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Microsoft has lost the mobile war. The disappointing performance of Windows Phone even after two years of its release is evident that the market has moved on. Microsoft's last bet is Nokia which dropped all of its own open source projects and promising OS such as MeeGo to become a hardware delivery truck for Microsoft's Mobile OS. Nokia used to have a very strong position in the Asian market and Microsoft wanted to get a free ride of that popularity. Which again is the indication that people won't go to buy a Windows phone they will be looking for a Nokia Phone. That leaves on to wonder what is going to be the future of Windows 8 Tablet.

I'm going to attempt to answer as many questions about the Spark tablet as possible here. The questions I'll be answering are ones found in comments in my blog, on discussion sites around the Internet and that came in by email or irc. Let the fun begin!

Q: When can I buy one?...

Having failing at every market segment where they can't force users to use their products, Microsoft has assumingly resorted to attacking competitors over bogus issues. We today published a story about how Microsoft's attack on Google's privacy policies are bogus. Now, Google has also responded to the FUD spread by Microsoft.

When I first let the world in on our "little" project to create an open tablet there were some who wondered openly about the licensing of the software. It's an important question that deserves a clarifying answer:

We are not using the OS (Android, in this case) provided by the hardware manufacturer. We are also well aware that some of the people in the hardware supply chain are violating the terms of the GPL. This was amazingly frustrating for us and caused significant delays as we went in search of GPL friendly vendors. We found that in the market of affordable device makers in China, they just don't exist. There's a cultural as well as legal hurdles that have led to this unfortunate situation, and I personally think Google has a lot to answer for when they allow such companies open access to their app store while they must be aware of the license violations that are going on. So it's an unfortunate situation, but we're problem solvers, we're bad-ass Free software developers who see a problem and bang on it until it falls over, right?

For several years, I've been saying that KDE is no longer trying to catch up with Windows, but surpassed it several years ago. However, last week a reader challenged me to prove it. I immediately told him that, if he didn't believe me, he should open KDE and Windows 7 side by side. Even a casual comparison shows that not only does KDE generally have more features than Windows 7, but that, conceptually, KDE has a healthy lead.

No feature defines the KDE 4 release series more than Activities. At the same time, no feature is so little understood -- Fedora even has a package for removing the desktop toolkit, which provides mouse access to Activities. But, when you take the time to learn about Activities, you'll find them a natural extension of the desktop metaphor that just might help you to work more efficiently. Activities are a super-set of Virtual Desktops. They don't replace Virtual Desktops -- in fact, each Activity can have its own set of Virtual Desktops if you choose. Instead, Activities are alternative desktops, each of which can have its own wallpaper, icons, and widgets.

Hewlett-Packard's WebOS is making unexpected inroads in healthcare as medical researchers develop applications for the newly open-source platform.

Andrew B. Holbrook, a Stanford University Department of Radiology research associate, developed a WebOS application that operates an MRI scanner and allows radiologists and other medical personnel to view images captured by the MRI machine on a TouchPad tablet.

These are interesting times for the Linux desktop. The often-overlooked area of the Linux ecosystem is now the centre of attention and, while some users have welcomed the changes, others have reacted in true community style: ranting and raging, threatening to abandon ship or, when all else fails, demanding a fork.

The ownCloud project is 2 years old next month!! Today is an exciting day because today we announce a company as an addition to the open source project to push ownCloud forward. ownCloud Inc. will offer ownCloud services and support to enterprises in addition to to the normal open source version.

ownCloud Inc. will help us to spread ownCloud and free cloud services in general – way more than we could have done without.

So why is it good for an open source project to have a company which offers enterprise services and solutions around free software?

My main grievance against GNOME 3 and Unity is the elimination of all except a few applets. Both grudgingly allow some basic applets, such as a clock, but each lacks the ecosystem of applets that made GNOME so configurable. You only have to look at the rich assortment of applets in KDE -- which calls them widgets -- to see what GNOME and Unity are missing. If anything, KDE's widgets are even richer than GNOME 2's applets, with dozens of small pieces of functionality that range from the serious to the trivial and the basic to the expert and obscure, including everything from hardware indicators and system configuration tools to desktop enhancements and toys and educational software.

"Secure boot" is a technology described by recent revisions of the UEFI specification; it offers the prospect of a hardware-verified, malware-free operating system bootstrap process that can improve the security of many system deployments. Linux and other open operating systems will be able to take advantage of secure boot if it is implemented properly in the hardware. This document is intended to describe how the UEFI secure boot specification can be implemented to interoperate well with open systems and to avoid adversely affecting the rights of the owners of those systems while providing compliance with proprietary software vendors' requirements.

In a cooperative effort, the Mer team and the basysKom integrators have succeeded in booting a Plasma Active image on NVidia Tegra 2 devices, opening the door bringing Plasma Active to a wider range of hardware. The image is based on Mer, a successor to the MeeGo operating system.

Several years ago now I had a minor epiphany while doing field research in the offices of friends and work associates on how people use their computers. The ideas led to the concept of "Activities", which I originally called "Projects" (we changed the name because it was about more than just things we could call a "project").

The idea was fairly grand: you communicate to the computer what you are currently doing and it adapts to that. You would be able to teach it what it means to be doing that thing: "I use these files, talk to these people, need this network connection, want these applications ..." The teaching would happen over time as you engage in your activity, whatever it might be.

We get a lot of questions about Plasma Active, and I'd like to address a few of the more common once in this entry.

Openness ...

QtQuick / QML ...

Plasma Desktop / Netbook ....

...After months of effort, Plasma Active has gone "beta". We're currently a little more than a month away from the first release, and so starting this month we are focusing on polish, integration and fixing defects. So how does it look? Judge for yourself from this quickly-made five-minute video of Plasma Active on an ExoPC device running packages that are just a few days behind our upstream development:...

During Display Taiwan, Transcend and Taiwan's ITRI displayed a finger-long USB stick that reportedly offers 2 TB of storage. That's no typo. It somehow holds up to 2 terabytes worth of information.

So far neither company has released anything official in regards to specs or a simple introduction, nor does the high-capacity USB 3.0 stick appear on Display Taiwan's website. But as seen in the video below, the "Thin Card" thumb drive is even smaller than a thumb, measuring slightly thicker than a penny. It offers a minimum of 16 GB and a maximum of 2 TB.

The Department of Defence has reportedly conducted an informal trial of the open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite involving some 100 users. According to iTNews (click here for the full story), the initiative was kicked off by Defence chief technology officer Matt Yannopoulos over the past year. However, it does not appear likely the initiative will immediately broaden into a wider rollout at Defence, with Yannopoulos noting it would be a major decision for the department, which has long been a Microsoft shop. The news comes as Australia appears to be witnessing a resurgence in interest in open source technologies this year, with the Federal Government taking several bold moves in the area in the past six months.

The Department of Defence has stepped up its push for open source software to reduce its $100 million annual software licensing bill. Last week, it joined five other government agencies in forming the Open Technology Foundation, which aimed to facilitate collaboration and interoperable technology in the public sector. Defence chief technology officer Matt Yannopoulos said the department had been considering open source software for more than three years.

Also talks about the split with Ubuntu, outspoken criticism and why KDE and GNOME are different operating systems After years of focusing on stability and non-disruptive improvements, the GNOME desktop recently took a big chance: With the release of GNOME 3.0 a fresh user experience was introduced, breaking with many of the old concepts. One of the driving forces behind the vision and concepts of GNOME3 has been Red Hat developer William Jon McCann. During the recent Desktop Summit in Berlin Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to talk to McCann about the way ahead for GNOME3, how the project deals with criticism and the importance of GNOME3-optimized app development.

It seems Matt Rosoff is having a little bit of snark over Microsoft apparently disregarding Linux as a threat to its desktop business.

The schadenfreude stems from a tweet from Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft, which points out that Microsoft's boilerplate from its last two annual SEC filings has some interesting revisions, as seen here. http://www.itworld.com/index.php?q=image/view/192877