"Intel announced today that they're open-sourcing their cross-platform Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) template library. While the company contributes code to open-source project like the Linux kernel and drivers, the opening of TBB marks the first time that Intel has taken a commercial tool and open-sourced it, making it Intel's largest open-source commitment to date."

Two preview articles give a taste of the new proof-of-concept desktop environment Pyro. Based on Firefox, used in conjunction with X's compositing extensions, Pyro allows web applications to behave like full-fledged ones running alongside traditional Linux apps. Perhaps most tantalizing of all, Pyro is a simple Firefox-extension-install away. Ars Technica has a backgrounder on the project, while Desktoplinux spotlights potential security concerns.

Break out the salt, boys and girls, it's time for some statistics again. "According to Net Applications, in June Windows Vista accounted for 4.52% of all systems that browsed the Web, up from January's 0.18%. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93% in February, 2.04% in March, 3.02% in April and 3.74% in May. Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22% in January and hit its high point of 6.46% in May, but it slipped back to 6% in June. If Vista's uptake trend continues, it should pass Mac OS X in Web usage share by the end of August." Do with it as you please.

The head of PC maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, has hit out at Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, saying that the 'entire industry' was disappointed by it. Few buyers have purchased new PCs specifically for Vista, Acer's chief says "The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista," the head of the world's fourth-biggest PC maker told the Financial Times Deutschland in its online edition on Monday. Never before had a new version of Windows done so little to boost PC sales, he said. "And that's not going to change in the second half of this year," Mr Lanci said. "I really don't think that someone has bought a new PC specifically for Vista."

This article reviews the Debian Linux-based Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. The basics of the internet tablet are covered as well as the new features available after the latest July firmware updates. Most notable new features would be a full fledged Skype client and SDHC support.

For the first time, the Syllable project has published translated versions of the Syllable 0.6.4 Live CD. Besides the regular English version, ten other languages are available: Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Magyar (Hungary), Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Other translations are currently not complete enough. The Spanish version is available from a new Syllable community website for Latin America. Also, Flemming Sorensen ported Battle for Wesnoth this weekend (screenshot), a fantasy strategy game.

Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called USD 100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.

"There is one major web rendering engine that grew entirely out of the open source world: KHTML is KDE's web renderer which was built from the ground up by the open source community with very little original corporate backing. The code was good and branches were born as a result, the best known being Webkit. Now, after years of split, KHTML and Webkit are coming together once again."

Six months ago, after a long gestation period, Microsoft finally released Windows Vista. Vista is a huge release; not only because of the long list of new features, but also because of its sheer size, and number of bugs and other oddities and downsides. The development process that lead to Vista has left many with a very bitter aftertaste; features were cut, codebases were scrapped, release dates postponed. A few days ago, Microsoft released some sparse details on Vista's successor, internally dubbed 'Windows 7', and in order to prevent another Vista-like development cycle, here is what I would advise Microsoft to do. Update: APCMag reports that Julie Larson-Green, who was the driving force behind Office 2007's new Ribbon user interface, has been transferred to the Windows 7 GUI team.

The ReactOS project has released the first release candidate for version 0.3.3 of their Windows NT-inspired operating system. "We just released the first pre-release (RC1) of the upcoming 0.3.3. Certainly, it contains even more bugs than the alpha-quality software could contain, but we are still doing our best to reduce amount of certain glitches and misbehaviour."

Microsoft is planning to ship its next major version of Windows - known internally as version '7' - within roughly three years, CNET News.com has learned. The company discussed Windows 7 on Thursday at a conference for its field sales force in Orlando, Fla., according to sources close to the company. While the company provided few details, Windows 7, the next client version of the operating system, will be among the steps taken by Microsoft to establish a more predictable release schedule, according to sources. The company plans a more 'iterative' process of information disclosure to business customers and partners, sources said.

CoreObject is intended to be one of the foundation pieces of Etoile. The current roadmap calls for an experimental version in 0.3, a stable interface in 0.4, and a completely stable version in 0.5. "What is CoreObject? Basically, it's a replacement for a filesystem as a programmer and user interface. Files (in the UNIX sense of the word) never were a good abstraction; an untyped series of bytes is no use to anyone. The operating system needs to deal with things like this, but programmers shouldn't have to. We already have a much nicer abstraction than a file; the object. Unlike files, objects have all of the structure and introspection that we want in order to be able to interact with them programatically. In EtoilE, we want to treat everything as an object, and objects as first-class citizens."

GCC 4.2.1 has been released, the last release of the GNU Compiler Collection under the GPL v2. "GCC 4.2.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.0 relative to previous GCC releases. GCC 4.2.1 will be the last release of GCC covered by version 2 of the GNU General Public License. All future releases will be released under GPL version 3."

Linus Torvalds included patches into the mainline tree which implement a stable userspace driver API into the Linux kernel. The stable driver API was already announced a year ago by Greg Kroah-Hartman. Now the last patches were uploaded and the API was included in Linus' tree. The idea of the API is to make life easier for driver developers: "This interface allows the ability to write the majority of a driver in userspace with only a very small shell of a driver in the kernel itself. It uses a char device and sysfs to interact with a userspace process to process interrupts and control memory accesses."