Russian web site Mobile-Review features today a thorough review of the upcoming version of Pocket PC: 6.0 aka Crossbow. The addition of VoIP SIP functionality by default is a welcome one.

In this article Joel talks about the number of choices in applications. "This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink."

ReactOS, the open source implementation of a Windows XP/2003 compatible operating system, just published a new interview in their series of interviews with ReactOS developers. Today's interview features the most active kernel developer Alex Ionescu.

"Buried in a Knowledge Base article that Microsoft published to the Web on November 14 are details of Microsoft's plans to combat Office 2007 piracy via new Office Genuine Advantage lockdowns. Microsoft's intentions are clear: Just as it is doing with Vista, Microsoft plans to incorporate what basically amounts to a 'kill switch' into Office 2007. Office 2007 users who can't or won't pass activation muster within a set time period will be moved into 'reduced-functionality mode', according to Microsoft."

"This article focuses primarily on some technical aspects of Qt, Trolltech’s cross-platform C++ toolkit which, as you may know, is the architectural core behind the KDE desktop on Linux. At the end, I show how easy it is to create a simple application without writing a line of code." More here.

C'mon, haven't you ever thought that it would be cool to write a game for the Xbox 360 or Windows, if only you had the time? Microsoft's new XNA Game Architecture is designed to make game development modular and easy. Throw in developer tools, such as XNA Express, and you have no excuses to create the next DOOM. Matthew David shows why game development is only a few key strokes away.

The first set of patches are available to compile the ZFS file system module on FreeBSD. "This is a first set of patches, which allows to use ZFS file system from OpenSolaris on FreeBSD. To apply the patch you need to have recent FreeBSD source (be sure you have rev. 1.284 of src/sys/kern/kern_synch.c). To try it out you need i386 machine (this is what I tested) and kernel without WITNESS compiled in (there are probably some warnings still). Currently it can only be compiled as a kernel module."