The videos of the announcements made at the 2007 Syllable Conference are now available. For those who don't have Syllable 0.6.4 yet, there's a demonstration video . Turning our attention to the future, there's a demonstration video of Syllable Server, the server companion to Syllable Desktop that is under development and is being built on the Linux kernel . These videos contain some bloopers, but they decided to present them uncut. They were transcoded on Syllable with the Media Converter application. Also, there are a few contributed videos on YouTube: EFileBrowser on VMware, Syllable 0.6.3 on VirtualPC, on VMware, part 1 and part 2.

"The HelenOS project is an effort to develop a complete and usable modern operating system, yet offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among wich are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC, SPARC V9 and Xen 3.0. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is extremely-well portable."

Adobe may launch its own office-application suite, taking it into direct competition with Microsoft. In an interview, Mike Downey, group manager for platform evangelism at Adobe, said that, although he could not reveal any plans at the moment, the possibility should not be dismissed.

In the wake of last week's ruling that Novell, and not SCO, controls the copyrights covering UNIX, Novell is reassuring Unix users that it has no plans to follow in SCO's footsteps. Given that the company is no longer in the business of selling UNIX, it has no reason to pursue any copyright claims.

In a discussion on Amiga forum site The Amigans, the Friedens twin brothers (developers of AmigaOS 4.0 exec kernel) revealed that the complete Amiga OS architecture will move ahead to a new design. The new AmigaOS (let's call it AmigaOS 4+1) will include some sort of virtual environment in which old (AmigaOS 4.0) applications will run as separate tasks, in their own address space. MorphOS, an Amiga-like operating system, employs a similar method to allow for compatibility with older Amiga 3.x applications. AmigaWorld of course also discusses the matter.

Microsoft today released its August 2007 security bulletin, which includes nine updates: Six are designated as 'critical' by the software giant and three are deemed 'important'. Two patches affect Microsoft products on the Mac, and one affects Windows Vista. All Microsoft security patches for Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via individual bulletins.

"We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software." Those were the opening lines of Miguel De Icaza's email announcing the GNU Network Object Model Environment, better known as GNOME, exactly (in my timezone) ten years ago, on 15th August 1997. They have come a long way from this, to this.

"FalterCon 2007 took place on August 11, and it went quite well (IMHO, of course). Here I would like to share my personal impressions of the event, as well as make a few (somewhat) related observations. When the news of the WalterCon cancellation broke out and I read about some people being left with non-refundable air tickets, my first reaction was 'OK, let's do something with these guys'. A few emails later with Mike Summers, Bryan Varner and Urias, we had decided on having a community gathering which, as many of you know, was to later be called FalterCon (yes, pun intended). In approximately two weeks, we found a venue (and a good one!), had this website running, prepared some nice promo material, and were able to gather nine people willing to attend. All in all, I think we did pretty well given the very little time we had."

"As we saw in part 1 of this series, large applications and games under Windows are getting incredibly close to hitting the 2GB barrier, the amount of virtual address space a traditional Win32 (32-bit) application can access. Once applications begin to hit these barriers, many of them will start acting up and/or crashing in unpredictable ways which makes resolving the problem even harder. Furthermore, as we saw in part 2, games are consuming greater amounts of address space under Windows Vista than Windows XP. This makes Vista less suitable for use with games when at the same time it will be the version of Windows that will see the computing industry through the transition to 64-bit operating systems becoming the new standard. Microsoft knew about the problem, but up until now we were unable to get further details on what was going on and why. As of today that has changed."

The GNU libc maintainer writes: "People are starting to realize how broken the Xen model is with its privileged Dom0 domain. But the actions they want to take are simply ridiculous: they want to add the drivers back into the hypervisor. There are many technical reasons why this is a terrible idea. You'd have to add all the PCI handling and lots of other lowlevel code which is now maintained as part of the Linux kernel. But this is of course also the direction of VMWare who loudly proclaim that in the future we won't have OS as they exist today."

"Deciding whether a particular computer is a good candidate for installing GNU/Linux can involve a nightmare of details about hardware compatibility. Nor is assembling a custom computer on which to run GNU/Linux any easier. In both cases, you need to evaluate video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital camera, wireless cards, and mobile devices for compatibility with the operating system. Fortunately, help is available."

Microsoft has had to create a new build of Windows XP Professional for computer makers because the six-year-old operating system's continued popularity has nearly exhausted the supply of product activation keys. The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created simply to address the shrinking pool of product keys. XP Pro SP2c, which has been released to manufacturing, will be made available to OEMs and system builders next month, said Microsoft.

Access has released screenshots of its Access Linux Program (or ALP), a successor to PalmOS based on Linux, with the ability to run legacy PalmOS applications (not to be confused with Palm's own attempt at building a new PalmOS, also based on Linux).

"A good programming language is far more than a simple collection of features. My ideal is to provide a set of facilities that smoothly work together to support design and programming styles of a generality beyond my imagination. Here, I briefly outline rules of thumb (guidelines, principles) that are being applied in the design of C++0x. Then, I present the state of the standards process (we are aiming for C++09) and give examples of a few of the proposals such as concepts, generalized initialization, being considered in the ISO C++ standards committee. Since there are far more proposals than could be presented in an hour, I'll take questions." Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is the original designer and implementer of the C++ Programming Language.