The Haiku developers are preparing to finalise which features should be present in the first official release of Haiku. "This general interest poll, is to allow you - yes you! - the opportunity to effectively express your thoughts on which features should be present in Haiku R1 (Final). For R1, a balance must be attained between delaying the release and making Haiku R1 a well polished, impressive and feature rich release."

Amidst all the WikiLeaks hoopla, there's also actual regular news going on. Windows 7 is barely out the door, and we're already dealing with Windows 8, which is indeed being worked on but will not arrive for at least two years. There's some rumours from an Italian website which state that the 64bit version of Windows 8 will have a completely new interface called Wind. Right.

"The Apache Software Foundation concludes that that JCP is not an open specification process - that Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses; that the commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem; that it is impossible to distribute independent implementations of JSRs under open source licenses such that users are protected from IP litigation by expert group members or the spec lead; and finally, the EC is unwilling or unable to assert the basic power of their role in the JCP governance process."

"The Singularity project (an OS written in managed code used for research purposes) has provided several very useful research results and opened new avenues for exploration in operating system design. Recently, MSR released a paper covering an operating system research project that takes a new approach to building an OS stack with verifiable and type safe managed code. This project employs a novel use of Typed Assembly Language, which is what you think it is: Assembly with types (implemented as annotations and verified statically using the verification technology Boogie and the theorem prover Z3 (Boogie generates verification conditions that are then statically proven by Z3. Boogie is also a language used to build program verifiers for other languages)). As with Singularity, the C# Bartok compiler is used, but this time it generates TAL. The entire OS stack is verifiably type safe (the Nucleus is essentially the Verve HAL) and all objects are garbage collected. It does not employ the SIP model of process isolation (like Singularity). In this case, again, the entire operating system is type safe and statically proven as such using world-class theorem provers." Channel9 has an interview on video with one of the developers behind this MSR project. Source code to Verve is available.

In an interview that gives some deeper insight into the fall of the company, ex Sun boss Scott McNeally talked to Gavin Clarke of The Register. "Sun was the fastest growing US company between 1985 and 1989, according to Forbes, and supplied the entire US government with more than half its workstations nine years after starting."

The Document Foundation has announced that the software development project recently announced by BrOffice will contribute to the development of LibreOffice and other free software projects. BrOffice has 15 million users in Brazil.

Here's the latest in our new series on OS tips from power users: a seemingly trivial task. You have a computer, most likely a laptop, that you wish to keep suspended while you're not working. For example, let's say overnight. At the same time, you wish to run a handful of maintenance tasks, like backups and cleanup, which you don't normally do during the day. So you need a mechanism that will send your machine to sleep, wake it up when necessary, run cron jobs, then send it back to sleep again.

It looks like several companies are learning what happens when you mess with the internet - and they're learning it the hard way. Several major companies have been hit by the collective powers of Anonymous after 4chan launched several distributed denial-of-service attacks. What many have been predicting for a long time now has finally happened: an actual war between the powers that be on one side, and the internet on the other. Update: PayPal has admitted their WikiLeaks snub came after pressure from the US government, and Datacell, which takes care of payments to Wikileaks, is threatening to sue MasterCard over Wikileaks' account suspension. Update II: Visa.com is down due to the attack. Update III: PayPal has caved under the pressure, and will release the funds in the WikiLeaks account.

Google held a Chrome event today, and the rumours had suggested we might see the launch of Chrome OS today. This turned out to be nonsense, and in all honesty, the entire event didn't really deliver much in the form of new information. The Chrome Web Store has been opened, and the first Chrome OS netbooks will arrive in the middle of 2011.

"The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices."

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner outlines the 12 most common programming mistakes, and how to avoid them. "Certain programming practices send the majority of developers reaching for their hair upon opening a file that has been exhibiting too much 'character'. Spend some time in a bar near any tech company, and you'll hear the howls: Why did the programmer use that antiquated structure? Where was the mechanism for defending against attacks from the Web? Wasn't any thought given to what a noob would do with the program?" Wayner writes. From playing it fast and loose, to delegating too much to frameworks, to relying too heavily on magic boxes, to overdetermining the user experience - each programming pitfall is accompanied by its opposing pair, lending further proof that "programming may in fact be transforming into an art, one that requires a skilled hand and a creative mind to achieve a happy medium between problematic extremes".

Amazon Web Services announced Route 53, a DNS web service giving a way to route Internet traffic to web applications by translating human readable names into numeric IP addresses. Amazon Route 53 can be used to route end users to multiple AWS services including Amazon EC2, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer or an Amazon S3 bucket, and to infrastructure outside of AWS. The Amazon Route 53 global network of DNS servers is designed to automatically respond from the optimal network location, resulting in low DNS query latency for end users.

It's no secret that I'm not a particular fan of antivirus software vendors. Other than the excellent Microsoft offering, I haven't yet seen a single antivirus program that doesn't suck the life out of computers, infesting every corner, making machines slow and full of annoying pop-ups. Still, a single license key for Avast! Pro being shared 774651 times? That's a bit harsh.

After countless rumours, leaked screenshots, and what not, Google has officially unveiled Android 2.3, dubbed Gingerbread, today. Accompanying the release of this new Android version is the Nexus S, a Samsung-made successor to HTC's Nexus One, which delivers the pure Google experience - unlocked, without additional crap.