On September 28, Nintendo released a Wii update, titled 4.2. This update was targeted squarely at homebrew, performing sweeping changes throughout the system.

During BootMii's development, its authors noticed that Nintendo's code had critical bugs and could sometimes permanently brick a console by writing incorrect or unchecked data to flash memory, so they decided to write their own, much safer flashing code.

Another interesting tidbit is that Nintendo is not believed to have any method to repair this kind of brick at a factory, short of replacing the entire motherboard.

After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form.

CP/M never really went away-it evolved into DOS PLUS, which then morphed into DR DOS, which one-time owner Caldera open-sourced as OpenDOS. Both DR DOS and OpenDOS are still with us.

Apple told it that having Commodore BASIC on the iPhone was too dangerous, which led Manomio to submit a version with BASIC disabled-except you could turn it on again if you knew how.

Wikipedia says that AmigaOS 4.1 was released last year, and that a "quick fix" (read: service pack) came out just last June. All I know for sure is that this version won't run on my Amiga 500-and that I'll shed a silent tear if AmigaOS ever ceases to exist.

A Microsoft Software Engineer has posted the results of tests the company performed to the upgrade time of Windows 7. Worst case scenario is that it will take a bit over 20 hours.

That's with 650GB of data, 40 applications, on mid-end hardware, and during a 32-bit upgrade. We don't even want to know how long it would take if Microsoft had bothered doing the same test with low-end hardware.

The Norton Online Risk Calculator, unveiled within a microsite to coincide with the launch of Norton 2010, calculates your net worth on the black market by asking a few questions about your personal Internet use.

It takes a few minutes to answer the questions, after which you get three results: how much your online assets are worth, how much your online identity would sell for on the black market, and your risk of becoming a victim of identity theft.

According to the letters, the FCC wants to know the who, what, why and when of the rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone.

And here the FCC isn't limiting itself to questions about the Google Voice incident. The FCC also wants to know what other apps have been rejected, what the rules are and what role AT&T plays in such decisions.

For instance, AT&T said it expected Apple to reject a Skype application that would let users make internet phone calls using the phones' 3G data connection. Apple also forced Slingbox to cripple its video streaming application so that it would only work over WiFi, and not a mobile carrier's network.

Microsoft is standing by its decision to release thousands of lines of code to the GPL, saying the decision wasn't based on a violation of the popular license.

It was the only reference to any violation of the GPL, meaning Microsoft has not tackled the original question of how it was in violation, why it happened, and what steps it has taken to prevent such an occurrence from happening in the future.

Their scheme, called Vanish, encrypts the message, and then essentially throws away the key. The trick is that the key will take a set amount of time before disappearing from view; during that time, it's still possible to access the data.

Because the online storage system purges data after set periods of time, once that time is up, the key is permanently lost. In essence, the message has self-destructed.

Management put a hefty check on the table - I'm sure our beloved sysadmins felt like kids before Christmas - and salivating sales people from major hardware vendors grabbed our requirements spec, dived into their CRMs and crunched their spreadsheets.

However, one of the world's biggest hardware vendors - whose name every single reader will be familiar with, and whose hardware a good share of you will be using right now - apparently didn't do their homework. When Opera's sysadmin booted up the server to test its web-based administration interface, they came across a single JavaScript statement that managed to piss off everyone up to and including the CTO.

Norton Internet Security 2010 won't be available for a few more months, but the beta version is available now.

Built upon the dramatic performance improvements are deeper integration with other security tools like OnlineFamily.

Although HTML 5 is still in the draft stage, several of its features have already been widely adopted by browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. Among the most compelling is the "video" element, which has the potential to free Web video from its plugin prison and make video content a native first-class citizen on the Web-if codec disagreements don't stand in the way.

The HTML 5 working group is split between supporters of Ogg Theora and H.264.

Apple and Google favor H.264 while Mozilla and Opera favor Ogg Theora.