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?

"USB 3.0 might be one of the big stories here at IDF, but Intel just showed off a glimpse of the future: Light Peak, an optical interconnect for mobile devices that can run as fast as 10Gbps. That's fast enough to do everything from storage to displays to networking, and it can maintain those speeds over 100-meter runs, which is pretty astounding. Intel says the idea is to drastically reduce the number of connectors on mobile devices, which should allow them to get even smaller - but the demo was on a huge Frankenrig, so don't expect to see Light Peak devices shipping any time soon."

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.

ActiveWin has published their usual in-depth review of the new Windows release, in this case, Windows 7. It's 70 pages long, and divided up into 26 sections. "Should you upgrade? Most certainly, there is no on the fence, if’s or buts about it. This is a major upgrade both Windows XP and Vista users will certainly see benefits from. Vista was of course a hard sell because of the major architectural changes it introduced, Windows 7 reaps the benefits."

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.

While half the world is waiting for Apple's take on the tablet - pretty much guaranteed to arrive somewhere next year - Microsoft has come out with a very interesting new take on the tablet, the Courier. It's a dual-touchscreen device, shaped like a book, and is in the late prototype stage of development.

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.

The Intel Developer Forum is currently in full swing, but it kicked off with a speech by Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Well, there's bad news for those of us who long for a time where lots of different architectures compete with one another, ensuring that technology is moved forward. Otellini's plans for Intel basically come down to one thing: x86 everywhere.

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.

Google Chrome Frame is an open-source plugin that adds HTML5, Canvas, a fast JavaScript engine and more to Internet Explorer; in fact it just swaps out Trident with Webkit! Developers can opt-in to the feature on their sites via a meta-tag / HTTP-header and prompt users to install Google Chrome Frame if they don't have it. Update: Correction, they don't support the HTTP Header.

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.

We all have our most favored machines of yesteryear; in this I assume that most people are like me, anyway. Breaking away from the mundane every-day news of boring (I jest) new technologies such as touchscreens the size of a wall and upcoming operating systems that support graphics cards with 1.5 GB of vRAM, take a walk down memory lane-- or "Neurological Alley" as I like to call it-- and take a look inside, outside, and in all of the nooks and crannies in between the circuits of the Macintosh Plus and its accompanying System 6, fresh from the splendor of 1986.

In some sense, home security systems suffer the same fate as mobile phone handsets. Most people, if they have one, have the one that a security monitoring company installed, and their only interaction with it is to turn it on or off. But some people want more than just a security system. Some people want a security system that can be expanded to perform almost any kind of home monitoring and automation task. You know, lunatics. Lunatic geeks. Enter the Elk M1.

"BeRTOS is a real time operating system (RTOS) suitable for embedded platforms. It runs on many microprocessors and microcontrollers, ranging from 8-bit to 32-bit CPUs and even PCs." Version 2.2.0 has been released.