Microsoft pledged to 'play fair' on all its future operating systems, including Windows Vista, will abide by self-imposed rules aimed at bolstering choice and competition. The announcement comes just a week after the European regulators slapped the company with a USD 357.3 million fine for noncompliance with a 2004 antitrust ruling.

A new report from Symantec security researchers contends that Microsoft's much-awaited Vista operating system could harbor a range of vulnerabilities that will make it less secure than previous iterations of Windows. According to research published July 18 by Symantec, a number of Vista's software components, specifically a handful of protocols related to its redesigned networking technologies, could become security loopholes if Microsoft does not fix the problems or ensure that the product is configured appropriately to hide the glitches when it is shipped.

Intel quad-core server and desktop processors will arrive this year instead of next, Chief Executive Paul Otellini said Wednesday, firing a new competitive volley against rival AMD. "We notified customers we're pulling in both the desktop and server (launch) of the first quad-core processors into the fourth quarter of this year from the first half of 2007," Otellini said.

"The next-generation protocol, Internet Protocol version 6, is becoming widely accepted as the future of the Internet and networking world. This acceptance has encouraged various IT companies to develop applications that support and talk with each other through the IPv6 address format. In this article, learn to configure the File Transfer Protocol server for IPv6, and to communicate with FTP servers through a simple Java program that uses the IPv6 address."

Castle director and Tematic boss Peter Wild has said RISC OS must become open source to compete in modern markets. ""Make open source and encourage users to contribute to it, use it and drive its ongoing development. This is the only scenario I can see in which the solution might prosper – short of someone investing a few million quid to fund further development."

eWEEK Labs got a hold of Vista Build 5472 on July 18, loaded it up on a test machine and took a quick tour. eWEEK Labs' tests show a smooth upgrade from Windows XP and helpful new utilities, but the overhauled Windows Explorer still needs work.

Plan 9 is an operating system designed by the same people who created the original UNIX. Its development began in the late 1980's and it was a research project intended to address a variety of system scalability issues that the UNIX and LINUX kernels don't do particularly well, namely, distributed computing, distributed name spaces, and distributed file systems. Plan 9 is open source and its current and fourth major release was in 2002. It is available as an install or LiveCD and it can be downloaded here. Note: This is an entry to our Alternative OS Contest.

'Why Reiser4 is not merged' is a widespread question around forums, Slashdot, OSNews, and wherever else Linux-related new appears on the web. The flame-wars on this topic have gotten to the 'mine is bigger than yours' level. Hence, it's not easy to see where the real problem lies. This document tries to make clear the 'official' point of view of Linux developers on this matter.

Enlightenment 0.16.8.2 has been released, and it includes some bugfixes and speed improvements. Remember that E16 is the 'old' Enlightenment; E17 is the new one, and there's a short article on HowtoForge explaining how to set it up: "Enlightenment 17 or E17 as it is generally called, is a cool Window Manager for X. The latest stable version of Enlightenment is E16 (0.16.8.2). In this article we will talk about the latest CVS build available (0.16.999.023)."

Intel launched its 'Montecito' Itanium, doubling performance compared with its predecessor. Each Montecito chip has two processor cores. Of the six Montecito models introduced, the top-end 9050 has 1.7 billion transistors and 24MB of high-speed cache memory. The models range in clock speed from 1.4GHz to 1.6GHz.

"In a previous item, we described how the AmigaOS4.0 memory system works in terms of managing memory allocations from the top. However, there is more to allocating memory than that. The object caches of course work on memory that has already been mapped into the virtual memory space. But both the virtual address ranges, as well as the physical memory has to come from a source, too."

There is an update for the next Debian release plan. According to Marc Brockschmidt Etch will carry 4.0 as version number and should be released on December 4th, 2006. "Please note that as of now, RC bugs and problematic transitions are our main concern. There has been progress, but we still need to lower the number of release critical bugs further."

The Mono debate over on the GNOME desktop developer mailing list is heating up again. Philip Van Hoof makes a compelling argument about the need for GNOME decision makers to take into consideration future developers and the over-reliance of C and GObject in GNOME. At what point does a general-purpose, high level framework and runtime become a necessity for GNOME?

SLED 10 is finally here, and so begins Novell's effort to get it onto as many business computers as possible. This event also comes shortly after the departure of Jack Messman as CEO, an event which has dramatically changed Novell's business strategy, especially as it relates to its SUSE Linux products. To find out more about SLED, its cousin SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and the company's plans for the future, I got in touch with senior Novell executive John Dragoon.