Wind River, a device software optimization company, just announced Wind River Linux 3.0, based off of Linux kernel 2.6.27 and GCC 4.3, and reportedly it is the most feature-rich OS offering from the company thus far. It includes more than 500 packages, which is about 250 more than in previous versions. Wind River Linux is designed for specific industries including aerospace and defense, consumer, industrial, networking, and medical, and was previously segmented in different packages for different features and hardware support for each industry, but has now been consolidated into one standard system.

It might seem like a New Zealand-only story, but the recently proposed law in New Zealand that would force internet service providers to cut off web access for those accused of violating copyright law has led to an interesting statement from Google about the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

"Working with Microsoft and director Mason Nicoll (former creative director at Digital Kitchen and Prologue), Seattle-based studio Oh, Hello brought this vision of a highly-gadgetized future to life with some slick roto, loads of tracking and, of course, silky smooth futurific animation. If this video is any indicator, the future will fuse together interactive and motion design in ways that this project only begins to imagine. Regardless of whether Microsoft is behind it, those who understand the rich nuances of time-based experienced will be well-positioned to succeed. Nathan Barr of Oh, Hello was kind enough to answer some of the more pragmatic questions I had about the project."

About a year after the first beta (which was followed by another beta and a release candidate), Microsoft has announced the release of the final version of Internet Explorer 8, the company's newest browser. The focus of Internet Explorer 8 is better standards compliance, security, and making "common online tasks faster and easier".

Details are sparse, but Intel has let out word of a spiffy new graphics accelerator designed for mobile devices. This SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) accelerator renders graphics more efficiently than any other available component in that it renders them faster and at higher quality and-- here's the kicker-- it consumes ten times less energy than similar available components, providing longer battery life. Again, there's not much to go on at the moment, but Intel says that these lovely little buggers will definitely be showing up in future mobile devices be they MIDs, UMPCs, or netbooks.

According to a Novel-sponsored IDC survey, Linux seems to be gaining popularity among businesses implementing servers, and it has a bright outlook for both server and desktop installations in the coming future. On the other hand, netbooks have seen less and less default OEM installations of Linux. Windows now has over 90 percent of netbook sales, quashing any hopes of an open source revolution in the form of netbooks. Android, however, may be able to change things.

"As expected, Silverlight 3 was announced today at MIX09, this year's iteration of Microsoft's annual conference for web developers, designers, and enthusiasts. While the keynote that just finished was full of little announcements that were handed out faster than the audience could swallow them, the one that stood out the most was the third iteration of Microsoft's Flash alternative, Silverlight. Links for the first and last beta of Silverlight 3, and the many development tools surrounding it, went live earlier today."

The GNOME team has released GNOME 2.26, the latest release in the 2.x release branch. As everyone knows, GNOME is a multi-platform open source desktop environment. The 2.26 release continues GNOME's policy of incremental updates to a stable base, and as such, it comes packed with a boatload of new features.

If you don't want to commit to the idiosyncrasies of a specific shell running on a particular platform, try the Squirrel Shell. The Squirrel Shell provides an advanced, object-oriented scripting language that works equally well on UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Write a script once, and run it anywhere.

In a move that would certainly shake up the computer industry quite a bit, IBM is reportedly in talks with Sun Microsystems about the possibility of IBM acquiring Sun. Sun is going through hard times at the moment, and has been actively looking for someone to be acquired by.

In addition to the Chrome 2.0 beta, work for the Linux version of Chrome is on its way. Its official name is currently "Chromium," and Google Chrome for Linux doesn't officially exist yet. For the sake of argument, however, Google Chrome for Linux is on its way whether it's currently in a Chromium and pre-alpha state or not, and now Ubuntu users can get a hold of Chromium to take for a spin. In this article, learn how to install the current build of Chromium to test on your Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based system and see several screenshots of the budding browser.

The Google Chrome team has pushed out the beta release of the Chrome 2.0 web browser release. In addition, they have also opened the beta update channel, so if you're running the beta you'll get continuous updates keeping you up to speed with Chrome 2.0's development tree. Apart from speed improvements, Chrome 2.0 delivers several other interesting new features.

Apple held an event today announcing some of the new features coming in iPhone OS v3. Thee were loads and loads of new features, but the big ones are cut/copy/paste functionality, push notifications (I guess most developers will believe it when they finally see it), spotlight search, and many others.

During these financially dire times, it's always interesting to keep en eye on the sales figures of computes, to see if the downward trend is still running. Sales figures from February analysed by NPD indicate that while Mac sales went down, sales of Windows PCs went up. Mind, though, that these figures are US-only.