TheWatchWorks

And thus, our true colours reveal. Since Obama was the young newcomer, technically savvy, many of us were hoping that he might support patent and/or copyright reform. In case our story earlier on this subject didn't already tip you off, this certainly will: Obama has sided squarely with the RIAA/MPAA lobby, and backs ACTA. No copyright and/or patent reform for you, American citizens!

It's been quiet about the Google-China dispute for a while now, but today, the silence was broken by China's minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, who stated that Google must either obey Chinese law or "pay the consequences", leaving no room for a compromise. With more and more western countries building their own internet filters and internet monitoring schemes, it becomes ever harder to make a strong fist against China.

While we are all busy discussing Apple suing HTC for patent infringement, we're almost forgetting that Nokia and Apple are also embroiled in about ten million lawsuits going either way. The most recent move comes from Nokia, who seeks to dismiss Apple's antritrust claims using pretty much the same arguments Apple used to counter Psystar's antitrust claims.

As most of you will know, Microsoft lost the patent lawsuit filed against the Redmond giant by i4i, while also losing the first appeal. Microsoft was forced to remove the infringing functionality from Word for US customers, but they also filed a second appeal. This appeal, too, has been lost.

New Zealand's internet filtering system went live last month - but the government forgot to mention this to its electorate until its hand was forced by online freedom campaign, Tech Liberty. Thomas Beagle, a spokesman for the group, said he was "very disappointed that the filter is now running" and that its launch had been conducted in such a "stealthy mode". He added: "It's a sad day for the New Zealand internet." It's sad indeed, that things like this are possible in modern democracies.

Common wisdom has it that Flash is a resource hog, and that HTML5 will prevent your processor from having to work really, really hard to show animations of videos. Well, a number of people have conducted benchmarks with the latest browsers and Flash betas, and common wisdom is starting to show serious signs of crackage.

Version 0.4.2 of the little-known microkernel-based multiserver operating system HelenOS has been released. See their official release notes to find out what other bleeding-edge features besides an experimental and highly modular networking stack this release brings.

Motorola will start loading Microsoft's search and map services onto its Android smartphones in China, bringing more non-Google services to the phones amid a row between Google and China.

"Khronos Group, the association behind OpenGL, has today announced the fourth generation of its cross-platform API spec, which takes up the mantle of offering a viable competitor to Microsoft's DirectX 11. The latest release includes two new shader stages for offloading geometry tessellation from the CPU to the GPU, as well as tighter integration with OpenCL to allow the graphics card to take up yet more duties off the typically overworked processor."

Earlier this week, it was time for the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, to announce the winner of the 2009 Turing Award, one of the more prestigious prices in the computing industry. The award was awarded to Charles P. Thacker; a name you might not recognise, but certainly one that has influenced the world of computing a great deal.

If you thought the growing criticism directed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office would force them to rethink their strategies in granting patents, you're most likely wrong. After a re-examination that took more than four years, the USPTO has reconfirmed Amazon's ominous one-click patent.

"The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation, brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation."

Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that takes a pretty radical departure from current IDEs. While most IDEs, such as Eclipse are file-based, Code Bubbles is based on fragments. The system appears to support reading and editing code with fragments, multi-tasking, annotating and sharing, and debugging with bubbles. There's a website with video too.

All Mozilla projects (the major ones at least, I didn't check them all up) are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. It's already over a decade old, and the Mozilla Foundation believes it is time to overhaul the license, with a focus on modernising what they believe to be outdated wording.

One of the things I love about software, particularly open source software, is innovation can come from anywhere. Sometimes it appears out of large tech companies such as Red Hat, IBM or Sun and other times it can come from one person writing code on a second hand computer in their college dorm. Software is really the expression of ideas and concepts, which can come from anyone. So I really enjoy seeing small open source projects try new things. Some will succeed and be adopted and some will fade away, but the amazing thing is to see people put their idea out there and present it to the world. Which is why I was thrilled when a few people directed me to Paldo and suggested it was worth a look. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Palm has released the PDK for the webOS, which allows developers to code in C and C++, while also providing access to, for instance, the 3D chip. "The PDK complements the Palm webOS Software Development Kit, letting developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK and mix them seamlessly within a single app. The PDK enables new functionality, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform. Developers can download the beta PDK and start developing today, but distribution of games built with the beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update."

"Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JaegerMonkey."

"Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a path toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and failed to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being assigned an impossible task. In this follow-up to yesterday's story on the future of Windows, Trower recounts the inside story of his experience in transforming Windows from vaporware into a product that has left an unmistakable imprint on the world, 25 years after it was first released."

Cisco Systems today introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. "The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate," Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said during a webcast announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said.

In response to Apple's lawsuit against HTC, Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, has written a very intriguing blog post providing an insight into how major companies like Apple and Microsoft treat patents. He recounts two occasions on which Apple and Microsoft threatened to sue Sun - and how Sun retorted.