At OSNews, we have kept you updated about the Amiga hardware announced by ACK controls. Supposedly ready for shipping in May, we are now in the second half of September, and still no hardware. Interestingly, nor ACK Controls, nor Amiga, Inc., will be present at the upcoming Amiga show Pianeta Amiga - leading to the inevitable conclusion that like so many other announcements in the Amiga world, this one was yet another big puff of air. All hope is not lost, though: ACube Systems has announced the SAM440ep, a PowerPC board, of which industrial versions are already available (according to ACube). The consumer version is supposedly ready to ship starting 22nd September 2007, and interestingly, Hyperion will be present at the ACube booth at Pianeta Amiga. Finally, new Amiga hardware? Seeing is believing, many will say.

"Sun announced Niagara 2 the other day, an evolution of the older Niagara 1, now called the UltraSPARC T1. From the 10000-foot view, it all looks quite familiar, but once you delve into the details, it quickly becomes apparent that almost everything has changed."

Microsoft suffered a stunning defeat on Monday when a European Union court backed a European Commission ruling that the US software giant illegally abused its market power to crush competitors. The European Union's second-highest court dismissed the company's appeal on all substantive points of the 2004 antitrustruling. The court said Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, was unjustified in tying new applications to its Windows operating system in a way that harmed consumer choice. The verdict, which may be appealed only on points of law and not of fact, could force Microsoft to change its business practices.

As some of you may have noticed by now, OSNews has started using icons from the Tango Project to replace many of our old icons. You can spot the new icons conveniently on the topic page. In the Tango icon library we have found numerous icons we could use, but understandably, Tango was not made for OSNews: we cannot replace all the icons we want with Tango icons - yet. And this is where you come into play. So, read on for the rationale behind choosing the Tango icon set, and how you can help us - and win a subscription to our ad-free version!

Google has released a statement regarding the decision not to fast-track Microsoft's OOXML for certification. "Google welcomes the ISO decision to not approve the fast track of Office Open XML proposed standard DIS 29500 (ECMA 376). Our engineers conducted an independent analysis of the OOXML specification and found several areas of concern, which we communicated both to the ISO and to the public."

"The HTML file that contains all the text for this article is about 25000 bytes. That's less than one of the image files that was also downloaded when you selected this page. Since image files typically are larger than text files and since web pages often contain many images that are transmitted across connections that can be slow, it's helpful to have a way to represent images in a compact format. In this article, we'll see how a JPEG file represents an image using a fraction of the computer storage that might be expected. We'll also look at some of the mathematics behind the newer JPEG 2000 standard."

Anders Magnusson's BSD-licensed pcc compiler has been imported into NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD's src tree. Anders wrote to NetBSD's tech-toolchain list: "It is not yet bug-free, but it can compile the i386 userspace. The big benefit of it is that it is fast, 5-10 times faster than gcc, while still producing reasonable code. The only optimization added so far is a multiple-register-class graph-coloring register allocator, which may be one of the best register allocators today. Conversion to SSA format is also implemented, but not yet the phi function. Not too difficult though, after that strength reduction is high on the list."

The vaunted 'USD 100 laptop' that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers dreamed up for international schoolchildren is becoming a slightly more distant concept. The USD 100 laptop has many innovative features including a pull cord for recharging by hand. Leaders of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child that was spun out of MIT acknowledged Friday that the devices are now slated to cost USD 188 when mass production begins this fall. The last price the nonprofit announced was USD 176; it described USD 100 as a long-term goal.

Yahoo reports that SCO has filed for bankruptcy in order to protect assets. "The SCO Group today announced that it filed a voluntary petition for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. SCO's subsidiary, SCO Operations, Inc., has also filed a petition for reorganization. The Board of Directors of The SCO Group have unanimously determined that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders, and employees." Groklaw has a story on it, too.

Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users' knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates. Many companies require testing of patches before they are widely installed, and businesses in this situation are objecting to the stealth patching. "Normal behaviour," according to Microsoft.

According to this KernelTrap article, the 0.11 Linux kernel was released on December 8th, 1991. Among the 'features' advertised in that release, Linus noted that the console was now capable of producing beeps, Linux gained native mkfs, fsck and fdisk utilities, and the com ports finally had adjustable line speeds. However, if you managed to get Linux booted you were immediately dropped into a root bash shell as Linux lacked a login system. It also lacked support for SCSI devices, and support for swapping to disk meaning it required at least 4MB of RAM to be useful.

"Ubuntu sponsor Canonical announced a version of its Linux software stripped down for use just on virtualized environments. The version, called Jeos for 'Just Enough Operating System' and pronounced 'juice', is now available." That's what ZDnet and News.com report, but Jeos is nowhere to be found on the Ubuntu website. El Reg claims: "Canonical is still in the midst of deciding whether not to make JeOS wildly available, since it's mostly meant as an ISV thing."

Fedora 8 Test 2 (7.91) has been released with isos and trees for i386, x86_64, and ppc(64) and 3 live CDs (KDE, developer and Electronic Lab). Update: Preview of Fedora 8 here.

The widespread acceptance of open source continues to grow as a cost-effective alternative to traditional network deployments. Well-known projects such as Linux have proven themselves to be in the enterprise environment, helping to dispel the fear, uncertainty and doubt preceding open source implementations. In the past two years, the industry has begun to shift from a total dependence on proprietary applications to a desire for more cost-effective, scalable and collaborative solutions.