With Novell’s help, alongside those other self-serving initiatives, Microsoft seems to have found a splendid formula for deception and manipulation. The company is perhaps convinced that it can afford to bribe, steal, bully and lie (just watch the OOXML scandals) in order to paint something Windows-specific and patents-riddled like OOXML with the ‘open’ brush.

Asus launched its new 8.9-inch Eee PC yesterday, offering more memory, a multi-touch trackpad and better webcam, but despite two operating systems, chains will only see the Windows version.

Here is just a quick word of caution: Now comes the latest FUD from the Burton Group, Microsoft’s left-arm FUD buddy, which was only recently used against Google, VMWare and ODF. As usual, it all comes in the form of a report Microsoft can cite and distribute copies of. It’s now used against Free software, too.

What do you do when you have billions of dollars in the bank and more money coming in each day than most companies can score in their corporate lifetimes? You probably don't open source your software.

Here is just a quick roundup of news which revolves around our ‘favourite’ patents trolls, our ‘favourite’ anti-Free software laws, and Microsoft’s latest intellectual monopoly offenses.

Your computer screen’s menus and icons disappear, slipping beneath a wall of funereal black. The computer still works, but it will not work for you.

Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs, one effect of which will be to limit the hardware capabilities of this type of device, IDG News Service has learned.

The bulk of the extra content consists of HTML tags and links. It's difficult to say how much cruft there is — much of it is Javascript, and I used a non-Javascript web browser for some of this analysis — but a naive dump of the content reveals 128 URLs.