, as an enthusiastic iPhone user, I think Apple is shooting itself in the foot here, as it is with all the "competitive" apps being rejected. Apple does stand to lose some Google revenue by letting people use other browsers, but they have much more to gain by unleashing the creativity of the developer community and giving them the freedom to improve or replace core iPhone functionality. Hopefully competition from Android forces them to wake up.

With Moblin 2.0, Intel is integrating in an open source technology called Clutter. Clutter is an open source animation framework that allows for the development of applications in the same way you would develop games. The underlying complexity is abstracted such that intricate UI can be built with a minimum of code. "Because it's developed like a game engine, all the graphics happen on the GPU, freeing up CPU do to application work," he said. "When combing with Atom and the various GPU's we use in Moblin supported platforms, you end up with advanced UI platforms. We really think it will create a huge opportunity for application innovation on top of Moblin."

OSNews recently ran a story on UNIX virtualization functionality which was a bit shallow on technical details. HP's Christophe de Dinechin (who had already begun working on virtualization at HP when we interviewed him several years ago, but couldn't talk about it then) contacted us to tell us he'd gone into more technical detail on his blog here and here saying, "They are a bit long, and probably boring to a general audience, but since your readers are generally more interested in OS technology than the average population, I thought I'd bring these to your attention."

The Linux Foundation (LF) has posted a ten-minute video interview with kernel coordinator Linus Torvalds. Held during the Linux Foundation's recent Linux Kernel Summit, the interview reveals the Linux founder speaking out on issues ranging from kernel/userland interactions to why Linux has so many interfaces.

Windows 7 is out and about. Microsoft has been unusually secretive about Vista's successor, but now that PDC is under way, they have unveiled the various enhancements to the user interface. Windows 7 might not have any significant under-the-hood changes (in fact, all your applications and devices will still work), but on the outside, Windows 7 represents the biggest change for the Windows user interface ever since Windows 95 came out.

Microsoft is sharing bits of Oslo at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week. Learn what's new in M, the company's language for creating domain-specific languages, and why Microsoft thinks it's such a big deal. (Oh yeah. And M will be made available under the open specification promise. Open source developers... ready set GO!)

Free Software/open source often gets a bad rap for innovating. It just rips-off the work of commercial developers, right? Not so, as this Linux Format piece argues. FLOSS has pioneered, or been a catalyst in, some notable changes in the computing world. Several of these innovations are OS-related.

Microsoft offered a software development kit for Surface, the company's tabletop computer, to about 1,000 people at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. The article features a some details on apps already available for Surface. (For example, designers at Vectorform have built an application that lets people can "carve" a jack-o'-lantern on the Surface by using their fingers to trace a design in an image of a pumpkin.)

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 only a few days away, Phoronix decided to take a look at the performance figures over the past releases - from Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 8.10. Phoronix used its own extensive test suite on fresh installations, with the same parameters, on the identical hardware. The results are rather surprising. Update: I've added some more information about this, gathered from the Ubuntu mailing list. You can find it in the 'read more'.

As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.

Stanislaw Szymczyk has been working on the AROS self-compiling bounty since April. The job, according to its website, has been not a trivial task. Now that some issues with soft links and the SFS file format have been resolved, the job is almost finished.

Lifehacker reviews some of the popular Linux distributions that have provided tools to make Live USB keys, a easy task. These include Damn Small Linux, Fedora with it's cross platform liveusb-creator , Puppy Linux and Xubuntu. All systems were tested with UNetbootin except for Fedora which was run using it's own liveusb-creator. For every distribution, the minimum requirements, image size, boot time, features, things that need improvement and which users it is recommended for, is listed.

The mounting irregularities of closed-source proprietary e-voting systems clearly show the need for a new approach to securing elections in the U.S. -- one centered on the use of open source technologies, writes Paul Venezia. 'It's time for us to make good on the promise of open elections and open our e-voting systems as well,' Venezia writes, outlining the technical blueprint for a cheap, secure, open source e-voting system. The call for open voting systems has grown louder as of late, with several projects, such as Pvote and the Open Voting Consortium, demonstrating how the voting booth could benefit from open source code. Such systems are already securing elections in Australia and Brazil.

For a long time now, GNU/Linux distributions have been criticised by desktop and laptop users for starting up too slowly. More recently, within the Fedora community particularly, there have been increasing numbers of complaints about the amount of 'flicker' that happens as the system switches from Grub to RHGB to GDM, etc. Fedora 10 is going to change all of that, and to talk us through this feature, Adam Jackson, Red Hat Desktop Engineer, agreed to an interview.