Go 1 is the first release supporting binary distributions, which are available in Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows. The language also integrates with Google's App Engine cloud platform.

"The driving motivation for Go 1 is stability for its users. People who write Go 1 programs can be confident that those programs will continue to compile and run without change, in many environments, on a time scale of years. Similarly, authors who write books about Go 1 can be sure that their examples and explanations will be helpful to readers today and into the future," according to a post from Go team member Andrew Gerrand on the Go language blog.

"We have customers who have huge repositories of business methods written in Cobol or C. They should be running on a modern platform like Java EE," said Laurent de Jerphanion, marketing manager for Libert TP.

The company has been working on the new platform for about two years, he said, and already has a number of its customers interested in it, particularly those running Tuxedo, the application server for non-Java languages that Oracle inherited with its acquisition of BEA, De Jerphanion said.

LiberTP is interesting for them because "It costs less to support Java than to support Tuxedo or other types of platform," he said.

Foxconn's contract handset manufacturing arm returned to a net profit in 2011, after the company streamlined its operations during the year to better manage production costs.

Foxconn International Holdings, a company under Foxconn Technology Group, reported on Thursday net profit of US$72.8 million for the 2011 financial year ended Dec. 31. This was up 133 percent from the $218 million loss it reported in the previous year.

The company's revenue for 2011 was $6.3 billion, down from $6.6 billion in the previous year.

Foxconn International reports earnings only for the half-year and the full-year.

The company noted that competition with rival suppliers increased. It said it had optimized its manufacturing capacity in various regions by cutting down on excess production, while also reducing investments in certain areas of research and development.

Drawing on a credit card or a linked bank account, users send money to another person in much the same way they would a text message. The app lets users include a note about what the payment was for, similar to using a paper check. It also invites users to share their notes on their Venmo activity feed and on the social networks Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Venmo claims that, prior to moving out of a two-year private beta Tuesday, it was processing roughly US$10 million a month.

Payments don't jump out as a real-world activity that users are clamoring to share on social networks, but, according to Venmo co-founder Andrew Kortina, most payments have been shared.

While Android and iOS continue to ride high, their competitors represent just a fraction of the smartphone market and will have trouble changing that this year, new data from mobile advertising firm Jumptap indicates.

During the month of January, 91 percent of all smartphone traffic on Jumptap's U.S. mobile ad network came from Android and iOS devices, according to the company's February MobileSTAT report, released Monday. Both platforms reached new highs during the month, with Android accounting for 58.8 percent of traffic and iOS making up 32.2 percent.

As a wireless connectivity technology, Bluetooth is designed to be relatively easy to use, and typically it requires little more than entering a four-digit PIN to instantly pair, say, a keyboard with your iPad.

And yet, for all its purported simplicity, online forums are full of users complaining about Bluetooth problems--whether it's iPhone owners looking to pair a novelty handset or a first-time laptop user just looking to turn Bluetooth on. "I cannot use Bluetooth. I don't know what is wrong with my laptop but this problem is frustrating for me," said one user in the TechArena forum. Another user, on Tech Support Forum, wrote: "I KNOW I have bluetooth, I checked BIOS and it says it is enabled... so lost right now, and a touch frustrated."

The maker of the iPhone and iPad is concerned that Motorola will bring the iPhone 4S into a patent infringement lawsuit it has filed against Apple in the U.S., as it has tried to do in Germany.

Apple said in the lawsuit filed Friday before the United States District Court, Southern District of California that Motorola's lawsuit in Germany, alleging infringement of its European Patent No. 1010336 ('336 patent) in the iPhone 4S, is in direct breach of a patent licensing agreement between Qualcomm and Motorola, of which Apple is a third-party beneficiary.

Motorola's rights under the '336 and its equivalent U.S. Patent No. 6,359,898 ('898 patent) are exhausted under the same contract, Apple said in the lawsuit.

A Qualcomm subsidiary sells the MDM6610 baseband processors to Apple's contract manufacturers for their inclusion in its CDMA2000-compliant iPhone 4S, Apple said.

Facebook, Groupon Inc, LinkedIn Corp, Zynga Inc and others have put in place governance provisions that go against a long-term swing towards more shareholder-friendly rules.

One stark example of this reversal is in the number of companies that have classified or staggered boards, where only a handful of directors come up for election each year rather than all of them, making it hard for an activist investor or unwanted suitor to take control of the board through a proxy context.

Instead of digging through source, Firefox 10 has something called the 'Inspect Tool'. With the Inspect Tool any Firefox 10 users can right click on any item on a web page and get a menu item that will provide visibility into the code and style structure for an element on a page.

"The word 'hacker' has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers," Zuckerberg wrote. "In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world."

Zuckerberg's view on the word 'hacker' is one that security researchers have also been pushing for several years. In 2011, a top security researcher at the U.S Government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also stressed that the word 'hacker' isn't a bad thing. Hackers are a pathway to innovation in a manner different than the typical structured and hierarchical approach to software development.

Android phones, Twitter, Google and YouTube are among the tools you can use to keep tabs on the jolly old elf during his travels for Sunday's holiday.

Here's a breakdown.

Google Earth and Google Maps

The easiest way to see what Santa's up to is to visit NoradSanta.org where you can see an embedded map of Santa's journey. The North American Aerospace Defense Command says the man in red officially began his annual journey across the globe at 2 a.m. EST time Saturday morning.

If you'd rather see Santa in all his glory on Google Earth, click the "Track Santa On Google Earth" button in the bottom right corner of the map. This will prompt you to download the Google Earth Plug-in for your browser (Windows 2000 or higher and Mac OS X 10.5 or higher).

The features documented in the Fusion 4.1 release notes include support for full-screen mode on Lion (including a "Smart Full Screen" mode that doesn't leave users of multiple-display Macs out in the cold), performance and graphics improvements, and support for Lion features such as FileVault 2 and Lion Recovery.

But one big change with this update isn't documented anywhere: The software has been modified so that it will run the non-server versions of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) and Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Previously, VMware Fusion supported virtual Macs running Lion, Lion Server, Snow Leopard Server, and Leopard Server.