A Fortune Magazine article looks at hand-held computing's most beleaguered major player and wonders whether it wouldn't be better off hitching its wagon to Google's coat-tails and adopting Android. After shunting aside its own, old-and-creaky OS in favor of Microsoft's it's been hanging its hopes on a long-awaited new Linux-based OS. Android may be Palm's best bet to avoid stemming its inexorable slide into irrelevance.

Windows XP just refuses to die. Have you ever notice that in movies they hit the bad guy just hard enough to stun him, then go about their business with their back turned to him while he slowly gets up and surprises them by attacking again? In this allegory, Microsoft management is the cute couple and XP is the villain: "Microsoft's deadline for allowing OEMs to sell PCs with systems that are "downgraded" from Windows Vista to XP is still a moving target. Initially planned to expire on June 30 of this year, Microsoft at first granted an extension to July 31. However, OEMs are still selling the downgrade option (often for a premium) and, according to new reports, the deadline apparently has been officially extended for six more months to January 31, 2009. The information is based on one leaked email sent to an OEM."

If you're looking for a party, Wall Street probably isn't the place you're going to find one. And to make matters worse, there are apparently people out there who are wilfully trying to make the life of the people on Wall Street (and subsequently, the rest of the world) even harder. By making up fake stories. And publish them on CNN's Digg - iReport.com. Some individual had posted a fake report last Friday, claiming Steve Jobs had suffered from a heart attack and was rushed into the hospital. As a result, Apple's stock made a 10% nosedive.

Gutsy/foolhardy Mac clone maker Psystar responded in August to Apple's copyright infringement lawsuit with an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple. Earlier this week, Apple's lawyers filed a motion to have the suit dismissed, calling it "deeply flawed." In its statement, Apple contends: "One of the bedrock principles of antitrust law is that a manufacturer's unilateral decision concerning how to distribute its product and with whom it will deal cannot violate the Sherman Act."

The Linux Kernel version 2.6.25 introduces a new Linux process sleeping state, TASK_KILLABLE: If a process is sleeping killably in this new state, it works like TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE with the bonus that it can respond to fatal signals. This feature is generally an improvement over the existing options -- after all, it is another way to keep from getting stuck with dead processes.

The GIMP Project has released GIMP 2.6.0. Among some UI-based changes and additional fixes, it comes the long promised integration of the GEGL library. The promise of 16 bit per-pixel non-destructive editing goes back to 2002, but it's at last here. This means that GIMP is now ready for prosumer (and in some cases even professional) photographer's usage, and this can only be big news and a big win for the F/OSS movement. GEGL will also help in future releases with proper support of CMYK. UPDATE: I guess things are not as good as the release notes want us to think. GEGL was turned "on" in the Color menu as per instructions, but I still got a no-support message for high depth TIFF pictures. If GIMP can't read existing 16bpp pictures, the feature I earlier gave them so much credit for, is useless.

The Bluetooth headset has gone from nifty novelty to ubiquitous accessory. They've become better and better with each generation, so now that they've matured, just how good are they? And what use are they for something other than making you look like you're talking to yourself?

Who said community pressure doesn't work with big companies? Apple has announced in a note titled "To Our Developers" that it has removed the non-disclosure agreement for iPhone developers, stating it placed "too much of a burden" on iPhone developers. The NDA was one of the two major problem points among iPhone developers, so the community has responded in a way that can only be described as rejoicing.

Yesterday Microsoft started introducing Visual Studio 2010 to Windows developers with a press release and a MSDN website. Introductions to the next Visual Studio also popped up on various technology news sites; InformationWeek, ChannelWeb, Microsoft Watch, BetaNews, and Ars Technica each have brief summary and explaination of the information Microsoft has released so far. Only NetworkWorld digs into the subject by asking various developers to give their impressions of the new Visual Studio.

"Nokia announced today the launch of Qt Extended 4.4, a complete mobile and embedded development platform based on the open source Qt toolkit. It is designed with a modular architecture that provides building blocks for assembling a Linux-based software stack for various embedded devices ranging from phones to set-top boxes." ArsTechnica showcases the various features and enhancements of the platform. There are some impressive screenshots of the Qt widgets as well.

The Red Hat community engineer behind the Fedora Games and Fedora Xfce media spins, Rahul Sundaram, announced the release of Omega 10 Beta, a remix of Fedora this past weekend. Omega is a desktop/mobile Linux distribution that is based upon Fedora but includes packages from the Livna RPM repository. The Omega 10 Beta release is roughly equivalent to the Fedora 10 Beta to be released tomorrow, but integrates multimedia support not found in Fedora.

No, Motorola isn't building an army of humanoid robots. The fading mobile phone powerhouse already has 50 developers on its android-based mobile phone OS team, and it intends to expand to 350, according to TechCrunch. Other major handset vendors seem to be expressing interest in the new Google OS as well. Will intense pressure from competitors backing an open OS be just what iPhone fans have been praying for, forcing Apple to loosen the screws a bit?

The saga surrounding Apple's policies concerning the App Store hasn't reached its climax just yet. After several seemingly arbitrary application rejections, high profile developers quitting iPhone development, and Apple adding a non-disclosure clause to its App Store rejection emails, we now have another high-profile Mac developer contemplating giving up iPhone development. Craig Hockenberry, of The Iconfactory, has written a public letter to Steve Jobs, detailing his worries that Apple's restrictive App Store policies are detrimental to the young platform.

Mandriva has done quite a lot of work on optimizing boot speed for its latest release, Mandriva Linux 2009. Frederic Crozat (head of the French engineering team) has written a blog post summarizing Mandriva's past work on this front, and the tweaks and improvements made for 2009. It shows that close analysis of inefficiencies in boot, and fixing 'small' bugs, can result in gains as large or larger than 'big picture' items like new initialization systems.