Microsoft is sharing bits of Oslo at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week. Learn what's new in M, the company's language for creating domain-specific languages, and why Microsoft thinks it's such a big deal. (Oh yeah. And M will be made available under the open specification promise. Open source developers... ready set GO!)

The new OS includes major new user interface updates, and promises to work much better with third-party hardware and software. Can the latest version of the OS wash away the sour taste of Vista? Here's a detailed report and a slideshow of Windows 7 screenshots.

Microsoft offered a software development kit for Surface, the company's tabletop computer, to about 1,000 people at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. The article features a some details on apps already available for Surface. (For example, designers at Vectorform have built an application that lets people can "carve" a jack-o'-lantern on the Surface by using their fingers to trace a design in an image of a pumpkin.)

It seems that Microsoft may have unintentionally leaked certain details about its upcoming Windows 7 feature set in a privacy supplement that was posted on its homepage. Driver protection, dynamic update, Homegroup, People Near Me, and Trusted Platform Model are all features mentioned (and described) in this document that will be new to Windows 7 that hadn't previously been publicized.

As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.

From the get-go, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu - Canonical - has backed Ubuntu with Mark Shuttleworth's money. The big question has always been if Canonical is actually making any money. We have a rather clear and definitive answer to that one now.

Lifehacker reviews some of the popular Linux distributions that have provided tools to make Live USB keys, a easy task. These include Damn Small Linux, Fedora with it's cross platform liveusb-creator , Puppy Linux and Xubuntu. All systems were tested with UNetbootin except for Fedora which was run using it's own liveusb-creator. For every distribution, the minimum requirements, image size, boot time, features, things that need improvement and which users it is recommended for, is listed.

Microsoft today announced Windows Azure, a cloud services platform. According to the website, "Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft data centers."

For a long time now, GNU/Linux distributions have been criticised by desktop and laptop users for starting up too slowly. More recently, within the Fedora community particularly, there have been increasing numbers of complaints about the amount of 'flicker' that happens as the system switches from Grub to RHGB to GDM, etc. Fedora 10 is going to change all of that, and to talk us through this feature, Adam Jackson, Red Hat Desktop Engineer, agreed to an interview.

El Reg reports: While Intel's Moblin 2.0 platform has been delayed from November 2008 to the first half of 2009, it looks like its arrival will provide quite the boost to the netbook scene. "Start-up Good OS has announced a relationship with MiTAC International to deliver its gOS Gadgets Linux operating system on a netbook based on Intel's Moblin 2.0. David Liu, founder and chief executive of gOS, told The Reg the machine planned with MiTAC would be among the first to be released on the as-yet unfinished Moblin 2.0. Ahead of completion, vendors have been working with Moblin 1.0 and so-called 'Moblin optimizations'. These are portions of the Moblin spec that have been picked up and incorporated into either hardware or software design. Xandros and Asus have, for example, added changes to their systems from Moblin that provide a 25 per cent improvement in battery life. Liu said Moblin was 'getting more and more ready for mainstream use' with features such as an extra-fast boot time of five seconds."

"If you disassemble a single binary, you can never tell why something was done in a certain way. If you have eight different versions, you can tell a lot. This episode of Computer Archeology is about reverse engineering eight different versions of Microsoft BASIC 6502 (Commodore, AppleSoft etc.), reconstructing the family tree, and understanding when bugs were fixed and when new bugs, features and easter eggs were introduced. This article also presents a set of assembly source files that can be made to compile into a byte exact copy of seven different versions of Microsoft BASIC, and lets you even create your own version."

A Fedora user takes a brief look at what he considers 13 of the prime features in the upcoming Fedora 10 release on end of November. "Fedora has many a projects finished or in the queue for Fedora 10. It is a mammoth and obviously unimportant to take all of them out here. So I have sorted some to best of your interests. If you are a developer, then don't worry. You have your goodie too."

ServerWatch writes about the slow but sure death of UNIX by the onslaught of Linux and customers moving from older proprietary UNIX systems to commercially supported open source enterprise Linux distributions."Linux does have one killer feature that is driving the switch: lower cost. Many companies are discovering Linux to be extremely attractive from a cost perspective. Take the experience of Sabre, a travel company that replaced Solaris with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) running on x86 machines, resulting in lowering costs 90 percent (with a three-fold speed gain to boot). These potential cost savings, which include hardware maintenance costs savings, are not to sniffed at."

Netbooks use various types of processors, but most of them are built around Intel's Atom processor and architecture. There are more exotic options, such as the Chinese Longsoon processor, but those are quite rare and hard to come by - and certainly not as powerful. Apparently, another contender is preparing to enter the netbook processor market. Say hello to ARM.