RISCOS Ltd have called for coders and beta testers to step forward and contribute to the company's flavour of RISC OS. Users were also welcomed to pitch ideas and feature suggestions - provided they weren't web browser-related. The company said this weekend it was 'looking at ways of increasing the involvement of users in the future development of RISC OS Select'. While it's not quite the same as Castle's plans with RISC OS Open, ROL have previously drawn upon a close circle of third party programmers to top up its features list, rewarding them with beta and alpha test builds of RISC OS and free Select subscriptions.

AMD has stopped its work on the Personal Internet Communicator project after nearly two years of planning and development. The PIC was announced in late 2004 as a USD 250 headless computer, sporting a Geode x86 processor, 128MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. PIC was designed for 'emerging markets' where the cost of computer hardware is seen as prohibitively high.

The European division of the Free Software Foundation has published a side-by-side comparison of the two drafts of the upcoming third revision of the GPL. All the removed or added lines are clearly marked.

"Opera Software chief Jon S. von Tetzchner's Web browser, popular with many hardcore computer users, hasn't taken over the industry. The Norwegian company's browser has been around for 12 years but has just 1.5% of the market. Compared to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or even Mozilla's Firefox, it barely qualifies as an also-ran. But unlike its competitors Microsoft and Mozilla, Opera is focusing a lot of attention on noncomputer devices: mobile phones, videogame consoles or just about anything else you can stick a screen on."

This course first presents an overview of what PHP is, how PHP programs run, and why PHP is so popular. You will also see a comparison of PHP to JavaScript, CGI, Net.Data and Java Web applications. Next, you will see how the PHP language is supported on the System IBM i5/OS platform with the Zend Corporation product suite.

"Power Developer is pleased to provide the relevant Linux support patches and documentation for running Linux on the Sony PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 games console was released in Japan today and will go on sale in the US market on Friday, 17th November."

"At its recent WWDC, Apple sought to steal some of Microsoft's thunder by releasing just enough details of its next OS, Leopard, to make an early comparison to the forthcoming Windows Vista possible. Staying true to form, then. More here. Also, Vista's dual Mode support allows resistive devices, such as touch screens and electromagnetic devices, to work with any computer that uses a digital tablet. Finally, Vista has already hit the pirate boards, along with an activation hack.

The popularity of OS X among geeks in recent years has led to a lot more people discovering OpenStep through Cocoa. GNUstep provides a much-needed Free Software alternative, as David Chisnall explains.

"I've been using PC-BSD for approx. 10 Months so I've had enough time to see what life throws at me with it. My first install was 1.0 Release Canadate 1 and I currently run PC-BSD 1.2 (the current release) on my laptop and have a beta version of 1.3 installed on my desktop for testing. This will cover PC-BSD 1.2 and PC-BSD in general. PC-BSD is primarly for desktops but makes a darn good laptop/workstation system." More here.

Rob Dickinson, former band leader of "The Catherine Wheel" (and cousin of Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson), has shot the video clip of his new single, "Oceans" (iTunes), using a Nokia N93 cellphone. The Symbian-based smartphone has a 3.2MP camera that is capable of capturing VGA video at 30fps with its Carl Zeiss optics. You can view the video at Yahoo!'s Music site (with IE) or via VLC. When the N93 was first launched Nokia tried to market the phone as the first DVD-quality capture phone in the market, but this is the first time that such a device is used for serious, professional purposes.

"The Software Freedom Law Center's CTO Bradley Kuhn has issued a statement regarding the Novell-Microsoft agreements and how they will impact FOSS developers. They have analyzed in particular Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated Developers and see little value and in fact say it's worse than useless, because it creates an illusion of safety and because it limits severely what that developer is allowed to do with his work."

The upcoming release of FreeBSD 6.2 includes the new Security Event Auditing system, that "permits the selective and fine-grained logging of security-relevant system events for the purposes of post-mortem analysis, intrusion detection, and run-time monitoring analysis." Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Robert Watson, founder of the TrustedBSD project, and discussed the advantages and potential it brings. Elsewhere, SCTP has been added to FreeBSD. Stream Control Transmission Protocol is a reliable message oriented transport protocol which provides network fault tolerance.

XForms is an ideal open standards technology for collecting and submitting data from a wide variety of Web-capable platforms. Using JavaScript to edit the DOM with XForms allows a single form to accommodate multiple, site-unique submission requirements.

Microsoft has released Office 2007 on it's Microsoft Volume License Services website. Confirmed versions available for download are the Office 2007 Enterprise at 559MB and Office 2007 Groove at 189MB. MSDN subscribers can expect to get it on November 12th. Office 2007 went gold on November 6th 2006.