The Office team beat its own deadline of early 2008 and will release Office 2007 Service Pack 1 Dec. 11. In an unusual move, the software maker limited testing of the update to the productivity suite to a few months and only at large enterprises in its Technology Adopter Program, as well as internally at Microsoft, to shave time off the production schedule, sources told eWEEK. Additionally, Office:Mac 2008 has gone gold. The third service pack or Windows XP has also seen its first RC.

Sun Microsystems is releasing the specifications of its new UltraSPARC T2 processor, formally code named Niagara 2, to the open-source community Dec. 12, as part of the company's ongoing effort to build more of a community around its signature chip. The goal of releasing Niagara 2 into the open-source community through the General Public License is to create a larger community around the chip and increase the number of operating systems and applications that can use the processor, said Shrenik Mehta, senior director for Fronted Technologies and the OpenSPARC Program at Sun. In 2005, the company released the specification for the UltraSPARC T1 processor and the designs have been downloaded 6500 times since then, Mehta said.

I guess the cat is out of the bag. "Everex has confirmed plans to ship a UMPC with a 7-inch screen, similar to competitor Asus's EEE PC. A source close to the company revealed that the device - codenamed 'Cloudbook' - will ship with the Google Apps-oriented 'gOS' Linux distribution early next year."

Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product. On Monday, Red Hat officially released JBoss Developer Studio, based on the Exadel product as a 100 percent open source IDE. The new Eclipse based IDE offering from Red Hat's JBoss division will provide a development environment that will work on both Windows and Linux for Java middleware solutions from JBoss.

Microsoft has released a toolkit to let businesses block service pack updates for Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003. Although service packs - particularly in the case of Vista - are keenly awaited by many users, some businesses prefer to test the packs before upgrading to assure compatibility with existing hardware and applications.

PureMobile sent us in a 16GB iPod Touch for the purposes of this article. This is one of the few times an - essentially - mp3 player comes with a powerful operating system (other examples include the Linux-based Archos and Sandisk offers). Read on for more.

Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever. "There was something magical about the C64," says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden."

"Leading up to next week's public beta-test release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate, Microsoft today has published a 17-page document outlining in fine detail exactly what difference SP1 makes to Vista. Some of the contents has been shared in bits in the past, but this is so far the most comprehensive 'changelog' we've ever seen and probably will see as the final version is not expected to differ much from the RC, with the exception of WGA modifications."

Ruby on Rails 2.0 has been released. "Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that’s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We’ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean." On Zenbits, they give tips on how to install 2.0.

A few weeks ago Adobe released the Premiere Elements 4 and Photoshop Elements 6.0 applications. The bundle sported a new user interface but also new features. Read on for more for a quick rundown.

An update on the status of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring development, including the publication of the release schedule and the technical specifications for this release. Highlights include PulseAudio, a switch to the fork of RPM that SUSE and Fedora are using, a parental control tool, mail import support for the Windows migration tool introduced in 2008, and automatic repository configuration via geoip.

Jambi ships as a single Java library, or JAR (Java Archive) file, plus a handful of tools, including an interface layout and design tool, and an Eclipse plug-in. Trolltech uses its vaunted Qt C++ library as the GUI engine and puts Java wrappers around it. This approach uses the JNI (Java Native Interface) to call the necessary functions from Java. More here.

Since my Cube could not run Leopard, and I did not have any other Macs, I was unable to delve into Leopard right away. Apple NL was kind enough to fix this problem for us, by generously loaning me a brand new MacBook with Leopard installed so I could review it for OSNews. Read on for the findings.

Microsoft is serious about getting Windows XP to work on OLPC's low-cost laptop, but the company still isn't sure it will be able to make a go of it. In an interview, James Utzschneider, the general manager of Microsoft's emerging market unit, says Microsoft has devoted about 40 employees and contractors to work on its effort. However, there are plenty of technical hurdles, he said. One of the biggest is the fact that the XO has no hard drive and only 1GB of built-in memory. The company concluded it needed at least 2GB of memory just for Windows and Office, so it convinced the OLPC folks to include an SD slot on the laptop's motherboard.