Microsoft will make a surprise announcement at the Nov. 1 launch of Windows CE 6.0, according to the Web's rumor-mill. In what would be its most substantial nod to the open-source movement, Microsoft is rumored to be opening up CE 6.0's entire kernel as 'shared source'. Update: It's official.

"How do the latest versions of each browser compare? For this prizefight, we looked at Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's first new Internet browser since 2001 and Mozilla Firefox 2, Mozilla's update of its popular Firefox 1.5 browser released in November 2005." This will be the last Firefox 2 vs. IE7 article. I promise.

"Application Verifier is designed specifically to detect and help debug memory corruptions and critical security vulnerabilities. It makes it easier to create reliable applications by monitoring an application's interaction with the Windows operating system, profiling its use of objects, the registry, the file system, and Win32 APIs (including heaps, handles, locks, and more). It also includes checks to predict how well the application will perform under Least-privileged User Account operation, compatibility tests to be used in logoing, and print tests to verify your usage of the print subsystem."

BETA3 for the FreeBSD 6.2 release is now available on most of the FTP mirror sites. There have been a lot of fixes to many things since BETA2. The most important of the things that have been worked on is the driver for em(4). More info here.

"The article is about my experience with Haskell and the process of working with it. I will describe which features of Haskell I used to implement particular aspects of my interpreter, how they're different from the object oriented world, why they helped me get things done faster, and how I had to change my program whenever my initial efforts took me to a dead end. While the jury's still out how well Haskell performs in other domains (I'm just starting my web application project) I hope this article sparks your interest in this beautiful language and explains some things programmers new to Haskell often find confusing." More here.

"Today, I'd like to share with you a hidden gem inside of Windows Vista's search capabilities. It's a neat little feature that lets you build one saved search on top of another, and we call it Query Composition. Think composition in the mathematical sense, not in the context of writing an English paper. To explain this feature, I'd like to start by talking a bit about Libraries."

"Following the talks given at this month's South East RISC OS show in Guildford, Surrey, Leo White has kindly uploaded the video recordings he made of the theatre presentations. If you have a web browser with a recent version of Flash installed, you can go watch them now on Google Video. The three pieces, which cover RISCOS Ltd, Castle, RISC OS Open and RISC OS Now, are fairly good quality, and it's pretty clear what the speakers are saying."

"You don't need a Ph.D. in scientific visualization to have some fun with three-dimensional data. Whether you're searching for an unused nook in a cramped disk partition, or trying to find the bloated temp/ folder that's crashing your system, sometimes the flat folder view of a traditional GUI file browser is little help. Luckily, Linux offers a variety of 3-D filesystems that can make your disk usage statistics come alive."

While Ars looks into the facts behind the recent flurry of license concerns over Windows Vista, several websites are reporting that Microsoft has internally released Vista and Office 2007 final builds. In related news, Microsoft has also released shots of the packaging for Vista and Office 2007. Meanwhile, other people have noted that there seems to be no upgrade path to Windows Vista Ultimate.

"The Haiku Project had its annual conference in Orlando this past weekend, and though I have little experience with BeOS or Haiku, I decided to attend and write about the conference because it's 20 minutes from my home. It's called WalterCon because 'Walter' was one of the proposed names for what was to become a free replacement for BeOS. Be, Inc. may be dead and gone, and the BeOS source code may have been sold and warehoused, but the spirit of Be lives on in Haiku and WalterCon. If only it had a little more developer support, you'd be hearing about the Haiku operating system a lot more often. Heck, you might even be using it."

"An old adage states that a frog will jump out of boiling water, but can be boiled alive if placed in cold water that is heated at a slow pace. Apparently, the process of making amphibian soup is not entirely unlike the process of cooking up a new web standard. Citing limited adoption of XHTML, Internet innovator and World Wide Web Consortium ringleader Tim Berners-Lee says HTML must be reinvented through a process of incremental change that will build on the existing standard."

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices swapped roles in a third quarter that wasn't as bad for shipments as some had initially feared, according to new data from Mercury Research. AMD had been making strides in the server market for several quarters, while Intel dominated the notebook market. But momentum swung the other way in the third quarter, with Intel regaining market share in server processors while AMD's notebook processor shipments surged, said Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research.

After the flood of Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 reviews, here is a review of PC-BSD 1.3 Beta. "PC-BSD has improved quite a bit and the use of its open-source PBI packaging system is a great idea. Although it obviously means there might be a minor delay in newly released products being ported over to the PBI package system, novice users will rejoice because the wait is well worth it. PC-BSD is a well oiled machine with its quick response times, even if you don't have that much memory in your system. Its implementation of a clean interface is welcomed by me and not having a 3D enabled desktop is not something I really would worry about unless you are an eye-candy lover."

Microsoft last week said that it is pushing back the next major service pack for Windows XP until the first half of 2008. The news came just ahead of reports that Vista’s RTM is being pushed back once again, from late October to early November, complicating matters for PC makers. The latest delay has some wondering whether the upgrade will ever see the light of day. "The fear is Service Pack 3 will just get killed off," said Jeff Centimano, an IT consultant at Levi, Ray & Shoup.