"Haskell is a valuable language for a lot of different reasons, but the most important one is that it changes the way that you think about programming. Haskell does things in a very different way from the imperative languages that most of us are familiar with. And it's an extremely well-designed language, so there isn't a ton of crap standing between you and the concepts that you can learn from it."

French députés' offices will be equipped with a Linux operating system and open source productivity software. There will be 1154 French parliamentary workstations running on an open source OS, with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and an open source email client.

"Apple researchers have built a full working prototype of a Mac tablet PC and three Companies in Taiwan are now costing a product for a potential launch in mid 2007. Sources in Taiwan have said that the focus has been more on the home and the education environment than the enterprise marketplace. Several months ago I was told that Apple was exploring a neat new device that is basically a touch screen that links to various source devices including a brand new media centre that Apple is planning to launch next year. The Mac tablet has been designed to handle third party applications such as home automation software that will allow users to control lighting, audio, entertainment devices and security feeds. It also acts as a full blown PC has wireless linking for a new generation of Wireless Hi Fi speakers that are currently being tested by Apple."

"If you're doing any kind of animation or running a process that needs to poll another process or a particular piece of hardware on a regular basis, you need an accurate timer. Depending on your application, the timer might need to be accurate to within one second, or within a fraction of a millisecond. If your timer's resolution is too coarse or its margin of error is too large, your animations will appear jerky or uneven, and your program that's collecting data from custom hardware will miss data or will fail altogether. Windows has two primary methods of measuring elapsed time, and two ways to provide periodic events."

Calmira XP is no more. "After almost 15 years of Windows 3.1 and 5 years of Calmira XP this is the time to say goodbye to this great project. I had a great time developing this, and I hope you enjoyed using it. As a farewell-gift I made a last version which includes all the graphical enhancements of Calmira XP 4.0, but without the experimental LFN-support; so this is a stable version. Now it's time to search for a new, fresh project."

RISCOS Ltd has released a preview build of RISC OS 6 Select 4 for Select subscribers to download. The release came just in time for the Midlands 2006 show this weekend after the company pulled out all the stops to finish the preview package. Copies of the operating system were available on CD from the event in Wolverhampton. The preview version is expected to be the forerunner to a full bug fixed Select 4 release, which will only be available to users who have continued to renew their Select subscriptions. An announcement sent out on Friday evening read: "RISCOS Ltd are pleased to announce the immediate availability of RISC OS 6 Preview for Select subscribers. The RISC OS 6 Preview release gives RiscPC, A7000 and VirtualRPC-Adjust users an opportunity to experience recent developments within RISC OS through the Select scheme."

CPU maker Intel is pressuring smaller rival Via Technologies to exit the CPU market, industry sources in Taiwan claim. In exchange, Intel will allow Via to continue making PC chipsets which use Intel's patented technology, say the sources at PC mainboard manufacturers, who do not wish to be named.

"This aims to be the most comprehensive kernel comparison of the latest most popular UNIX style kernel versus the latest most popular current Windows kernel. A kind of kernel comparison FAQ. In Q4 2006, this means Linux 2.6.18/2.6.19 kernel versus the Windows Server 2003 R2 kernel. In Q1 2007, this will mean Linux 2.6.20 kernel versus Windows Vista kernel."

"It's been a good week for Microsoft's documentation efforts as the company achieved important milestones with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. US antitrust authorities signed off on Vista and IE7 and announced that Microsoft was making good progress in its efforts to document certain server protocols in Windows. In Europe, where Microsoft has encountered more problems and increased fines over the state of its documentation, the company got a rare bit of good news as the European Commission completed its initial review of the revised documents."

"Tabos is a new operating system, at this stage of development aimed to run on Intel's x86 platform. Although it is our first try in creating a runable, modern OS, it seems that we are on the right way. We decided to develop a modular monolithic kernel with module loading support, using x86 platform features to achieve this goal: multitasking, paging, virtual memory, dma, pci, acpi are yet to be implemented."

Microsoft is beating Oracle hands down with the security of its database, according to a new report. David Litchfield, a security researcher with NGS Software, published a whitepaper entitled Which database is more secure? Oracle vs. Microsoft on 21 November comparing the number of software vulnerabilities patched by both vendors in their respective products in the past six years.

House is a demo of software written in Haskell, running in a standalone environment. It is a system than can serve as a platform for exploring various ideas relating to low-level and system-level programming in a high-level functional language.

A whole flurry of RISC OS news the last few days. A port of Gnash is in the works, while a survey showed that users of the RISC OS word processors TechWriter/EasiWriter want .doc support. Meanwhile, RISC OS got transparent windows. Drobe also has a short article on re-writing RISC OS.

openSUSE 10.2 RC1 has been released: "I'm glad to announce Release Candidate 1 of openSUSE 10.2 codename Basilisk Lizard. It contains a large number of enhancements and updates done by the open source community and Novell's development teams. Screenshot walkthrough here.