Because of Ubuntu's big release tomorrow, a review of the latest release candidate. It concludes: "To sum up my experience with Ubuntu’s Dapper I will say that it is easily the most impressive Linux distribution I have used to date. The combination of speed, stability, ease of use and the excellant apt-get package manager, makes it the Linux distro to beat. The 5 years of upgrades is another incentive to try out Dapper as well. This would be the first time I would recommend a Linux distro to any computer user (including Windows users) and feel confident they would like the system, as well as be able to use the system proficiently shortly after testing out the system."

Thiago Macieira says in his blog: "With commit 546830, KDE says good-bye to one of its longest friends: DCOP. The technology has served us well for 6 years, to the point that has become one of our most proeminent features." From now on, the KDE 4 tree will use DBUS. Due to the very extensive use of DCOP in KDE, this is a big jump for DBUS, "probably bring more applications into D-BUS in one go than there currently are".

"In the previous article in this series, you discovered a whole world of messages that the .NET Framework doesn't even capture. These messages can signal all kinds of events, request changes, and even can end your application. Unfortunately, the techniques described in that article only work for messages that the CLR passes to your application. Sometimes, you want to track messages that the CLR doesn't support."

When it comes to Windows Vista, there are bugs - and then there are bugs. There is no doubt that people will find glitches in Beta 2 of the oft-delayed operating system. The question is whether there are any show-stoppers. Microsoft has time to squish some bugs, but it needs to avoid any significant headaches, if it is to make its revised goal of finishing the code by November and launching the product in January. In the meantime, ExtremeTech tests Vista's gaming performance.

"Flow control is usually straightforward: sequence, selection, iteration. And many programmers, having been raised on these primary control structures, have a difficult time seeing what other kinds of flow control might be necessary. This article introduces continuations and teaches you to think about flow control in radically new ways."

"Linux is at risk of suffering a similar fate to that suffered by Unix. That risk is the danger of splintering into multiple distributions, each of which is sufficiently dissimilar to the others that applications must be ported to each distribution. The bad news is that the rapid proliferation of Linux distributions makes this a real possibility. The good news is that it doesn't have to, because a layer of standards called the Linux Standard Base has already been created, through an organization called the Free Standards Group, that allows ISVs to build to a single standard, and know that their applications will run across all compliant distributions. And happily, all of the major distributions have agreed to comply with LSB 3.1."