"Microsoft, makers of most of the computer software in the world, tried to kill it with words, and Intel, maker of most computer chips, tried to kill it with dirty tricks. Of course, they don't admit to being attempted murderers. And when I introduce you to Intel's lovely spokesperson, Agnes Kwan, you'll realise how far their denials go. But the truth is the two mightiest high-tech companies in the world looked on Negroponte's philanthropic scheme and decided it had to die."

ACM has announced the availability of the SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, an Issue on Research and Developments in the Linux Kernel. It is available, for free, from the ACM Archives site. The issue has 12 papers about the advances that have been merged or are candidates to be merged into the Linux kernel, as well as new idea papers discussing promising experimental work.

One of the common complaints regarding Microsoft is that the company has problems eating its own dog food. Even though it promoted Windows Presentation Foundation as the programming framework for building Windows and web applications, it so far failed to produce any significant WPF applications itself. None of Microsoft's major applications use WPF (Expression Design and Blend aren't major), which does not help in promoting it as the Next Big Thing. This may all change in the near future, as a small but extremely popular Microsoft application is about to make the switch to Windows Presentation Foundation: MSN Windows Live Messenger.

The Genode OS framework, the reference implementation of the Genode operating system architecture, has seen its first release. "Genode is a novel operating-system architecture that enables dynamic workload while retaining security and robustness. The fundamental difference of Genode compared to other OS architectures is its strict organizational structure, which allows the execution of sensitive applications with a trusted computing base of a few thousand lines of code beside high-complexity workload. With its organizational approach, the architecture facilitates a clean separation of policies and mechanisms, and enables the definition and application of system policies in a natural and distributed fashion." The Genode OS Framework runs on Linux via libSDL, or on real hardware on top of the L4/Fiasco microkernel.

This week at the Black Hat Security Conference two security researchers will discuss their findings which could completely bring Windows Vista to its knees. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, "the genius of this is that it's completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That's completely game over."

From OpenSuse's automatic green-finding algorithm, to Fedora's long-winded concept explanations, examining each distribution's art process can tell you a lot about the distribution.

Embedded designer Paul Thomas is showcasing a tiny, open-sourced computer at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week. Would-be Linuxstamp enthusiasts can obtain pre-built boards for the hefty sum of $120 directly from Thomas, or they can download the design for free and build it themselves.

It seems Lenovo is being selective in which markets get Linux on its new range of IdeaPad netbooks. "People in most markets Lenovo serves, including Singapore, China and the UK, will be offered the company's new IdeaPad S10 with either Microsoft Windows XP or a Linux OS, but Australian and US computer buyers will only be offered Windows XP according to Lenovo."

Red Hat's David Zeuthen blogged today about the huge patch he submitted to GTK+ that will allow the toolkit to achieve resolution independence - widget and font size adapting to your screen's real estate; no more tiny application lost in the corner of your high resolution screen. Although more work is obviously required, Zeuthen's idea is to use RI as the hot-new-feature selling point of the upcoming 3.0 GTK+ release. Discussion is going on in the gtk-devel mailing list and there is an ogg video of the feature in action.

The Mozilla and Nokia teams have been working hard to port Firefox 3 and the Mozilla Platform to Qt and there are now some solid results available from their efforts. An experimental build of Firefox Qt is available and you can download the sources from Mozilla's mercurial repository. The plan is to merge the Qt branch into the central Mozilla branch to make the port official.

After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."

In an "as told to" article for CIO.com, Linus Torvalds explains how he keeps the Linux people and software on-track. Arguably the most surprising facet of Linus' management style is that he's perfectly willing to flame people when he thinks they're wrong--though he's also happy to be corrected himself. "Part of that, by the way, is not feeling shy about saying impolite things or showing some emotion. So I'd rather flame people for doing stupid things and call them stupid, rather than try to be too polite to the point where people didn't understand how strongly I felt about something." That's particularly interesting in light of several OSCON presenters who believe that the way to grow the open source community is to make projects more welcoming to would-be contributors. Do these attitudes actually contradict one another?

On August 1 2007, I published an article called "My Month with the iPhone" wherein I examined the iPhone's now well-known advantages and deficiencies and speculated extensively on where Apple was likely to take the phone, development-wise. Now that the new iPhone and the iPhone 2.0 software have been out for a few weeks, and there's been a whole new storm of praise and gripes raging, I thought it would be illuminating for me to re-visit my prognostications and take my lumps.

"AMD's plan to integrate a CPU and GPU on a single chip, codenamed Fusion, has been a hot topic since the CPU manufacturer first announced it planned to purchase ATI. AMD hasn't had much to say about Fusion lately, beyond confirming that the project exists and is still in development, but new rumors have surfaced over what form Fusion might take when it surfaces in 2009."