Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday. The next test, essentially a "release candidate" version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won't hit Microsoft's initial goal of finishing the browser this year. "Our next public release of IE (typically called a "release candidate") indicates the end of the beta period," general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting, "We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done."

Every now and then, an article pops up which argues that it would make sense for Microsoft to offer a free, ad-powered version of Windows. "We are all aware that Google is the king of online advertising. Microsoft has wanted to compete in that space forever, which is why giving away Windows 7 makes so much sense," Business Pundit argues, "Let's look at the numbers; Microsoft's operating systems are on 90% of the world's computers, or roughly one billion machines. That's penetration on a massive scale. Even Google has to be impressed." While these articles make some valid points, they rarely dive into the actual details.

Earlier this year VIA announced they wanted to join the open-source bandwagon by establishing an open-source driver development initiative, releasing documentation and source-code, and to better engage with the Linux community at large. They have made a few small steps over the past few months, but today they have made their largest open-source contribution yet by releasing four programming documentation guides that cover the video, 2D, and 3D programming for their Chrome 9 graphics processor. In addition, they are now partnering with the community-spawned OpenChrome developers.

Arjan van de Ven from Intel Open source centre has posted the news that http://kerneloops.org has recorded its 100,000 oops. An oops in the Linux kernel is a deviation from correct behavior of the Linux kernel which produces a certain error log. kerneloops is a client side software that helps record oops more automatically on the website with the same name and is available as part of many distribution repositories and even included by default in Fedora. This is part of the QA efforts in the Linux kernel and when posting the news, Arjan has noted that Linux kernel developers have been fixes most of the top oopses quickly

Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell inked a landmark deal on patents and Linux-to-Windows interoperability. According to Microsoft and Novell, it's a deal that has shown dramatic momentum in its second year, with a triple digit percentage increase in customers for a total tally of more than 200 customers. "I was surprised at the number of over 200 customers, so I actually went back and double checked it just to make sure," Susan Heystee, General Manager for Global Strategic Alliances at Novell told InternetNews.com. "That represents over 250 percent growth in terms of the number of customers that are part of the partnership which is really great. A real positive surprise has been the great customer momentum."

Tech pioneer Hewlett Packard has had its ups and downs over the decades, but it's currently on the upswing, even during these trying economic times. #5 probably hits closest for OSNews readers: a renewed focus on innovation.

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?

Royal Pingdom blog has posted with a comparison of home page load times and uptimes and concludes that various Linux distributions and Apple, both beat Microsoft's record. 13/16 Linux distributions (and Apple) had less downtime than Microsoft's homepage. 5/16 Linux distributions had less downtime than Apple's homepage. Four homepages had NO downtime: Red Hat, Mepis, Knoppix and Fedora. Five homepages had more than an hour of downtime: Gentoo, Mandriva, Mint, Arch and Microsoft.

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of Mozilla corporation has posted a report the details the financial status of Mozilla for this year. "Our revenue remains strong; our expenses focused. Mozilla's revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2007 were $75 million, up approximately 12% from 2006 revenue of $67 million. As in 2006 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google. The Firefox userbase and search revenue have both increased from 2006"

Red Hat has announced a new program where customers would get higher service level guarantees and updates for up to 10 years for a new release instead of the usual 7 years for every release. "The targets for this are the most conservative companies currently on Unix-based systems and with a need for unusual levels of support," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's Platforms business unit.

From MacRumors: "Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies Jordan Hubbard spoke at LISA '08 last week. [...] This year's conference invited Apple's Jordan Hubbard to speak about the evolution of Mac OS X from large servers to embedded platforms". The presentation slides (PDF), besides generally interesting info on Mac OS X, feature a table that shows a release date of Q1 2009 for OS X 10.6 Leopard.

Nvidia and partners are offering new "personal supercomputers" for under $10,000. Nvidia, working with several partners, has developed the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, powered by a graphics processing unit based on Nvidia's Cuda parallel computing architecture. Computers using the Tesla C1060 GPU processor will have 250 times the processing power of a typical PC workstation, enabling researchers to run complicated simulations, experiments and number crunching without sharing a supercomputing cluster.

Strike one for Apple. Curling is a better sport anyway - the first end goes to Apple. The Cupertino company sued clone maker PsyStar for licensing and trademark violations and copyright infringement, only to be greeted by a counter lawsuit from PsyStar, who claimed Apple was a monopolist. U.S. District Judge William Alsup sided with Apple on the counter lawsuit Tuesday. In his 16-page decision Tuesday, Alsup ruled Apple's products don't constitute a market to dominate. As a consequence, Apple then can't be considered a monopolist, Alsup wrote. An Apple spokesman had no comment. A representative for Psystar couldn't be reached for comment. The original lawsuit is still running, so PsyStar can, for now, continue selling its clones.

Adobe recently released their 11th major version of Photoshop, along with the rest of the gang: Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Premiere, After Effects and more. Here's a peek at CS4's video-related tools, which are closer to the technologies I use for my Creative Commons videography work. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

LoseThos is an open-source 64-bit operating system that was created from scratch without any compatibility with Windows or *nix. It is not your regular main-stream OS and it doesn't aspire to become one. It is built for a programmer and it gives the programmer unchecked privilege over its kernel.

To address the growing need for a PC security solution tailored to the demands of emerging markets, smaller PC form factors and rapid increases in the incidence of malware, Microsoft Corp. plans to offer a new consumer security offering focused on core anti-malware protection.

The new 0.4 version of Etoile had just been released. Etoile intends to be an innovative, GNUstep-based, user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components. It is created with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications) and Components. 0.4 is a developer-targeted release on its way towards this goal. As a developer-focussed release, this predominantly consists of frameworks. A few demonstration applications are also included.

"An alpha version of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 11/17/2008 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation." The pre-release can be downloaded from Adobe Lab Downloads.

"The Windows Research Kernel (WRK) packages core Windows XP x64 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 kernel source code with an environment for building and testing experimental versions of the Windows kernel for use in teaching and research."

Microsoft has released an initial release of version 2.0 of the Singularity operating system (research development kit, as it likes to call it). Singularity is a microkernel research operating system, where the kernel, drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Singularity is released under a shared source academic license, and you can do whatever you want with it, except making money (simply put).