beta release

As a casual aside, while discussing the future of the tiletastic Windows Store, a Microsoft vice president announced that the Windows 8 beta would begin in late February 2012.

The beta will be feature-complete and will allow developers to begin listing their apps in the Store.

The PHP.net site has a new announcement about the latest version of the language in the PHP 5.4.x series - beta 2 has been released for testing.

Datamation: With the beta release, we can start to judge Unity as a mature product -- and the verdict is decidedly mixed.

Mozilla has issued a beta release of Firefox 6 with WebSockets and a number of other features. At the same time, a pre-release build of Firefox 7 has rolled into the Aurora channel with a much slimmer memory footprint.

iOS 5 beta 2 was released over the weekend, and already developers picking into it have spotted a number of new features and tweaks that didn’t exist in the previous version.

Most of the changes are minor, but the big one is that wireless syncing with iTunes has been enabled and is ready for testing.

Dr.Dobb's: "Open source management and governance company Black Duck Software has announced support for the beta release of the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) open source standard."

Thoughts on Technology: "Two months after our first release, the Bodhi Linux team and I are proud to announce our first ever beta release."

Around The Web: "Recently, Skype stopped working for me and some other users that are using the Beta release of Maverick (Ubuntu 10.10).

This error is due to an update to the ia32-libs library."

ars Technica: "Canonical has announced the availability of the Ubuntu 10.10 beta release. The new version of the popular Linux distribution, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, is scheduled for final release in October.

It brings some noteworthy user interface improvements and updated software."

Microsoft today announced the beta release of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.