Late last Friday Microsoft extended the deadline for the public beta of its next-generation desktop operating system, Windows 7, perhaps because it hasn't hit its 2.5 million download bogie although it claims to have enough feedback to meet its engineering needs. It says it doesn't want anyone to miss out.

Access is now supposed to close on February 10.

Meanwhile, there's a near-final release candidate of Internet Explorer 8, the tardy next version of Microsoft's web browser.

It's supposed to comply better with web-development standards like RSS and CSS, crash less and include new features like Web Slices and Activities.

Users can use Web Slices to subscribe to pages or parts of web sites and track them (like for updates) from tiles on the browser's menu bar at the top of the page. Activities should let users right-click on web pages and access, say, maps from inside the web site they're surfing, without additional code or add-ins.