Microsoft's Windows platform chief Jim Allchin last week told 50 top-tier OEMs to think more like custom-system builders. During Microsoft's annual OEM executive summit at company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., Allchin, group vice president of platforms, advised the vendors to shift development resources into creating computing "experiences" through which they can differentiate their offerings, rather than beating each other up mainly on price and spewing out product specs.

Unununium Operating Engine got its 0.1 official release on Sunday. This release boots with a minimal shell and... a python interpreter! You can download a floppy image or an ISO from the official website.

The long awaited Syllable 0.5.4 is now available. This release includes a completly new Desktop and Registrar server which adds important functionality to Syllable.

This download contains different projects and source files which are designed to show how how some common Visual FoxPro functionally is created in Visual Basic .NET. Many of these samples are directly or indirectly based on existing Visual FoxPro 8.0 Solution Samples for comparison reference. Each project is self-contained and can be run independently of any other.

Perhaps surprising, and certainly not obvious to many people, is that it's been possible to develop RISC OS programs under Windows for a long time. Historically, ARM's SDK environment was able to generate RISC OS binaries, although that support was removed some time ago. More recently (but has still been true for a number of years), it's been possible to build RISC OS programs using GCCSDK under Cygwin - although bugs in the version of the compiler packaged with it did make that problematic earlier this year.

Hewlett-Packard, one of the most aggressive promoters of Intel's Itanium family of processors, is 86ing its line of workstations that use the chips. The decision by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant will likely be interpreted as a large symbolic blow to Itanium's fortunes.