"Back in 2003, Microsoft assembled a team of engineers to rethink the lowest levels of Windows, so that the OS could be more easily slimmed down and secured to run in servers and embedded applications. That project, called 'MinWin', has now started to bear fruit."

At PDC '09 Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, revealed the first details of the company's next browser, Internet Explorer 9. Even though the new browser is still in an early development stage, the first few builds are being tested internally. It is poised to come with some fancy improvements - including HTML5 and CSS3 support.

Only last week Samsung pushed out a press release announcing its new mobile operating system, named Bada. Little is known about this new operating system beyond the name of the project, but thanks to Phoronix, we know a little detail that might indicate what, exactly, Bada will be like. As it turns out, Samsung is sponsoring the Enlightenment project.

Fedora 12 has been released today. "I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 12, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat."

"ARM on Tuesday announced the launch of an alliance of 35 tech companies to support development of Android-based products using its widely used chips. ARM-based chips power the world's most popular smartphones, including - in the US - the Apple iPhone, Blackberry Storm, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid. The Solution Center for Android alliance will serve as a resource for designers and developers of ARM technology-based products running on the Android operating system, which is the software on the popular Motorola Droid smartphone and Acer Liquid."

"Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100000 iPhone apps, will continued migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?"

InfoWorld has compiled a list of 10 not yet widely adopted enterprise technologies that will have the greatest impact on IT in the years to come. From whitelisting, to NoSQL, to I/O virtualization, each class of technology is analyzed for its potential to solve significant IT challenges - mobile app dev, power conservation, data glut - over the long haul, as opposed to how it may currently be implemented or how today's iterations currently perform.

This weekend, Palm launched its second webOS phone, the Palm Pixi. At the same time, the company also released webOS 1.3.1 for Pre owners in the US (other countries will follow later this month). At the same time, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein talked to The New York Times about his company.

As Murphy's Law dictates, this news was destined to come while I'm down and out with the flu, while being miserable on the couch. Dragged my bum to the computer for this one (my iPhone alerted me, oh the irony): Apple has scored a major win in its case against Psystar. Judge William Alsup more or less agreed with just about everything Apple said, granting Apple's motion for a summary judgement. Instant update: Mind, though, that this ruling only covers Leopard. Snow Leopard will be handled in the Florida case.

Thom's down with flu, so to avoid moving a lot of interesting news to pg.2, I am creating a combined item here covering a number of Microsoft related news items submitted to us.

"Qualcomm has revealed that its 1Ghz Snapdragon ARM chip will ship in an upcoming Lenovo smartbook. AT&T has already partnered with Lenovo to sell the product. New smartbook products will bring ARM into the small form-factor laptop market and could give Intel's Atom some serious competition."

Techvideoblog has a video review of the Menq Easypc E760, an $80 ARM-based laptop that runs Android. From the looks of it, I don't think this is a very good gadget, because it's slow (less powerful than an iPhone 3GS, but of course also a lot cheaper), but I agree with the Techvideo guy: the Easypc is important because it's the vanguard of a likely wave of cheap, ARM-based devices that will very soon have the necessary power for a pleasant and productive web browsing experience. Once that happens, a sizable portion of the current laptop and netbook userbase will move downmarket, and some of the constituents that the OLPC program was trying to serve (young students and the lower economic stratum) will have a network communication device available to them that's more accessible.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is claiming Google's Chrome OS will debut next week - but his story does have an odd ring to it. He goes on and on about how driver support will be shoddy, but that makes no sense - isn't Chome OS supposed to be built on Linux? The only way I can see initial driver support to be shoddy is when Chrome OS has its own, custom graphical layer, instead of using X. However, were that to be the case, I'm sure Google would at least support some NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel chipsets. In any case, it's a rumour - do with it as you please.

GNOME 3, the much talked about next generation GNOME introduces a radical shift from the interface found in GNOME 2.x. Digitizor has a quick visual tour of GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 9.10.