"Microsoft late last week said it won't patch Windows XP for a pair of bugs it quashed Sept. 8 in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The news adds Windows XP and SP3 to the no-patch list that previously included only Windows 2000 Server SP4. 'We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible,' said security program manager Adrian Stone during Microsoft's monthly post-patch Webcast, referring to Windows 2000 and XP.... 'By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability,' the company said. 'Windows XP SP2 and later operating systems include a stateful host firewall that provides protection for computers against incoming traffic from the Internet or from neighboring network devices on a private network.'"

Only a year after Google's Chrome entered the browser market, we're already hitting version 3. While Chrome 3 had been available in the developer and beta channels for a while now, the company has now released the first stable Chrome 3 version. Technically, this means Chrome 3 has been released.

Earlier this year, the European Commission imposed a massive fine upon Intel for its anti-competitive practices in the OEM space. Intel has been given the opportunity to respond, as is usual in cases like this, and the chip maker is claiming that the fine should be thrown out, because the EC did not prove that Intel's practices hurt the competition.

The French download law has passed the lower house (285 votes to 225). "The law must still be approved by parliament as a whole and the opposition Socialists have already announced they intend to challenge the measure in the constitutional court."

"ARM, maker of microprocessors and microcontrollers used in mobile and embedded electronics, has joined the Linux Foundation. Amanda McPherson, vice president, marketing and developer programs, at The Linux Foundation said in the announcement 'By joining the Linux Foundation, ARM is demonstrating its commitment to open standards and Linux.' To date, ARM has shipped more than 10 billion ARM processors in mobile devices, many of which run Linux. Ian Drew, EVP Marketing at ARM, said that 'joining the Linux Foundation is a natural step towards advancing innovation in the Linux community for a rich, always-connected, computing experience.'"

Jay Robinson delves into what makes up iTunes LP and comes out pleased and suprised: "The iTunes LP experience is accomplished with HTML 4.01, CSS and JS. The interface feels very Flash-like, but there is no trace of it. The CSS animations are elaborate and smooth."

Novell has announced MonoTouch 1.0, a commercial SDK kit that allows developers to build iPhone apps using Microsoft's .Net Framework instead of the Apple-designated C or Objective-C languages. The SDK leverages Novell's Mono runtime for running Windows apps on non-Windows systems, allowing developers to utilize code and libraries written for .Net and programming languages like C#.

Getting data into (and then out of) Web-based services can be tricky or even impossible. Google today publicly committed to liberating user data in all of the company's products, making it easy to switch services.

After eight years of hard work, the day has finally arrived. Today, September 14, the Haiku project has released its very first alpha release. With the goal of recreating one of the most beloved operating systems in history, the BeOS, they took on no small task, but it seems as if everything is finally starting to come together. Let's talk about the history of the BeOS, where Haiku comes from, and what the Alpha is like.

The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku, an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. The purpose of this release is to make a stable development snapshot of Haiku available to a wider audience for more extensive testing and debugging.

And yet another Week in Review, number 42 to be exact, so I guess this week is pretty important, you know, with life, the universe, and everything and all that stuff. It wasn't a particularly strong week or anything, but we still got some interesting stuff to look back upon.

"For the last 12 months, I have used Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04 as my primary OSes. I remain a very happy Linux convert, but I worry that Ubuntu is being unevenly developed. Certain areas have seen great improvements over the last 12 months, while other areas have languished or been largely ignored. The purpose of this article is not to whine or rant, but to bring some perspective to the evolution (or lack thereof) that Ubuntu has experienced between versions 8.04 and 9.04."

The British government has issued an official apology for the treatment Alan Turing received after WWII. "The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the 'appalling' way he was treated for being gay. Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of 'gross indecency' in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration. Gordon Brown's statement came in response to a petition posted on the Number 10 website which has received thousands of signatures in recent months."

One of the main new features in Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system has been released as open source. Apple has released the code of the userland portion of its Grand Central Dispatch technology under the Apache License, version 2. Mac OS X also has kernel support for Grand Central Dispatch, which is also released as open source via the XNU project. While we're at it, let's take this opportunity to look into exactly what Grand Central Dispatch is.