Apparently, OpenBSD turned 11 today. " It's been eleven years to the day since the formation of the OpenBSD Project. In celebration, here's a little timeline of memorable events. Feel free to add your own entries and links." Congratulations.

Adobe has released a beta for Flash Player 9 for Linux. "While we are still working out exactly how to distribute the final Player version to be as easy as possible for the typical end user, this beta includes 2 gzip'd tarball packages: one is for the Mozilla plugin and the other is for a GTK-based Standalone Flash Player. Either will need to be downloaded manually via the Adobe Labs website and unpacked."

Microsoft will release the final build of IE7 today to customers. IE7 will be made available via Automatic Updates on the 1st of November. At the moment there is no link on Microsoft.com, but Yahoo has the final build bundled with Yahoo Mail. FlexBeta is currently hosting Internet Explorer 7 Final without the need of downloading Yahoo Mail. My take: Read about my thoughts on IE7's new interface on my blog.

Sun Microsystems engineers have begun designing Niagara 3, a second sequel to the company's ambitious lower-end processor. John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's server division, confirmed the development in an interview Tuesday and suggested it will continue Sun's push to squeeze more processing cores onto the chip. This new member of the Sparc family will be built using a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer circuitry elements, he said.

The long-touted Microsoft Vista/Office 2007 tandem launch is on for the last week in November in New York, sources said. This event will focus on business usage and scenarios. The new client Windows operating system and Office client and server applications have been promised for volume business customers by year's end and for consumers by early 2007. Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, would not comment on a specific launch timing or venue but said the company remains on track for the two promised delivery windows. He applied the usual caveat: Microsoft will not ship the code if it's not ready.

"As presented at the Opera Backstage event in London today, Opera 9.1 will include enhanced fraud protection. Today we display the name of the certificate owner in the right end of the address field when you're on a secure site. In 9.1 we will reuse that field to display more information about the trust level of the site you visit."