Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Phone 7 will be launched worldwide October 11. "Horror, shock, surprise! Microsoft CEO and prime fanboy of all things Windows and developer-related, Steve Ballmer, will be the keynote speaker at Microsoft's New York launch event for Windows Phone 7. He'll be joined on stage by AT&T's Ralph de la Vega and when the pep rally is over, we're promised opportunities to finally handle the official incarnations of retail Windows Phones for ourselves."

InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp looks beyond OpenOffice.org to list 10 great free and open source desktop tools for word processing, page layout, graphics editing, illustration, task management, and more. Some of the featured tools provide a worthwhile alternative to expensive proprietary software, while others carve a niche all their own. All are available for Windows, and nearly all are available for Linux and Mac OS X as well. From AbiWord, to Inkscape, to Task Coach, each of the tools provides further proof that the roster of available free programs is growing remarkably -- in both the breadth and depth of functionality offered.

Recompute has just launched a "green" pc whose chassis is made up entirely of cardboard. No joke. It can be ordered in different configurations, from an Athlon X2 Linux, to an Athlon II Quad Core Windows 7 model. Please note this is not for sensitive viewers. Steve Jobs and other aesthetes are encouraged not to read further.

Once upon a time, operating systems used to matter a lot; they defined what a computer could and couldn't do... Today, there's only one operating system: Unix (okay, there are two, but we'll get to that). This is why I contend that the OS doesn't matter - or that we need to take another look at the word's content, at what we mean when we say 'Operating System'.

FreeBSD is getting support for USB 3.0. "Commit initial version of new XHCI driver which was written from scratch. This driver adds support for USB3.0 devices. The XHCI interface is also backwards compatible to USB2.0 and USB1.0 and will eventually replace the OHCI/UHCI and EHCI drivers."

So, yeah, it's been ten years in the making, including a number of rewrites, but the day has finally come: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which, surprisingly enough, form the foundation of, among other things, Enlightenment, have reached beta status. This is a major step towards the final release of Enlightenment DR17, which should hit before year's end.

Today EFF, joined by Public Knowledge, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Apache Software Foundation, filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case in which Microsoft is trying to make it easier to invalidate an issued U.S. patent. If successful, this challenge should help in the fight against bad patents by lowering the standard required to prove that the patent is invalid to the same one required to prove infringement. It should especially help the free and open source community.

Anyone who did not see this one coming after Microsoft's patent deal with HTC and Apple's meticulousness in avoiding Windows Mobile in its suit against HTC hasn't been paying attention. Microsoft has filed a patent complaint with the US International Trade Commission, as well as a patent lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington against Motorola over its Android-based devices.

A few months ago, Google open sourced the VP8 video codec as part of the WebM video project, to create a truly Free/free unencumbered video format for the web as an answer to the non-Free/free patent-encumbered H264 format. Today, Google launched a new image format for the web, WebP, which aims to significantly reduce the file size of photos and images on the web.

"Arm plans to add multithreading capabilities to future architectures as it tries to boost the performance of its processors, a company representative said on Tuesday. The company is looking to include multithreading capabilities depending on application requirements in different segments, said Kumaran Siva, segment marketing manager at Arm, at the Linley Tech Processor conference in San Jose, California"

Pirating Android apps is a long-standing problem. But it seems to be getting worse, even as Google begins to respond much more aggressively. The dilemma: protecting developers' investments, and revenue stream, while keeping an open platform.

Artificial intelligence is going mobile . The technology that can help machines behave more intelligently, popularized by such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, is finding its way onto tablet-style computers and other handheld devices.

Bright days ahead for the Amiga world. AROS is doing well, AmigaOS4 is getting one heck of a machine in the AmigaOne X1000, and MorphOS continues its development at a brisk pace. Version 2.6 of MorphOS, currently in development, will add support for (G4, I'm assuming) PowerMacs, which, alongside support for the Mac Mini and eMac, gives MorphOS a solid base of used hardware to run on.

Researchers at IBM now know how long a single atom can "remember" its state. The events that take place inside of atoms occur at speeds that are normally much too fast to capture. Now researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center have developed a technique that lets them watch this atomic action with unprecedented resolution"