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The Microsoft strategy against Android owes less to Ray Ozzie than it does to John Roberts. As I noted at the time, the non-decision in Bilski vs. Kappos gave companies a green light to try and sue innovation out of existence. This nightmare has now come to pass. The problem with software patents, as opposed to those for drugs or medical devices, is that they don’t cover the way you do something, but the idea of doing something.

When I first started to read the title of the motion, I thought with joy that Oracle was dismissing its complaint. But of course, no. That's in my perfect alternate universe, where Oracle comes to its senses and the parties work it all out, in the FOSS community way. Instead, it is asking the court to dismiss parts of Google's Answer -- some of its counterclaims, particularly the ones claiming that Oracle's patents are invalid -- some of Google's affirmative defenses -- which Oracle calls improbable and too vaguely pleaded -- and believe it or not it would like to censor some of the factual background material in Google's Answer. It says paragraphs 7 through 22 of Google's Answer are merely "a long list of self-congratulatory remarks and polemics that have nothing to do with Google’s counterclaims for non-infringement and invalidity." Oracle says they are immaterial and impertinent. It is to laugh, as they say. Silly stuff already, and we're just clearing the runway.

The Linux Foundation (LF) and its smaller embedded Linux counterpart, the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced they will merge, with CELF becoming a technical workgroup at the LF. With the merger of the two non-profit groups, the Linux Foundation will expand its embedded computing technical programs, and will launch a new embedded Linux "Yocto Project."

TransGaming, the company behind the Cedega program for running Windows games on Linux (as an alternative to using Wine or CodeWeaver's CrossOver Games) and Cider as the Mac equivalent, has just announced that Adobe is now licensing its SwiftShader Technology for the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. SwiftShader is TransGaming's pure software 3D renderer that supports features like vertex/pixel shaders, floating point rendering, and other DirectX 9.0 / OpenGL ES 2.0 level features.

As well as documentation for those interested, I sincerely hope that it can raise awareness of the non-security of “electronic mail” and help users to take the appropriate implementation tools. Let’s start with this basic idea: “Email is not a secure media for transmitting information.”

I recently upgraded my trusty Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook from Ubuntu Netbook remix version 10.04 to the recently released version 10.10. Canonical and the Ubuntu community have made some very significant changes to the user interface, but the changes were pretty intuitive, so they did not take a lot of getting used to. In this article, I will reveal some of the insights that I have had over the last several days using the latest Ubuntu, and how I think that Ubuntu is really going to help cloud computing become more popular.

AISL, the Italian Association of Free Software companies, recently debuted at the SMAU exhibit, the Italian leading ICT to discuss items related to digital technologies for business. As results clearly from the FAQ, AISL is born to bring under the same roof Italian IT companies promoting, creating and selling free software-related services. AISL will participate also to the very next event of the “Open Source Focus Group” series, dedicated to electronic purchase of open source services via the Public Administration Electronic Marketplace.

We cannot ignore them — they are everywhere. Lists of things “todo”. Things to buy. Choices to choose from. No mobile environment would be complete without the ability to display a list of choices to a user. Of course, every platform has their own name for them. Android calls its list a ListView and requires an “adapter” to supply the data to the list widget. iPhone developers create lists with the UITableView and flesh out a “protocol” in Objective-C to provide the data via a callback paradigm. For the Java programmers among us, a protocol is similar to an Interface in Java.

It's easy to lampoon Ray Ozzie's farewell memo to Microsoft - Dan Lyons summarised it as "We suck. I quit. Goodbye." - but the departing Chief Software Architect has made some serious points. Tech is changing, and Microsoft isn't changing fast enough. It's not the easiest memo to read, because Ozzie never uses one word when he can use 80 - so we stuck it through Microsoft Word's AutoSummarize feature to find the important bits*.

A really slick Ubuntu advertisement was shown during Mark’s keynote address at the Ubuntu Developer Summit 2010. It's a very well put together Ubuntu advert and gives you a quick preview of what Ubuntu is all about. Watch the video below.

This article shows how you can change the appearance of your Ubuntu 10.10 desktop so that it resembles a Mac. This can be achieved with the help of Elementary, Docky, and Gloobus-Preview. Elementary is a project that provides a popular icon set and GTK theme; Docky is an interactive dock (like the one you know from a Mac) that provides easy access to some of the files, folders, and applications on your computer, and more; and Gloobus-Preview is an extension for the Gnome Desktop Environment designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file or directory.

Intel will be introducing their first Sandy Bridge CPUs in the coming months, which we already know has Linux graphics support well underway, but for now the top-end Intel desktop processors are the Gulftown CPUs that were introduced earlier this year. The Gulftown CPUs boast six physical processing cores with Hyper Threading to put the total thread count per CPU at 12. Besides putting 12 processing threads at your disposal, these CPUs are built upon the 32nm die shrink of Nehalem and boast 12MB of L3 cache. The first Gulftown desktop product to launch was the Intel Core i7 980X, which was quickly followed by the Core i7 970, and we now finally have the chance to test out this incredibly fast but expensive processor under Linux.

Microsoft plans to impose royalty fees on Taiwan-based vendors of Android handsets for using its patents in e-mail, multimedia and other functions, with Acer and Asustek Computer being targets in an actual attempt to prevent the two vendors from adopting Android and Chrome OS for their netbook and tablet PCs, according to Taiwan-based makers. There are only several Taiwan-based handset vendors and only HTC has signed for licensed use of Microsoft patents.... Acer's and Asustek's handset shipments are in small volumes and therefore Microsoft's royalty charge is not for revenues, the sources noted.

The "Unity" user interface that debuted in Ubuntu 10.10's Netbook Edition will be standard on the next version of the Ubuntu Desktop Edition, as well. Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will replace the Linux distribution's default GNOME environment in favor of the multitouch-enabled Unity user interface, says Canonical. Making the announcement at a keynote Oct. 25 at Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Fla., Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, said Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will swap out the GNOME user interface in favor of the Unity interface that is now available on UNE.

I’ve said before that I love what Ubuntu is doing with design, but the recent announcement to ship Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity as the default desktop is going to make things a bit rocky for the next couple of years. The Unity interface, while beautiful, still has quite a few bugs to work out, which will make it rocky for Ubuntu developers. Adoption of Unity probably means that the GNOME Shell is not going to be used in Ubuntu, which makes relations between the GNOME and Ubuntu developers a little more rocky. Right in the middle of all this are Ubuntu’s users who might be left wondering what their place in all of this is.

I was excited to see that the Linux From Scratch (hereafter, LFS) project just released a new and stable documentation “build” for version 6.7 this past September. I have known about the LFS project for many years but I didn’t start experimenting with it until not too long ago.

Compact Flash and SD storage cards are everywhere; gigabytes for cheap in a tiny form factor. Most come formatted with VFAT. So what is the fastest Linux filesystem for these little devices? Flash drives and SD Cards are getting bigger, faster and cheaper. They're not just for sucking down snaps from your pocket camera any more: they're backup storage, portable homedirs, netbook expansion ... you name it.

Alex Miller is just 12 years old, but don't let his age fool you. This teenager has just made his mark in the technology world by spotting a major security bug in the world's second most popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox.

The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here's a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.

Compiz 0.9.2 was revealed recently with a number of major improvements, new features and even new plugins. But the future of Compiz became uncertain since both Gnome with its GNOME Shell and KDE with its new KWin has decided to go forward with the new integrated desktop approach. But hold on, Compiz might just become an ever more active and important project with Canonical deciding to integrate Compiz with Ubuntu Unity.