Microsoft's next-generation OS is finally here. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is walking the streets of London calling Windows XP the 'no compromise' operating system--both reliable, and compatible while Bill Gates officially launches the product, and what could be the company's most important product in more than six years.

"Competitor Scott Draeker isn't impressed with TransGaming Technologies' plan to use its version of Wine to get Windows games to work on Linux. Not so fast, says Draeker, whose Loki Entertainment has been the flagship company of that "traditional" approach. Draeker has doubts about games running on Wine working as well as games actually made to run on Linux. Although Loki filed for bankruptcy back in August, the company has continued to release games, including Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns in late August and Postal Plus 'coming soon.'" Read the rest of the article on NewsForge.

"Richard Dale recently announced that he has committed C bindings for the KDE3/Qt3 libraries to KDE's CVS. Richard generated the C bindings automatically using a hacked kdoc, with relatively little manual intervention. According to him, "The bindings wrap about 800 classes 13,000 methods, with 200k of C/C++ generated." The same hacked kdoc can also generate Objective C and Java bindings, and Richard hopes to be able to consolidate generation of these various KDE bindings (Java/Objective C/C) with this one tool." Get the rest of the news at .DOT KDE.

InfoAnarchy has an interesting story about Microsoft's shady OEM practices. Everyone who believes in competition on the OS market should read it. The article is an extension of Scot Hacker's "He who controls the boot loader" article, published 2 months ago and had put lot of people into deep thinking regarding Microsoft's business practices.

After Palm announced the buyout of Be, Inc.'s intellectual property & Technology and after some consequent indications from several key people that Palm has no interest at Be's products and especially in BeOS, a number of the BeOS believers tried to find a new home. Some found confort in AtheOS, others joined BeUnited's effort to license the BeOS source code, while some developers formed efforts like OpenBeOS and BlueOS. OpenBeOS (OBOS for its friends) consists from a number of BeOS developers who are trying to recreate the BeOS Kits in a form of a new, complete and open source Operating System that has source and if possible binary compatibility with BeOS 5. One of the most important people in this effort, Michael Phipps, also part of the kernel team, is here today for an interview to OSNews.

REBOL is a powerful software technology (ever thought that you could write a full blown GUI Instant Messenger in only 7 kb of source code?) designed from the ground up to enable a new era of distributed Internet applications. The technology provides a ubiquitous, lightweight model of distributed computing that operates across all types of computer systems. REBOL is a true distributed computing architecture. Applications and data become distributed across all devices. REBOL is completely device independent, so it does not matter what operating system or hardware is being used. Every system of the Internet becomes an independent resource that can process and communicate information. The REBOL kernel currently runs on more than 40 different operating systems -- everything from large Sun Solaris servers, to Windows and Macintosh PCs, to Linux, BeOS, down to CE handheld devices. And it is here to revolutionize the Internet, by introducing the X Internet (also called as 'XNet') through the REBOL Internet Operating System (IOS). Read more of what Carl Sassenrath, Rebol Tech's CTO and founder, has to say about the future, Rebol and the race against Microsoft's .NET Services.