The web browser has been the dominant thin client, now rich client, for almost two decades, but can it compete with a new thin client that makes better technical choices and avoids the glacial standards process? I don't think so, as the current web technology stack of HTML/Javascript/Flash has accumulated so many bad decisions over the years that it's ripe for a clean sheet redesign to wipe it out.

While the tech media are all busy praising Windows 7, the operating system still obviously does have issues, it being Windows and all. Because we are talking about Windows, and not, say Ubuntu or Mac OS X, it comes with one big downside that will mostly hit new users of Windows 7 (meaning, everyone): the incredibly complicated upgrade paths.

We had a remarkably short week this past week, so this will probably be the shortest Week in Review yet. We talked about Apple's hardware design, GNOME's decision to drop icons from menus and buttons, KDE 4.3 was released, and more.

Earlier this year, the European Commission slammed Intel with a massive fine, penalising the chip maker for its anticompetitive practices. A report by the European Union's ombudsman has now criticised the EC for its conduct, as the EC did not perform proper record keeping, leading to the loss of some evidence. It won't turn the tide for Intel, but it does raise an important question: how fair are these EC antitrust proceedings?

A friend of OSNews asks: "You might have heard of our Open-PC project. The idea is to collaboratively build a completely open PC, with free software and free drivers. We prepare an operating system image, do online services and support and choose the hardware. Then we work together with hardware manufacturers who build and sell the PC. We already have one manufacturer in Germany who committed to work with us. We will sell the first version of the Open-PC this fall. The problem is that it is expensive to ship the PC from Germany to the United States, so we are looking for a second manufacturing partner in the US. Can you recommend a company? I think the ideal would be a mid-size PC manufacturer who has experience with assembling custom PCs, experience with Linux and is able to ship the PC economically within North America." This seems like a great candidate for crowdsourcing. So, OSNews readers, can you give our friend any leads?

"AMD has announced the release of the first OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs, and it will enable developers to target x86 processors with the kind of OpenCL code that's normally written for GPUs. In a way, this is a reverse of the normal 'GPGPU' trend, in which programs that run on a CPU are modified to run in whole or in part on a GPU."

RadioShack will be taking a leaf out of Microsoft's book (remember that Bing thing?) by renaming itself to simply "The Shack" in the hopes that it will reach out to consumers to help them understand that the store isn't just a nuts-and-bolts (batteries-and-parts, anyone?) place for the electronic era. They want people to know that they're competing with those larger retail stores in selling computers, LCD televisions, and more, and I suppose they think "The Shack" will cause droves of people to suddenly forsake BestBuy and Wal-Mart's offerings of the common consumer electronics. In a way I couldn't rewrite better, a RadioShack veteran customer writes his feelings on the subject at hand and stresses that "you can change your look, even your name, but you are still just what you are--and people notice."

Clutter is the magic bringing Apple-like 3D goodness to GNOME 3.0, Moblin netbooks, and even Windows CE/Mobile devices. Learn its past, present, and future in this intriguing interview with the "man behind the curtain." "MoblinZone's Henry Kingman catches up with Emmanuele Bassi, maintainer of the Clutter hardware-accelerated GUI toolkit. Bassi discusses Clutter history, the recent 1.0 release, and what lies ahead for this key Moblin and GNOME technology."

The team behind MorphOS has just announced the release of MorphOS 2.3 for the PowerPC-based platforms, the Pegasos and the Efika. This new release comes with a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements, but also packs a number of new features.

The OpenOffice.org team has been experimenting with a new user interface for the suite of programs, and they've presented the first rough prototype of this new interface, more specifically for Impress. The general gist? It's Microsoft Office 2007's ribbon interface.

Using his blue box, Steve Wozniak once called the Vatican (for free), and, imitating Henry Kissinger's voice, asked if he could speak with the pope. The pope turned out to be asleep. Wozniak pulled these pranks together with Steve Jobs, with whom he'd found Apple computer not long after. Oh, how the times have changed. How can a company with its roots in phreaking, pranks, and home-made computing end up the way it is today?

The Haiku alpha release has always been a bit elusive. The project has been near the alpha release for a while now, but a number of difficult data-destructive bugs kept it at bay. After an informal coding sprint, the alpha is now just a decision away.

Windows 7 RTM Build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that, once triggered, could bring down the entire OS in a matter of seconds: "The bug in question - a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility - appears when you attempt to run the program against a secondary (i.e. not the boot partition) hard disk using the "/r" (read and verify all file data) parameter. The problem affects both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and is classified as a 'showstopper' in that it can cause the OS to crash (Blue Screen of Death) as it runs out of physical memory," reports InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. Microsoft is claiming the bug is a chipset driver issue, but Kennedy's testing of the latest Intel INF Update Utility driver set and VMware virtualized chipset drivers suggests otherwise. "This is clearly a Microsoft bug - and the fact that it manifests itself via the chkdsk.exe utility makes me wonder if it isn't something intrinsic to the Windows 7 version of the New Technology File System (NTFS) driver stack." Worse still, user comments suggest that Windows Server 2008 R2 suffers from the same flaw.

"Google confirmed today that it plans to buy digital video compression outfit On2 Technologies in an all-stock agreement, valued at $106.5m. Mountain View said On2 shareholders will be handed 60 cents worth of Google class A common shares for each outstanding share they hold in the company. Clifton Park, New Jersey-based On2 employs around 60 staff. It started life as the Duck Corporation in 1992. On2's VP6 codec is licensed by Adobe, for its Flash Player and Flash Lite 3 for mobile phones. Other major customers include AOL, Freescale, Nokia and Sun Microsystems."