To date, with its Genuine Advantage anti-piracy programs, Microsoft has targeted consumers. Windows and Office users have been required to validate their products as 'genuine before being able to obtain many downloads and add-ons. Come this fall, however, the software maker is planning to turn up the Genuine Advantage heat in two ways: by baking more Genuine Advantage checks directly into Windows Vista, and by taking aim at PC makers, system builders, Internet cafes and other sources of potentially pirated software.

"All of you who are reading this article right now are doing so with the help of an operating system. Of course, if you're reading it on paper, then that you may not think that that's the case, although it had to be printed by a printer that was connected to a computer which was operated by an operating system, right? In a way, it's like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. When you get right down to it, operating systems are a major part of our connected lives since something is needed to manage and execute all of the actions that take place on the electronic devices that we love oh so very much."

With Automator, users can graphically assemble Actions - self-contained modules that perform a single task - into a Workflow to create a collection of Actions that complete a larger task. This Automator functionality is also available to developers for automating workflow in software development projects. This article shows you how to streamline some of the tasks you face in development projects by writing custom Shell Actions and Workflows.

Lars Wirzenius wondered how usable Debian with GNOME is for the uninitiated, or more specifically, for someone who has been using Windows for a number of years, and switches to Debian. The experiment will continue for a couple of months. The first use went pretty well, with only a couple of real problems which he outlined.

In the effort of maintaining Mac market dominance, Parallels virtualization firm already started a new beta cycle of its popular Desktop and reveals virtualization.info a major product: Parallels Server for Mac OS. In the meantime Microsoft killed its Mac VirtualPC and VMWare announced its new Mac product.

Some tidbits on Haiku/BeOS again, today: "Michael Lotz has posted to his blog about the status of USB on Haiku. Michael, who took over working on the USB stack from Niels Reedijk, has got it to the stage where he can now use his USB mouse under Haiku, albeit only temporarily before memory leaks take it down. He states the core stack is around 80% completed, with the UHCI driver around 75% of the way - lacking support only for isochronous transfers." Also, Pe 2.4 has been released to BeBits.