Apple has presented its financial earnings for the 4th quarter of the 2008 fiscal year yesterday. Despite an across-the-board slump in growth, spectacular iPhone sales more than made up for the lost growth, beating the ten million iPhones claim. You can read all about it at Ars. What's more interesting were a number of remarks from Jobs regarding netbooks and cheap computers.

A week ago the Contiki embedded operating system announced uIPv6, the world's smallest compliant IPv6 stack, developed by Cisco, Atmel, and SICS. Contiki now releases the first snapshot release that contains uIPv6, released under a 3-clause BSD-style license.

Earlier this week we reported on the court case between Apple and PsyStar, stating they went into settlement negotiations. Details, however, were sparse. The law firm representing PsyStar has now replied to the matter, and there's good news for those of us who hope to see crazy EULA clauses tested in court.

Since its release, the steady stream of updates have made Windows Vista noticeably less annoying to use. The biggest stride forward was the release of the operating system's first service pack, back in March of this year. Neowin.net now claims that the second service pack is on its way, with the first beta being dropped on testers in the coming four weeks.

The legal battle between Macintosh clone maker PsyStar and Apple is still being waged, but it appears that the two companies are going to do what some of us had already predicted: settle the whole thing out of court.

PolishLinux site takes a look at KDE 4.2 based on the latest subversion branch and concludes: "As it can be seen, the KDE4 development is running at full throttle. KDE4.2 will include much enhanced functionality and versatility than KDE 4.1, but still a lot of work has to be done in many areas, especially when it comes to the stability of the applications." Hopefully some of the long standing stability and maturity issues with KDE 4.x branch are resolved before the GA release.

Here at OSNews, we use a moderation system where your peers rate your comments, and where the OSNews staff rarely intervene. This system was put in place after realising that the editorial moderation was failing miserably; it had become too much work. Sifting through ten reported comments a day is one thing, sifting through 100 of them each day is another. The result was that editorial moderation had become willy-nilly, which led to understandable user frustration, and pointless email rants back and forth between users and staff members (mea culpa). The answer to this problem turned out to be a two-step process: banning anonymous commenting, and our peer moderation system. While the moderation system has its flaws, it has exceeded all of our expectations in making sure that our comments' sections are free of spam, and relatively fun to read. Still, we realise problems exist, but we also see a lot of misinformation floating around. The treat we have in store for you today will help in fixing some of that.

Mozilla's latest browser "Fennec", specifically designed for mobile devices has finally been released. Currently, it is only available for the Nokia N810 platform. Support for other platforms is planned for the future. Ars Technica has a review of the new browser. If you are interested in getting involved, but don't have a Nokia N810, you can install it on your desktop (Windows, Linux and OS X) and experiment with it.

While Ext4 was originally merged in 2.6.19, it was marked as a development filesystem. It has been a long time coming but as planned, Ext4dev has been renamed to Ext4 in 2.6.28 to indicate its level of maturity and paving the way for production level deployments. Ext4 filesystem developer Ted Tso also endorsed Btrfs as a multi-vendor, next generation filesystem and along with the interest from Andrew Morton, Btrfs is planned to be merged before 2.6.29 is released. It will follow a similar development process to Ext4 and be initially marked as development only.

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project originally based on Fedora 7 has done a revamp of its core system to Fedora 9 and added a number of new interesting features and many bug fixes. These include updates on applications on the XO laptop called activities such as home view and journal, new control panel for common system settings, a update system, better backup integration and many others.

Even though Snow Leopard is supposed to be all about tweaking and performance, AppleInsider claims to have some information regarding new features coming in Snow Leopard. They claim Apple is working on bringing Exchange support to iCal, Address Book, and Mail, a feature called ImageBoot, and - insert drum roll - a new Finder written in Cocoa. Testers also claim that other bundled applications are written in Cocoa. This isn't all that weird seeing Carbon doesn't come in a 64bit flavour.

Linux Foundation has announced Linux Standard Base 4.0 beta. LSB attempts to provide a consistent Linux platform for ISV's. These are a number of changes. Following Red Hat's efforts to consolidate on NSS, LSB has endorsed it as the cryptography solution as well as providing new distribution tests and tools for certification of third party applications.

"Krusader is a massively powerful and feature-packed twin panel file manager. If you dislike bloat and prefer minimalist windows managers like XFCE or Fluxbox, the good news is that Krusader will run without KDE, provided you have the necessary libraries installed. If Dolphin isn't cutting the mustard Krusader might just be what you've been looking for." Here is the download page for Krusader, give it a spin and share your comments.

"The T-Mobile G1 Google smartphone, designed by Google and made by HTC, remains firmly in the shadow of the iPhone-for now. The phone, which goes on sale next week in the US and next month in Britain, was released too early. The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects. It's not a bad phone, but the software and hardware needed more time in the oven to bring them to a golden brown crispness." Full review at Arstechnica.