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Icaros Desktop, the distribution for i386 PC of the AROS Research Operating System (an open source revival of classic AmigaOS) reached version 1.2.6 and introduces new improvements and features.

Dell has released two servers for the U.S. market that have been customized to run Ubuntu-based cloud services. The company has outfitted its PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers with Canonical's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, an implementation of the Eucalyptus private cloud software that runs on the Ubuntu Server Edition operating system.

Go is a highly hyped (last year) new programming language by Google. Thanks to ongoing community effort, its Win32 compatibility constantly improves. This week's rolling release should be considered a major milestone. In the somewhat dry words: "implementation of callback functions for Windows" and "cgo: windows/386 port", it introduces two major breakthroughs for this platform: WinAPI GUI support, and the ability to easily wrap and link external (non-Go) libraries. Note that there's an unofficial compiled build for Win32 available for download.

"Apple is further tightening its control of the App Store. Some application developers, including Sony, say Apple has told them they can no longer sell e-books within their apps unless the transactions go through Apple’s system. Apple rejected Sony's iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books from the Sony Reader Store."

There is a falling out between governments & ISPs on the one hand and consumer groups and companies like YouTube and Netflix on the other. Lately more punitive measures affecting these companies and consumers have emerged that include increased throttling, greater per-usage billing and lower internet caps. The internet as whole is struggling to find a self-sustaining business model that supports the rising speed and bandwidth requirements of consumers and online media purveyors. The conflict boils down to who should pay and to what degree they should pay.

A vulnerability has been reported in Microsoft Windows, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the way the MHTML (MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML) protocol handler interprets MIME-formatted requests for content blocks within a document.

"The Intel Atom processor line is associated with low power usage in devices such as a netbook or nettop computer. The emphasis is definitely not on performance, it's on pushing up battery life on a device with a small display and mid-range graphics requirements while still managing a decent desktop experience. Microsoft thinks Atom can do more, though, and wants to use it in servers. With that in mind it is calling on Intel to up the cores in an Atom chip to 16, and deploying it as a low power server chip solution."

"Each time a new version of Windows is released, many computer users find that their hardware is suddenly outdated. For cash-strapped schools, upgrading to the latest hardware with each major software release is simply impossible. A New York startup called NeverWare is offering a possible solution - a server that lets even decade-old PCs upgrade to the latest Windows 7 operating system."

RT-Thread RTOS is an open source real-time operating system for embedded system or microcontrollers, with components which include a hard real-time kernel, a command line shell, a device virtual file system, and a graphic user interface.

"National ICT Australia, in conjunction with Open Kernel Labs, has released new software aimed at researchers, developers and manufacturers that has the ability to protect computer hardware from failure or being attacked. The seL4 microkernel is a small operating system kernel which regulates access to a computer's hardware and is able to distinguish between trusted and untrusted software."

Engadget gets some hands-on time with a Playstation Phone but the big news is out of Tokyo where Sony held its "Playstation Meeting 2011" event where they introduced both Playstation gaming on Android and the PSP2, currently code named NGP.

"AMD has announced its support of Open GL 4.1 on Microsoft and Linux platforms in its latest driver release for a number of its graphics cards. The driver release, available on the AMD website for the ATI FirePro, ATI FireGl and AMD Radeon cards, will support OpenGL 4.1 for Microsoft's Windows 7, Vista, XP, as well as Linux."

"Sometimes the sheer wrongness of what is posted on the web leaves us speechless. Especially when it's picked up and repeated as gospel by otherwise reputable sites like Engadget. 'Google copied Oracle's Java code, pasted in a new license, and shipped it', they reported this morning. Sorry, but that just isn't true."

Codezero Embedded Hypervisor Toolkit v0.4.1 has been released for TI OMAP4 dual-core Cortex-A9 Pandaboard platform. Please take a look at the download page for the project installer and tarball packages. Available in this release is a prebuilt hypervisor toolkit for userspace application development. The toolkit brings up two cores as a real-time executive and is meant for running baremetal software on the low cost OMAP4 ARM Cortex-A9 hardware from TI. Virtualized Android and Linux editions are also planned for a later release.