"The Grand Old Duke of York is clearly in charge of Microsoft's operating systems roadmaps for, having marched Longhorn up to the top of a distant (2005, said his Billness) hill earlier this year, he has now marched it straight back down again. Longhorn, the next version of Windows XP, will not after all be a 2005 product, but will quite possibly be a next year product after all." Read the article at TheRegister.

In spite of the major advances in Web technology and the explosion of communication methods on the Internet, the simple act of Web browsing has remained fundamentally single-user in its implementation. Why is Web browsing still a solitary activity? Researchers at Microsoft and Harvard were excited about their proposal for a multi-user Web six years ago, and yet here we are and nothing much has changed. Jared White of The Idea Basket gives us his take on the matter, and offers a new proposal for a multi-user Web experience.

"Miniscule mobile telephones, tiny electronic organizers and portable DVD players are nice. But they'd be so much less cumbersome if they were surgically implanted under your skin. The chip, called the VeriChip, is about the size of a grain of rice, carries a number that identifies you and, the company says, may eventually provide a way to make sure that only the right people gain access to secure sites, corporate offices or even personal computers. The chip could also carry access to personal data, like medical information." Read the (enthusiastic!) article at NYTimes. Our Take: Implantable chips? Over my dead body. I have hard time liking the tooth implants already.

Version 2.0.8 of the GTK+ widget toolkit is now available. Fixes gif/gdk-pixbuf and libtool-related bugs.

"Put an absolute beginner in front of a computer and he'll try to touch the screen to make things happen. The revolutionary thing about Microsoft's new tablet PC is that it transforms this wishful-thinking behavior into reality: You can write on its screen and the thing will respond! This is the stuff of science fiction, and it makes the tablet PC an unusually ambitious venture for Microsoft. It's just not a successful one." Rob Pegoraro tells it like it is for WashingtonPost.

Here's the latest about what the OpenOffice Project is up to for language support, new platforms and development partnerships.

"Sun's Desktop strategy - "Project Madhatter" - is taking shape and it dominated questions from the floor at an analyst session in San Francisco today. In charge of Madhatter is Curtis Sasaki - Sun's VP of Desktop Software - who was at Apple at the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984, led the IIGS project and then followed Steve Jobs to NeXT where he spent several years. More from Curtis in a moment. Read the story at TheRegister.

"In Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel A fire upon the deep, he presents the idea of “software archeology”. Vinge’s future has software engineers spending large amounts of time digging through layers of decades-old code in a computer system — like layers of dirt and rubbish in real-world archeology — to find out how, or why, something works." Good stuff over there from UI designer Matthew "mpt" Thomas.

Slashdoters discuss today the possibility of people finding MacOSX slow in general (regardless of hardware) or not. What do you think, is the whole MacOSX 10.2.x experience slower than other modern operating systems, generally speaking? Let's allow users to vote and decide over this!

PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released to manufacturing. They'll add fun and functionality to your Tablet PC experience. Microsoft also released the Office XP Pack for Tablet PC. In the meantime, ZDNet published a 3-page article regarding Tablet PC: "What will it do for you"?

"Palladium is not secure Windows. Not exactly. Nor is it a standalone OS. Not exactly. Manferdelli presents it as a sort of parallel OS that is securely ringfenced from Windows, but which doesn't run all the time, and which actually you wouldn't want to run all the time. It works like this..." Read the rest of the article at TheRegister.

"What a mess. Less than a week after a court-approved deal ends the antitrust case, Microsoft's back in the spotlight. The latest Halloween memo portrays your company as utterly obsessed with the open-source software movement but utterly confused about how best to proceed. I can only imagine the state of confusion. Microsoft has tried to persuade developers and users for the last four years that there's no there there--and to no avail." Read the editorial at ZDNet. In the meantime, Business 2.0 posted a story called "Fighting Microsoft the Open-Source Way": Apple, IBM, and Sun have opened up their software code to the public in their battle against Redmond. It just might work. And here is another, interesting, editorial about the DOJ settlement. Update: Another one at PCWorld.com.

"New in build 61: branded hwprobe; removed "unverified" from rlsysinfo; minor khelpcenter update; changed kicker clock applet type to plain, without date; minor mozilla update; upgraded NVidia drivers and rebuilt additional kernel modules; made printk default to level 6; fixed minor adduser bug; added more sdx1 and sdx4 entries; removed rmmod -a from crontab; added change the system password entry in control center; upgraded ghostscript to espgw 7.05.4, less to build 378, libdvdcss to 1.2.3, modutils to 2.4.21, PCMCIA to 3.2.1, util-linux to 2.11x and finished the unattended installer." Download the ISO of Lycoris and report some bugs.

"The release of a production version of the free GNU operating system (OS) has been delayed beyond the end of the year, as the current development version of the system does not support large disk partitions and high speed serial I/O (input-output), according to Richard Stallman, president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF)." Read about Hurd at LinuxWorld.au.