Earlier this week, Google launched Chrome Frame, a plugin for Internet Explorer 6/7/8 which replaces the Trident rendering engine with Chrome's rendering and JavaScript engine for better performance and superior standards compliance. Microsoft has responded to this release, claiming it makes Internet Explorer less secure. Note: What database category do I put this in? Internet Explorer? Google? Choices, choices!

"It seems that UTIs are in the news again. It all started with a change in application binding in Snow Leopard. In a scant few weeks it's degenerated into a sometimes-angry bout of cross-blog debate. I have an opinion about the changes in Snow Leopard, and I'll get to that eventually, but my main goal is to clarify the issue. It's really not that complicated, and seeing all the confusion on the web has been disheartening."

Today, the GNOME team has released GNOME 2.28. It builds on the solid foundation laid out by all the previous releases, and adds in a number of new features and improvements, on top of all the bug fixes and performance improvements, of course.

We've already talked about the proposed interface changes for Firefox 3.7 (and 4.0) which are coming to the Windows platform. However, those were anything-goes sketches, and now it seems as if the team has more or less settled on what Firefox 3.7 will look like on Windows. I'll reserve final judgement until I have used it, but my first thought was: who littered all these different widgets all over the place?

"One of the downsides of working in security is that we seldom get to do cool things. The desktop engineers, VM engineers, even kernel engineers get to show off cool stuff. But security guys usually only ever get to show how we broke something, if that. Sometimes all we can do is say 'trust us, it's working'. But I think I have something cool to show off which I'm calling sandbox -X."

Systemtap 1.0 has been released. There are a few features for this release, like experimental support for unprivileged users, cross-compiling for foreign architectures, matching C++ class and namespace scopes, reduced runtime memory consumption, but more importantly, this release means that Systemtap is finally considered stable and ready for user adoption.

"With just over a week left before the expiration of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Department of Commerce, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) urges the US government to closely re-examine ICANN's structure, governance, and oversight mechanisms before committing to any further long-term cooperation. Significant adjustments must be made to the JPA in order to remedy the egregious problems CADNA has found with ICANN." CADNA not only proposes that an audit be made of ICANN, but they also have released a "top-ten list" detailing the most prevalent problems they find in the non-profit organization.

At the recent Linuxcon Conference in Portland, Oregon, there were hints of new Moblin-powered hardware being announced at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum. Normally, this would be moderately interesting news, but some of the ambitious comments made by Linux luminaries at Linuxcon merit further examination. People from the Linux Foundation, Intel, and IBM spoke at the conference, and it's evident that they see the netbook market as the epicenter of the movement to raise Linux's profile in the consumer space, and whittle away marketshare from Windows. Update: Intel has also announced Moblin 2.1 for phones.

We have a new chapter in the Palm Pre and iTunes saga. We all remember that the Pre could sync with iTunes, but that Apple wasn't particularly keen on this. The Cupertino company issued an iTunes which intentionally broke Pre syncing, but Palm retorted by re-enabling it not long after. Palm also sent a complaint to the USB Implementers Forum about Apple's behaviour, but the USB-IF squarely sides with Apple.

Can computers win the Turing Test? Imagine a day when a machine will say, "Move over Turing! You can no longer consider machines to be less smart than humans! After all, we can think too. We do all the thinking and processing and you take all the credit, just because you are our creator! ". That would be an awkward and exciting situation. To be honest, there is a valid argument here in this imaginary conversation. As naive as it may sound for now, let me assure you that such a scenario is not far away. Applications are becoming more and more logic-oriented and increasingly intelligent.

More than a decade ago, Intel ran into an issue trying to deliver what was to be the world's top-ranked supercomputer: it looked possible that its new Pentium Pro processors at the heart of the system might not arrive in time. As a result, the chipmaker made an unusual move by paying Hewlett-Packard $100,000 to evaluate building the system using its PA-RISC processors in the machine, said Paul Prince, now Dell's chief technology officer for enterprise products but then Intel's system architect for the supercomputer. Called ASCI Red and housed at Sandia National Laboratories, it was designed to be the first supercomputer to cross the threshold of a trillion math calculations per second.

When the news broke that Oracle wanted to buy Sun, a number of eyebrows were raised over what would happen to Sun's open source portfolio. While the US Department of Justice gave the green light for the deal to go through, the European Commission was among the eye brows raising crowd, and they were quite worried about the future of specifically MySQL.

Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3, the next-generation of the componentized, real-time Windows Embedded CE operating system that now features a rich immersive user experience provided by Microsoft's Silverlight Rich Internet Application platform. The company also delivers Windows 7 connectivity to the platform.

For a couple of months, the french speaking NetBSD advocacy group, NetBSDfr has started a series of interviews called "Discussing with a NetBSD developer". The first developer that has been interviewed was Soren Jacobsen, NetBSD 5.0 release engineer, shortly after NetBSD 5.0 was released. In July, we had the opportunity to talk to Adam Hamsik, known for porting LVM and ZFS to the NetBSD OS. S.P. Zeidler was our third victim, one of the Project's admins and member of the pkgsrc-releng team. This month, we had the chance to interview Alistair G. Crooks, actual president of The NetBSD Foundation. Alistair gave us a unique historical point of view as one of NetBSD's early hackers. He also shared with us his thought about the future of NetBSD and explained what makes this operating system so special. The interviews can be read in english at blog.NetBSD.org by clicking on the links above, and in french at www.NetBSDfr.org.