Microsoft has lately been a bit sluggish with producing its mobile branch of Windows, and it's about time that they make some headway if they hope at all to compete with the market today. Though Microsoft isn't talking, a sneaker over at ZDNet says via her sources that Windows Mobile 6.5 will be shipping September of 2009 and 7.0 in April of 2010 (not to mention to testers in November of '09). Will Windows Mobile be able to keep up with the fast-paced mobile market of today? That, of course, is for the consumers to decide.

Lim Ding Wen, a fourth grader in Singapore, has taken up writing applications for Apple's all-popular iPhone, his latest of which is called "Doodle Kids," aptly named for its doodling or painting capabilities. He began his computer experience at the ripe age of two and has a good twenty programming projects under his belt. He is fluent in six programming languages. His father also writes iPhone apps, and they often compare statistics to see whose is more popular-- as it is, Lim's app has over 4,000 downloads. Do you think perhaps we could be calling him "King Ding" in thirty years when he's taken over the digital world?

Netbooks have been heralded as the foot in the door for Linux. With the launch of the earliest Eee PC models, Asus made a bold move by only offering them with Linux pre-installed; Microsoft soon responded by working with Asus to bring Windows XP to the next generation Eee PCs. Since then, Windows XP gained market share in the netbook segment rapidly, casting doubts over whether or not netbooks would really turn out to be that foot in the door. HP has today announced that its new HP Mini 1000 netbook will not be available with Linux pre-installed in Europe.

Microsoft has confirmed that an upgrade license for Windows 7 from Windows XP will be available, but there is a catch: users will have to wipe their hard drive and perform a clean install - so technically, it's not an upgrade. Still, the upgrade license will probably be cheaper than the full license, so it might just be worth it.

Fedora 11 Alpha includes a number of major features including Ext4 as default filesystem, A Windows cross compiler with dozens of libraries available in the repository, PackageKit Firmware support, experimental support for the next generation Btrfs filesystem, GNOME 2.26 development snapshot, KDE 4.2 RC 2 (general release available as an update), Xfce 4.6 Beta, Python 2.6 and more. Download it from here. The general release is targeted to be released at the end of May this year and will have many more enhancements available.

Michael "Monty" Widenius, original author and founder of MySQL, has announced he has now resigned from Sun to start his own company, Monty Program Ab. Rumours of his departure had circulated last September and Widenius now confirms these had an element of truth to them. According to him, his issues with MySQL 5.1 GA were pivotal in the decision making process and his public warnings of those problems "had the wanted effect". That effect was an agreement to stay on for three months to "help Sun work out things in MySQL development" and allow Sun to "create an optimal role for me".

Three months after the previous release, the ReactOS Team has released version 0.3.8 of their Windows NT-compatible operating system. We have taken a short virtual look at this new release. In addition, the project will have a booth at the FOSDEM event in Brussels, Belgium on the 7th and 8th February. Several members of ReactOS Development Team along with the Project Coordinator will be attending. You can have a chance to test the live system, speak with developers, and get a closer look at their project.

Linux Containers provide lightweight virtualization that lets you isolate processes and resources without the need to provide instruction interpretation mechanisms and other complexities of full virtualization. In this step-by-step tour of Linux container tools (LXC), the author introduces you to the Linux container tools and shows how to get up and running on them. This article will show you how Linux containers significantly lower the overhead of using true virtualization, while still providing isolation.

"Has the era of the 1GHz smartphone arrived? It has for Toshiba, which has tapped Qualcomm's new Snapdragon silicon. The Toshiba TG01 Windows Mobile phone was unveiled Tuesday, according to reports. Based on Windows Mobile 6.1, it is designed to take on the iPhone 3G. Only 9.9mm thick, it uses a 4.1-inch WVGA 800 x 480 384k pixel resistive touch screen and comes with support for 3G HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and assisted-GPS. The TG01 is slated to be available in Europe this summer. The price, at this time, has not been disclosed (Acer and Asus are also expected to bring out Snapdragon-based products)."

With Linux traditionally coming in many, many flavours, a common call among some Linux fans - but mostly among people who actually do not use Linux - is to standardise all the various distributions, and work from a single "one-distribution-to-rule-them-all". In a recent interview, Linus Tovalds discarded the idea, stating that he thinks "it's something absolutely required!"

"Scrotwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast."

Windows 7 was causing quite a bit of hype months before its release, and now that it's finally out into the void, you'd think people would be contentedly beta-ing the system and be happy to wait until the wrinkles are smoothed, right? Apparently not, at least for a certain Kelly Poe and now over 2,500 Windows 7 enthusiasts.

Yes, actually. The old-school, inefficient, heat-generating incandescent bulbs are all but history, CFL (compact florescent) bulbs taking the pedestal what with how relatively inexpensive and efficient they are when it comes to both electricity consumption and overhead cost. However, even these may have a short-lived supremacy as British scientists developed a new way of "growing" the material needed for LEDs on silicon instead of sapphire wafers, which was the original and somewhat expensive way of doing it. Because of this, household-grade lights of LED nature can be produced for under $5.00 and last up to sixty years. LEDs are three times more efficient than CFLs, last substantially longer, and contain no mercury, so they're even more environmentally friendly. These wonder-bulbs are supposed to be available to consumers within two years. It is estimated that if these new bulbs were to be installed in every home and office, it would cut electricity used on lighting by 75%. I'll take twenty of those, please.

"The first public demonstration of OpenCL functionality was given by AMD at Siggraph Asia 2008. OpenCL is the new vendor-independent standard designed to extract high performance parallel computing out of GPUs, DSPs and multicore CPUs. Basically the idea is that you can write your core computational code in OpenCL and voila! - your code scales to whatever processors are available. OpenCL will greatly improve speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications from entertainment to scientific and 3D visualization."