"Today's another exciting day as we move closer to Beta 1. We are just wrapping up the MVP summit here in Redmond and we've finally announced another piece of functionality I've wanted to talk about for a long time now. This afternoon Steven Sinofsky announced to our MVPs that we will build in native support for the PDF format in Office 12."

E-Ink, the pioneering electronic paper developer that's been announcing handheld devices "in a year or so" since 2001, has quietly found a manufacturer for its screens, and is not only offering developer kits, they've got an actual mass-market product set to launch in China q4. The folks at Hong Kong-based Jinke, makers of the $299/E250 E-Ink devices, are so excited, they're talking a V2 model running Linux with an SDK that allows for user-created apps before next summer. Read more.

"Sun Microsystems must have figured digital rights management never sounded so good when it recently announced a call for partners in its quest to use open source DRM to "compensate rights holders and stimulate innovation," but Sun's open DReaM (DRM everywhere available) Project is as scary as any other content control nightmare to open source and digital freedom proponents."

"No matter what strides the new generation of open-source companies make, they all owe a big debt to Torvalds. In 1991 the Finnish programmer started Linux as a project at the University of Helsinki. Fourteen years later the reverberations are still being felt." In this email interview Torvalds discusses his thoughts on where open source is heading and the challenges the Linux community faces.

Triavid is a web implementation of a TriangleOS VFDBS system. The service will eventually be fully integrated in TriangleOS, allowing users to use the web-disk as just any other drive. All objects stored on the web-disk can be viewed from any PC with an internet connection. The web-disk can also be accessed with by a browser, by using a user interface similar to that of the the TriangleOS GUI.

Hackers at a security conference failed to break into Via Technologies' StrongBox security application during a competition. The Taiwanese microprocessor vendor offered a $5000 (EUR 4157) prize to any hacker who could break into StrongBox, a secure virtual hard drive of up to 40GB designed to protect data from computer intruders. Announced on Tuesday, the application uses a combination of hardware-based SHA-1 and 256-bit AES encryption.

Read this article to determine your transition path and learn what you’ll need to do to make your application ready for Intel-based Macintosh computers.

Judd Vinet, Arch Linux's founder, posted a message discussing the future of his distro and his plans.

After some trial and error, I got the popular Gizmo run on my PocketPC via the SJPhone SIP client (there is no native Gizmo client for PDAs). Read more for the instructions.

Microsoft has revealed plans to release a third service pack for its Windows XP operating system.

At PrepCom3, a dramatic last-minute deal drawn up by the EU may mark the end of the US government's control of the internet. In essence, a new version of the current overseeing body ICANN and an end to the US government's overall control of the DNS. The US was scathing about the proposals, within minutes telling delegates that it "can't in any way allow any changes" that would prevent it from having overall control of the internet. Other countries, like Brazil, China, Iran and Cuba support the proposal. Brazil's ambassador outlined: "It is not a question of being anti-ICANN, it's about having a very clear and open and democratic and inclusive mechanism of overview of certain functions that today are performed by ICANN with no kind of supervision."

The commonwealth of Massachusetts has finalised its decision to standardise desktop applications on OpenDocument, a format not supported by Microsoft Office. State agencies in the executive branch are now supposed to migrate to OpenDocument-compliant applications by 1 January, 2007, a change that will affect about 50 000 desktop PCs. The reference model also confirms that Adobe's PDF format is considered an "open format".

"The experience of installing Debian can vary widely depending on your hardware and requirements. There simply isn't room here to provide a comprehensive installation guide. Instead, you'll find an outline of the major points of the installation process, and plenty of information about where to go and what to do when things don't work as expected." In related news, work is under way to provide a gtk+ front-end to the Debian installer.

"Dylan is an advanced, object-oriented, dynamic language which supports the rapid development of programs. When needed, the programmer can later optimize programs for more efficient execution by supplying type information to the compiler. Nearly all entities in Dylan (including functions, classes, and basic data types such as integers) are first class objects. Additionally Dylan supports multiple inheritance, polymorphism, multiple dispatch, and many other advanced features."