Last week, in a piece from our friends at GigaOM, Database Grandpoobah Mike Stonebraker announced that Facebook's continued dependance on MySQL was "a fate worse than death," insisting that the social network's only route to salvation is to "bite the bullet and rewrite everything."

Stonebraker's Facebook comments drew fire not only from a core database engineer at Mark Zuckerberg's social networking outfit, but also from the recognized kingpin of "cloud computing": Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels.

Despite the significant challenge of increasing the Firefox release cadence, Mozilla has successfully delivered Firefox 5 to users a mere three months after the release of Firefox 4. The new version is unsurprisingly light on user-facing changes due to the shortened cycle, but has some decent improvements under the hood.

Aside from these minor user interface changes and new features, Firefox 5 brings a number of bugfixes and performance improvements that will improve the browsing experience.

The US Department of Homeland Security is warning of holes in Chinese infrastructure software which could leave factories and power stations vulnerable to hack attacks.

The software is mainly used in China but claims some customers in Europe, the Americas and Asia and Africa. There have been no known exploits of the vulnerability and attackers would need an intermediate level of skill to use it.

Over the past couple of months, there have been continual rumours that Apple is testing the iPad's A5 processor in its MacBook range, suggesting Apple believes iOS could stretch further than smartphones and tablets.

Why would Jobs want to keep giving software companies a free ride on Mac OS X, when it could migrate MacBooks to iOS, mandate software purchases via the App Store only, and take a 30% cut of the revenue?

Speaking on Wednesday at the opening of Microsoft's new Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group headquarters in Beijing, Microsoft CEO said that the company earned revenue in China amounting to only five percent of that earned in the US, in spite of comparable sales of personal computers between the two countries. The reason for the difference? Piracy, unsurprisingly.

In a post on the group's blog today, EFF staff attorney Julie Samuels said Apple has put developers in a difficult position by requiring them to use within their apps in-app purchase (IAP), a mechanism that's been targeted by a third-party group that says the technology infringes on its patents.

Apple has still not publicly addressed Lodsys' claims or responded to requests for comment. A report by the Guardian earlier this week said Apple was "actively investigating" the matter.

Those wishing to cough $8 a month (or $60 a year, $100 for two years) for the iPlayboy service are promised "every issue, every Playmate, every celebrity, every article, every joke, even every vintage advertisement".

A big selling point for iPlayboy is the back catalogue's availability on the iPad, entirely uncensored as Hugh Hefner previously promised. This has prompted questions as to just how the smutmonger has managed to bypass the Apple ban on porn.

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite.

Most of the major companies that have historically been involved in OOo development have moved to stand behind TDF and LibreOffice, including Red Hat, Novell, Google, and Canonical.

Oracle now has little choice but to abandon its commercial ambitions for OOo because the growing momentum of the more inclusive LibreOffice fork is making OOo irrelevant.

The next IE won't run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista.

If users try to install IE10 Platform Preview on a Vista machine, they'll receive an error message and the installer software will shut down.

This is how IE can attain impressive performance on graphics-intensive demos like those on Microsoft's IETestdrive site.

In buying up a stash of Novell patents, Apple and Oracle could choke rivals in the virtualization, middleware, mobile, and media markets, according to the Open Source Initiative.

The OSI is "very concerned" that Apple could make it "difficult or impossible to create competitive mobile platforms or mobile applications developed as open source."

Steve Jobs has threatened to "go after" Ogg Theora and other open source video codecs. "It seems plausible that Apple's most credible competitor in the mobile market, Android, would be vulnerable to challenge by the patents involved in the CPTN-transaction," Tiemann said.