The commonwealth of Massachusetts has officially thrown its weight behind Microsoft's Office Open XML format along with the OASIS Open Document Format. In July, the commonwealth added Microsoft's format, also known as Ecma-376 or Open XML, to the list of approved standards in a draft of the Massachusetts ETRM, an architectural framework used to identify the standards, specifications and technologies that support Massachusetts' computing environment.

Google has developed a prototype cell phone that could reach markets within a year, and plans to offer consumers free subscriptions by bundling advertisements with its search engine, e-mail and Web browser software applications, according to a story of The Wall Street Journal. More info here and here.

Microsoft says it will be forced to delay Office 2008 for Mac, the next version of its productivity suite for Apple Inc. computers, until early next year. The company had been planning to release the product this year. But a recent development review showed that "the quality just wasn't where we wanted it to be," said Craig Eisler, who became general manager of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit in June.

Some of the concerns expressed about CFS were reports that it might not handle 3D games as well as the SD scheduler. In a recent thread, Ingo Molnar noted, "people are regularly testing 3D smoothness, and they find CFS good enough and that matches my experience as well (as limited as it may be). In general my impression is that CFS and SD are roughly on par when it comes to 3D smoothness." He noted that all known regressions were reported against earlier versions of CFS that had long since been fixed, and that he was very interested in any new reports of regressions against the current version of the code, "there are no open 3D related regressions for CFS at the moment." Ingo then offered benchmarks illustrating the improved 3D performance of CFS, with numbers showing it to perform as well and in some cases considerably better than the SD scheduler.

"Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of the beta release of 5.1 (kernel-2.6.18-36.el5) for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family of products. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is still in development and therefore the contents of the media kit, the implemented features, and the supported configurations are subject to change before the release of the final product."

If you own a Mac or an iPhone, chances are you'll need to download at least one of the security updates issued by Apple. Dozens of vulnerabilities and bugs were covered by a total of six downloads for Mac OS 10.3.9 (Panther), Mac OS 10.4.10 (Tiger) on PowerPC, and the Universal version of Mac OS 10.4.10, as well as the server versions of each of those operating systems. Each download contains several patches to correct flaws, and Apple is recommending that all users of those operating systems download the updates. In addition, Apple will make a Mac-related announcement coming Tuesday.