Syllable's resident graphics designer Ruud Kuin has published the first issue of his Syllable Development Newsletter . This new project is a continuation of the SDN magazines by Michael Saunders that were popular around two years ago. The first issue contains five main articles and five smaller ones, for a total of eleven pages, by six contributors. Subjects range from a developer interview to the first part of a programming tutorial series. It is accompanied by an archive that conveniently collects software that was released recently: three pieces this time.

It was a long time in coming, but Microsoft has finally acknowledged that its anti-Linux site had gone past the point of usefulness. On August 23, Microsoft pulled plug on the 'Get the Facts' site, replacing it with a new Windows Server 'Compare' site. "The goal of the site is to offer more in-depth information and customer-to-customer opinions about many of the issues IT administrators face," a company spokeswoman said. "It turns out people wanted 3rd party validation in addition to people's experiences making OS purchasing decisions so in addition to customer case studies, research reports that compare platforms the site will also offer guidance around best practices, web casts, etc."

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 has been released. "The Ubuntu developers are hurrying to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 is the fifth alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10, and this alpha release brings a host of excellent new features."

"Microsoft has released a new showcase of its Silverlight web development frameworks, a graphical search engine called Tafiti. Tafiti, which means 'do research' in Swahili, is an experimental frontend to Microsoft's Live Search engine. It presents search options in three panes on the screen: the left pane is for entering search queries and switching between image, RSS, Web, and News, the middle pane contains the search results, and the right pane is used to 'dock' results using drag-and-drop for looking at later."

OpenSUSE 10.3 beta 2 has been released. "The openSUSE Team is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 10.3 Beta 2. Though this release should not be used on any production machines, everyone can help shape this release by testing out installations and much more. For more information on the release schedule, take a look at the Roadmap."

"Details about the first OEM systems equipped with Windows Home Server are leaking out on to the 'net, and it looks like HP is going to get the ball rolling with its MediaSmart Home Server. Prices for the units were accidentally posted on several sites, such as PC Mall and onSale.com, and it looks like the server will have a US list price of USD 596 for the 500GB version and USD 745 for the 1TB version."

It is not too surprising that Ubuntu came in first in DesktopLinux.com's 2007 Desktop Linux Market Survey, or that Firefox was the topmost browser by far. More interesting is that for the first time ever in the site's annual surveys, GNOME surpassed KDE among desktop environments (45% over 35%), with Xfce a solid third (8%).

The Nivo is a new 'ultra thin' client device under development by British, not-for-profit organization Ndiyo. Its principle intended market is developing nations and the project is based upon a non-profit model. The aim of the project is to create hardware and software that can lower both financial and technical skill cost of computer service provision.

"The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time? I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges."

Bas de Lange has published the videos that he made at the 2007 Syllable Conference about the revival of the Syllable Development Newsletter. The recordings are in Dutch, but Bas made translations in English. There is a video of Ruud Kuin presenting the upcoming new design and also a personal interview with Ruud about his involvement in the Syllable project as a graphics designer, and now, publisher .

Phil Hester, AMD's chief technology officer, stopped by the Hot Chips conference here at Stanford University on Tuesday to talk a little more about Fusion, AMD's plan to integrate a graphics processor and PC processor onto the same chip. By the time the chip is ready around 2009, Hester thinks the growing explosion of video and 3D graphics on PCs these days will require an affordable chip that still delivers great graphics performance.

"Hoping to improve the state of server software, Sun Microsystems has confirmed that it will include support for transactional memory with the first generation of its Rock processors due out in the second half of next year. Sun's research and development teams have spent years working on a type of transactional memory that combines software and hardware aids. Now, the company looks set to be the first mainstream chip maker to build transactional memory hooks into its chips."

Apple, which last week asked that developers provide feedback on their experiences using pre-released builds of Mac OS Leopard, has followed up by seeding a significant stability update to the next-generation system software. The latest seed, labeled Mac OS X Leopard 9A500n, arrived via Leopard's Software Update mechanism as a 'recommended' update for all developers running Mac OS X Leopard build 9A499.

Jeff Jones has published another one of his vulnerability scorecards comparing various operating system offerings. As always, these figures just list the patched vulnerabilities over the designated period of time; they do not take into account any unfixed or undisclosed vulnerabilities. Hence, these reports are not proper measurements of security - they are just that, a tally of fixed vulnerabilities. Any conclusions like "x is more secure than y" cannot be drawn from this data set. As always, do with it as you please.