Sony's PlayStation3 metaverse Home that was unveiled over a year ago is finally approaching the beta phase, and subscribers to Sony's online magazine Qore are receiving the first keys outside of private beta to test the service.

In March 2007, when Home was officially unveiled, a large-scale beta was expected to take place "in April prior to the final launch." Then, at the Tokyo Game Show six months later, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kazuo Hirai announced the service would be delayed until spring.

Giving a nod to developers who've apparently given a lot of feedback, as well as "certain commercials," Microsoft's platform chief Steven Sinofsky acknowledged that perhaps User Account Control in Windows Vista may have been...a little annoying. In turn, Windows 7 has additional UAC settings.

"We got a lot of feedback about Windows Vista," Sinofsky said, before pausing several seconds for the inevitable developer response. Given the vast amount of response he received, he said, "We have to do what developers do." That is, to sit back, re-evaluate, and say, "What did we learn from that?" That, he said, is what engineering is about.

The 3.0 version announced today enhances secure connectivity, with Wi-Fi integration, USB support, SSL and support for a FAT32-compatible file system. Both touch and gesture support has been added to user interface options.

The .NET Micro Framework is designed for embedded systems, extending the .NET platform to handheld devices and smaller. Developers working with .NET MF can utilize higher level programming languages to control resource-limited devices.

After another long, lofty, and philosophy-laden introduction from Microsoft's Ray Ozzie this morning, the #1 new feature being discussed in the "cleaned up" Windows 7 is improved file and application access.

The rethought Windows 7 taskbar, while not exactly like the dock in Mac OS X, certainly borrows some inspiration from it. Based on the early demonstrations given by Julie Larson-Green this morning, we're seeing a kind of sliding dock that is just as tall as the current taskbar, but which omits the text to the right of icons. The identities of running programs or active documents is ascertained by moving the mouse pointer over the icon.

Day two of PDC 2008 begins this morning with a keynote address featuring Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell. The focus of today will be Windows 7 and the introduction of new user experiences in Windows. The next release of Windows Server 2008 will also be discussed.

We will be live-blogging the keynote as it takes place. Refresh this page for updates.

After nearly four years, you'd think the PopCap crew would feel good about kicking up their heels at the release of Bejeweled Twist, the third version of their iconic casual game.

But CEO Dave Roberts seemed a bit abashed Monday night, even as a flock of spangled trapeze artists prepared to loft themselves high above a launch-party crowd.

Love that giant touch-sensitive electoral map on MSNBC? Want one of your very own (or have a better idea)? Developers at PDC are readying their multitouch mojo as Microsoft today released the software development kit for the Surface interface.

It's a long way from a hacked Ikea table to parody on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, but here we are. The project presented to Bill Gates in prototype form back in 2003 is already in use on a few early deployments, but distribution of the SDK to up to 1,000 developers signals that the Vista-based platform is ready to expand considerably, with consumer-app availability likely within 3-5 years.

Monday morning in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie took his time unveiling his company's gamble to dominate a field of computing where it has actually fared third-place, or worse.

For over two years, a team of senior Microsoft executives stayed mostly out of the public view, working on something that was sometimes strangely called the "Windows Core." Some rightly guessed it was the company's services platform for cloud computing, though it was still a matter of speculation how that would work, or what it would consist of.

BetaNews sat down Monday afternoon with Amitabh Srivastava, the corporate vice president and distinguished engineer who heads up Windows Azure, to find out more details on Microsoft's new operating system for the cloud.

At Day 1 of PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, attendees got their first look at a technology Microsoft introduced earlier this month into beta: a new way for building reformed Web applications.

The Web site StackOverflow.com is the latest example of a fully operational Web site, running today out of beta, using a technology from Microsoft that is still in beta: ASP.NET MVC, the new compartmentalization model for content-driven Web site programming.

Microsoft announced on Monday that the company's Windows Live ID will support the OpenID digital identity framework, releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) at this week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The CTP allows relying-party sites and the developers of relying-party libraries to test their setups against the Windows Live ID OpenID provider endpoint. Testing now will help them to knock out bugs before the system goes live, most likely sometime next year.

Canonical today announced that the 8.10 version of its popular Linux distribution Ubuntu will be available for free download on Thursday, October 30.

Both the desktop and server editions of Ubuntu 8.10 will be available for download on the official Web Site, and on FileForum.

Twitter may make Army Intelligence nervous, but examples of two current online efforts by the Air Force and Coast Guard show that tech remains value-neutral, and vital to American military interests.

The news over the weekend that the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion worries that Twitter has become "a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences" induced a certain amount of eye-rolling around the Web. The Federation of American Scientists, which posted a PDF of the report on its site (PDF available here), snarked that Twitter was thus comparable to credit cards and can openers.

Although PDC 2008 attendees won't receive Windows 7 Milestone 3 build 6801 until Tuesday, Microsoft has already issued a security patch for the pre-beta version of Vista's successor. This early version of Windows 7 is quite similar to Vista, and will likely require the same security fixes.

"A security issue has been identified that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it," Microsoft says on the download page. x86, x64 and Itanium versions of the patch are available.

Interest in how Microsoft would deploy an extension of the .NET Framework called Dublin in the cloud exceeded anyone's expectations today, as thousands of attendees literally spilled over into a spare room to watch the first Dublin demos on video.

Dublin is, as was already known prior to today, Microsoft's platform for extending .NET services as distributed architecture; but now we know that Dublin will be used for deploying custom .NET applications on Windows Azure. This afternoon, the company's Jacob Avital and Mauricio Ordonez performed live demonstrations of how a cloud-based .NET would asynchronously capture customer-generated events over the Web, respond to those events with code, and report on the results.