Channel9 recently visited the Vista Print team and learned about the new Print stack in Vista and took a tour of the team and the lab where print testing happens. The 1-hour WMV video is 228 MB.

A major UK retail store and three of the largest PC vendors worldwide still have no plans to sell the version of Microsoft Windows that does not contain its media player, five months after the version was released. Microsoft started offering Windows XP N, a version of Windows without a bundled media player, in June of this year to comply with last year's antitrust ruling by the European Commission.

LinuxDevices has once again published the proceedings of the annual Real-Time Linux Workshop. This one, the seventh, was held in France earlier this month, at the University for Science and Technology of Lille (USTL). The papers span a range of topics, from fundamental real-time technologies to applications, hardware, and tools.

So you just bought a brand new WM5 device. The box says it's got 64M of RAM. You go digging through control panels on the device and find one that says it's only got 50M. Is something wrong? Should you be worried about this? The short answers are "No" and "No." This will explain why. UPDATE: On related news, ActiveSync 4.1 was released.

"Red Hat Desktop is sensible to the point of austerity, but practical in the way it supports updates and other features. It's not for individuals or very small businesses, but larger companies who calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) may well find it worth considering." More here.

IronPython is the codename for an alpha release of the Python programming language for the .NET platform. It supports an interactive interpreter with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers.

SUSE Linux 10.1 alpha 3 has been released. Changes include: "Update to KDE 3.5 RC1; update of GCC to the current 4.1 development version; removal of linuxthreads support; NetworkManager will be the new way of managing changing network interfaces, Kinternet is now in maintenance mode; update to Linux kernel 2.6.14.2; /dev on tmpfs is mandatory, a static device directory is not supported any more; udev is now the sole program for handling hotplug events, superseding the old hotplug package."

Genesi, the company behind the Open Desktop Workstation and Pegasos platform, has decided to open up all aspects of the PegasosPPC. "We have decided to make the complete design and component listing for the PegasosPPC available for free download."

"If you shop around, you can actually get a functional computer for $500 (EUR 425,-). But as we become more budget conscious, $500 seems to be a bit much for a standard machine, so what's our next target? Why, it's an over ambitious $100 (EUR 85,-) notebook. How companies accomplish this is their business; what we are interested in is what they ship out for a product when all is said and done. As of now, however, there is one thing that interests me even more, and that is, why would they want to sell me a $100 notebook in the first place?"

The cross-compiler effort now includes AROS as a target. Install these new binaries right along side of your OS3 and OS4 binaries and compile for all three platforms. Binaries for i686-linux so far, i686-cygwin will follow. Binaries available here.

Dr. Dobb's Journal has published the first articles in a series on the popular Google Summer of Code. These articles cover the following four projects: 'Apache Axis2 JMX Front', 'CL-GODB: a Common Lisp GO Database Manipulation Library', 'Wide Character Support in NetBSD Curses Library' and 'gjournal: FreeBSD GEOM Journaling Layer'.

Sun Microsystems has thrown its weight behind PostgreSQL, announcing plans to distribute and support the open-source database.

"When Office 12 arrives sometime in the second half of 2006, you may stop hating Microsoft Office. We looked at an early, private beta version of the suite and found a lot of improvements. Although the interface is radically changed, a lot of the underlying features and commands remain the same. We won't promise using Office 12 will be trouble-free, but so far it looks like a big step forward." Another look at beta 1 can be found here.

MIT has unveiled its $100 hand-cranked laptop computer to the United Nations technology summit in Tunisia and said that it hopes to make millions of the devices to give to the poorest people in the world. The lime-green machines, which are about the size of a text book, will offer wireless connectivity via a mesh network of their own creation allowing peer-to-peer communication and operate in areas without a reliable electricity supply.