OSNews

The iPad pretty much has the tablet market all to itself at this point, since no serious competitor has yet been released. We've been teased to death with the first real competitor, a device from Samsung called the Galaxy Tab. It has been officially unveiled today, and it indeed looks like the first serious competition to the iPad. It runs Android, naturally.

Well, this was rather unexpected. As it turns out, Commodore USA's CEO Barry Altman isn't particularly pleased about the article I wrote earlier today in which I placed a considerable amount of scepticism with regards to Commodore USA and its business (and website). He (not his lawyer) sent us a threatening email demanding we take down the article, post a new correction article, the whole shebang. The entire email - as an image, you'll want the original formatting - after the break. Our reply? We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

Just when you thought the Amiga world was finally getting its act together, finally making things a little less obtuse for outsiders, this happens. So, we have the AmigaOne X1000 coming up, a brand-new PowerPC computer, running the real deal - AmigaOS 4. In the meantime, Commodore USA - the one with the sketchy website - has apparently secured rights to the Amiga hardware brand, and is planning to release Amiga-branded computers running AROS. In the meantime, Hyperion, the Belgium company behind AmigaOS, who is working with A-eon on the AmigaOne X1000, claims this is a clear violation of the settlement between them and Amiga Inc., and has notified its US lawyers.

Highly innovative but remarkably illusive - that's how I describe the webOS. The operating system never made its way to The Netherlands, and as such, I never got to try it. Now that Palm is part of HP, development on webOS continues, and the company has just detailed what's coming for developers in version 2.0.

I remember a time when you bought ATI instead of NVIDIA, much the same way you still buy AMD instead of Intel. As we all know, AMD bought ATI, further confirming the implicit relationship between the two that already existed anyway. Now, though, the relationship comes to an end, since AMD has confirmed the ATI brand will be phased out.

Well, this is about as surprising as Fiona Apple being awesome in every possible way. Google has announced that it has withdrawn itself from JavaOne, an annual conference on, well, Java. The cited reason? Oracle suing Google over Android's use of Java, of course.

Most of us here are not particularly big fans of the concept of patents. Most of us are aware of the significance of patents, we just believe the system has gone out of control and needs a serious kick in the butt. Well, it turns out not even the richest people on this earth are immune to the call of the patent troll. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed a massive patent lawsuit, using broad and vague patents to sue just about any big name in the business - from Apple to Google.

I'm not really sure what to do with this. I mean, I know how popular the Commodore 64 was and still is, and how significant a machine it really was. So, when Commodore USA sends out a press release that it has acquired the rights to produce an exact replica case of the C64 (but with Intel Atom innards), I knew a lot of people would like this. At the same time, Commodore USA's website always seemed a little... Sketchy to me.

I came across a news entry at Phoronix about a new init replacement, systemd, and curiously started a read into the surprisingly heavy matter. Systemd is by no means as simple as upstart. It does far more things far more straight and in more detail. The differences are so significant that they enforce quite different configuration strategies. One can argue for both, depending on the goal to reach. However, that's not what I want to write about. After having read what systemd is capable of, and how it does it, I began to put the existence of all system daemons - in their today's forms - in question.

Today, Mozilla released the fourth beta of Firefox 4.0. After a period of what I would call stagnation, the Mozilla team are back on track with delivering interesting UI concepts. They were sensible enough to copy Chrome's excellent tabs-on-top UI, but have now also added something called Panorama, a new and very interesting way of managing your open tabs.