pshuke writes "After 15 years of development, Wine version 1.0 has been released. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. While perfect windows compatibility has not yet been achieved, full support for Photoshop CS2, Excel Viewer 2003, Word Viewer 2003 and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 have been among the goals prior to the release. For further information about supported applications, head over to the appdb. Get it (source) while it's hot."

unkgoon writes "The Mozilla Developer News blog is reporting Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, June 17, 2008, and you're invited to the party! From the website: 'After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we're proud to announce that we're ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.'" Update: 06/12 17:44 GMT by T : Dan100 was among several readers to write with news that, rather than just being announced, "Opera 9.5 has been released today after nearly two years of development. New features include increased speed (particularly in the Javascript engine), Opera Link (browser synchronisation), and a 'sharp' new theme." Dan100 also links to a full changelog from 9.27.

schliz alerts us that ISO, in response to the four appeals (Venezuela, India, Brazil, South Africa) filed in recent weeks, has put the OOXML standardization process on hold. Here is ISO's press release, which says that ISO/IEC DIS 29500 will not be published for at least "several months" while the appeals process goes forward.
Update: 06/11 10:13 GMT by KD : Reader Alsee points out that the fourth officially recognized appealing country is Venezuela, not Denmark as originally stated. The protests of Denmark and Norway are being disregarded, as they do not come from the administrative heads of their national organizations.

Ian Lamont writes "Bill Gates, in an address to the TechEd Developers conference, talked about Microsoft's plans for hosted services, and revealed that the company is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' that will apparently enable the company to offer all of its server-based products over the Internet. The talk did not include details in terms of capacity or scale. This was Gates's final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee, and he acknowledged that Microsoft's success is 'due to our relationship with developers.' On July 1, he will start spending most of his time at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Microsoft.

An anonymous reader recommends a story about the upcoming beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. InternetNews expects that the standards-compliant default mode will push many developers to update their sites. We've previously discussed IE8's standards compliance and other features. Quoting: "Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE -- most recently, the current commercial release, IE7. Now those pages will need to be changed. Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards. That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

kgamiel writes "The Obama campaign's CTO is hiring LAMP-biased geeks for the Boston office to help elect the Senator in the fall. This got me to wondering, what if he instead announced a SourceForge project toward the same end? What would such a project look like? Tools that both sides could use 'equally' would not achieve the desired end. And philosophically, could the Open Source community support one side in a competition such as this? What other issues does this raise?" Another reader notes that the Obama campaign is also searching for a security expert to plug the holes that allowed a hacker to redirect Obama's site (Linux/Apache hosted by GoDaddy) to Hillary Clinton's (Windows/IIS hosted by Rackspace).

An anonymous reader writes "Information scientists organized by the US's NIST say they will create a "concept bank" that programmers can use to build thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the frontiers of knowledge — from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine. The agreement by ontologists — experts in word meanings and in using appropriate words to build actionable machine commands — outlines the critical functions of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR). More on the summit that produced the agreement here."

Thomas Nybergh writes "Due to an appeal court decision from a couple of days back, breaking the not-very-effective CSS copy protection used on most commercial DVD-Video discs is now a criminal act in Finland (robo translated). The verdict is contrary to what a district court thought of the same case last year when two local electronic rights activists were declared not guilty after having framed themselves by spreading information on how to break CSS. Back then, it was to the activists' benefit has CSS been badly broken and inneffective ever since DeCSS came out."