Microsoft is now planning to launch Windows 8 on October of this year which is exactly 3 years after the launch of Windows 7. The software giant will not be only launching the version for PCs on that month but also its new version for ARM powered devices such as tablets.

Following the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview last week that immediately resulted to over a million downloads in the first 24 hours of going live, Microsoft’s next version of its operating system has now been discovered to have a total of nine SKUs.

Microsoft has announced the availability of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Available versions are 32-bit and 64-bit for x86 / x64 based hardware while current available languages include English, French, German, Japanese and simplified Chinese.

VideoLAN has now released the biggest update for the swiss army knife of all multimedia players, VLC. The popular multimedia software has now reached version 2.0 and is dubbed as “Twoflower”, bringing with it a new rewritten core that enhances performance significantly on today’s modern CPU and GPUs.

Mozilla, the company behind your favorite Firefox browser has now revealed to the public the Gaia UI interface that will be used for the Boot to Gecko mobile OS that the company announced last year. The OS will be deployed to mobile devices in order for Mozilla to infiltrate the market that is increasingly being dominated by the Android OS.

According to Taiwan-based supply chains, Google is planning to release Android 5.0 codenamed ‘Jelly Bean’ in the second quarter of this year. Jelly Bean is the the successor to the Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ operating system that seemed to have fallen short of Google’s expectations, with only 1 percent of Android devices running the OS as of February 1, 2012.

Symantec’s source code for its pcAnywhere and Norton Antivirus tools software has been taken by a group of hackers who claims they are part of the hacktivist group, Anonymous. The source code has been in the hands of the hackers for some time now and is believed to have been taken as early as 2006 when the servers of the Indian Military Intelligence were breached.

The developers of Windows at Microsoft have provided the first details about the new file system which will be introduce with the upcoming Windows 8 operating system. The new file system goes by the name of ReFS short for Resilient File System which according to its developers is built on the foundations of NTFS therefore maintaining great compatibility while being also engineered to take advantage of the new storage technologies now available.

Steam is undoubtedly the largest digital game distribution platform right now but until last year when it was finally launched for Mac, it was only available for the Windows operating system. Now a new rumor is spreading that the expansion of the platform will cover Linux soon as Valve is now seen posting a job listing for a Senior Software Engineer who can port Windows-based games to Linux.

Clement Lefebvre, the mind behind the increasingly becoming popular Linux Mint operating system, has recently released a new desktop environment that aims to act as a replacement for the GNOME 3 and other desktop environments for Linux, the Cinnamon desktop environment.

Last Week, Microsoft released a hotfix for their Windows operating system addressing the issue with AMD’s FX Bulldozer CPUs not being utilized to their full capabilities which we talked about in the earlier article. Now, Microsoft has pulled out that very patch from their servers because as it turns out, the hotfix was released prematurely thus led to majority of users who applied it to having reduced performance in their systems.

It seems the main culprit for AMD’s Bulldozer FX-series CPUs’ lack of performance is not the poor architecture of the chips but rather because of the Windows operating system not being able to fully take advantage of the features brought by the new CPUs such as Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling.

Microsoft's Antoine Leblond and Ted Dworkin have shed light on their company’s upcoming feature which is the Windows 8 app store. The feature is new to Microsoft but not to others such as Apple and Android. In fact, Microsoft used the app stores of both competitions as reference while carefully picking out what other features can be improved.

Ultimate Edition 3.0 Linux has been officially announced yesterday and contrary to earlier versions of the operating system being based on Ubuntu, the new release is now based on Linux Mint 11 (Katya) which itself is based on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narhwal).

Analysts have predicted that tablets will show an explosive growth in the coming years and that one of the biggest driving factors to it will be games that will utilize the constantly improving performance of the portable devices.

Microsoft is indeed putting much effort into its next major operating system even making sure that right from the installation process users will be able to tell that the new offering from the software giant is much user friendly and efficient.

Futuremark has announced the development of a new version of its popular game benchmarking software that now aims to provide gaming performance measurement and comparison across all Windows 8 devices from tablets, smartphones and notebooks to high-end desktop gaming systems.

Over the weekend, news broke that the Steam forums were hacked and now it seems the situation is worse than originally thought as new evidence suggests that hackers were also able to gain access to the Steam database that contains users' personal details, including credit card information, emails and passwords.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has expressed their plans for the Ubuntu operating system appearing in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices in the near future.

HP has introduced two new products that both feature 3D capabilities - the TouchSmart620 3D Edition PC which is an all-in-one home entertainment system and the 23-inch 2311GT LCD monitor that uses FPR (Film Patterned Retarder Technology) to display high quality images in 3D.

Gigabyte has released the LAN Optimizer Utility, a free software application that seeks to simplify the management of networks while providing intelligent and automatic prioritization of the most important task such as gaming, social media streaming, communications as well as web browsing.

For years scientist have been trying to crack the secret behind a certain AIDS protein and the process was being done with all the best minds from all over the world and with the help of supercomputers but a recent report has revealed how the right structure that has been very elusive for so long has been finally determined with the help online video gamers.

LucidLogix has showcased its HyperFormance technology being integrated into its Virtu Universal GPU virtualization software and along with it has promised to bring with this setup a faster, more responsive and a visually enhanced gaming experience.

Microsoft has made available for download through its MSDN server the Developer Preview Build of its next operating system set to replace the highly successful Windows 7.

Windows 8 developers has added a nifty feature into the next iteration of Microsoft’s most used operating system and it’s not the traditional eye candy stuff like aero effects and artful wallpapers but rather, the ability to mount both ISO and Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files right out of the box eliminating the need for any third party software like Daemon Tools, PowerISO and VMWare just to name some.