"WinFS has been officially pulled out of Microsoft's road map for products and services - permanently. People all around the web are shocked and complaining. But the thing is: who didn't expect this? Although no one came out and said it directly, no one spoke of WinFS except as a distant memory, it was quite obvious that people didn't buy Microsoft's story of it shipping separately. If people believed, the shock and outrage today would be ten times as big as it was when the LH project was rebooted and WinFS torn out with the strings still hanging. But the question many people are asking these long years later is: what is WinFS anyway? And what's the big deal if everyone already knew it wasn't coming?"

AndandTech, in its usual in-depth fashion (14 pages), reviewed Windows Vista Beta 2. Their conclusions are grouped per competitor-- the MacOS and XP. On Tiger: "However, even with the massive improvements Microsoft has shown with Vista, we still feel they aren't quite ready to beat Tiger in a fight." When comparing to XP: "Feature for feature, Vista is superior to XP, and its only real costs are memory usage, hard drive usage, and price." In the meantime, Microsoft has released a new build of Vista. Update: Screencast of Beta 2.

"The inventor of the WWW has a short, to-the-point post that explains exactly why supporting real, bona fide net neutrality is the Right Thing to Do. I absolutely encourage you to read the entire post, but really he sums up the whole argument for net neutrality in his opening sentence: 'When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission.' If you think about it in terms of start-ups having to ask the permission of AT&T to innovate, then the whole net neutrality issue becomes less complicated."

"Wondering what the future holds for Apache Geronimo? You've come to the right article in this series. In this installment, the renegade will explore what's in the proverbial cards for Geronimo, including where the developers of Geronimo are taking the project, the important new features, and the improvements. Follow along, and you might be there with them for the unveiling of the next version of Apache Geronimo."

"All software has security defects," insists Michael Howard, senior security program manager at Microsoft. "You either do something about it, or you don't." In the past few years, Microsoft has learned to write more secure code. In a session given at last week's TechEd conference, Howard explained some of the lessons that the company has learned in developing its Security Development Lifecycle, and shared advice for developers who want to improve the quality of their own code.

"It is time yet again where the next Fedora Core installment (this time, Core 6) begins to grab the attention of red-hat-wearing penguins and other GNU/Linux enthusiasts. Yesterday was the inaugural test release of Fedora Core 6, which is targeted at die-hard Fedorians, and any other users wishing to get a glimpse at what Fedora Core 6 will hold in store." Read more here.