"With today's release of the Windows Vista February CTP, Microsoft has publicly passed a key milestone on the road to launching its new operating system. This release of Vista is 'feature-complete', the company says, meaning that all of the fundamental capabilities that Vista will eventually offer are now baked in." Lots of screenshots included, so go ahead and praise halleluja or declare end of days, boys and girls.

"Parallels today announced the availability of Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta2. In addition to the numerous enhancements and new features included in Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta1, this upgraded version of Parallels' desktop virtualization solution includes a completely new user interface, faster virtual machine performance, better stability and stronger isolation, more advanced USB support that enables users to access a broader range of popular USB devices like cameras, flash drives and PDAs directly in virtual machines."

"What would happen if the beginning of file systems embedded a driver for accessing the disk? If the driver was in some sort of neutral format (similar to the X Windows drivers), then any OS could access the file system! While this concept was exciting in of itself, it didn't even begin to scratch the surface of what was possible. It wasn't long before I considered the fact that a file system is nothing more than a hierarchical database. There's nothing inherently special about it, so why can't the file system payload be replaced with some sort of other data? As long as the embedded driver can read the format and produce some sort of usable data structure, there's no reason why the concept could be extended for all types of data!"

This is your daily IT Lawsuit News Feeder. Groklaw reports that IBM has subpoenad Microsoft in its enduring legal battle with SCO. IBM is demanding Microsoft delivers all communications between Microsoft and SCO, since June 28th 2002, including conversations Darl McBride may have had with Steve Ballmer. But no worries, that ain't all! IBM, Red Hat, Sun, and Real have filed a complaint with the European Commission because Microsoft unfairly scotches competition. That was your daily IT Lawsuit News Feeder, end transmission.

Times Square has seen the largest Windows error message ever. One of the many machines controlling one of the many electronic billboards crashed, displaying a large DirectX error message. The billboard is two stories high. Adam Gaffin happened to be at Times Square and took some pictures of the world's largest error message.

"Apple special events are nothing new. The company will send out an invitation, rumor sites will post images of the invite, Mac users everywhere will speculate about what's going to happen and what Apple will announce, and on the day of the event, news sites faithfully report on the special event. Apple has just such an event planned for the last day of February, but with a twist: in invitations sent out to journalists, the company says journalists are invited to 'come see some fun new products from Apple' without giving hints as to what they might be."

Windows narrowly bumped Unix in 2005 to claim the top spot in server sales for the first time, according to a new report from IDC. Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report.

Java 5 generics provide information that's useful for many classworking applications. This article shows how the ASM Java bytecode manipulation framework offers flexible access to generics information without going through the Java classloading process. Along the way, It looks deeper into the representation of generics in the binary class format.

ReactOS released news today regarding the project's status, recent confusion and future development. The news item is slightly confusing in itself though, but the the gist is this: there is no code inside the ReactOS SVN repository that has been directly pasted from Windows source code. However, it might be that some people had access to Windows source code and used it as inspiration-- these developers should mark their code as 'dangerous', and these sections will then be audited by a 'clean' person. Currently, 15% has been audited and can be declared 'clean'.

Will Microsoft's forthcoming Vista OS support legacy applications written in VB6? Microsoft plans to answer that question in detail about a month from now, a timeframe that happens to coincide with the one-year anniversary of a petition from developers asking for better support of the traditional VB environment during the emerging .NET era. But for now, MS is willing to say that when Vista goes out the door, Microsoft will extend mainstream support for the VB6 runtime by another six or seven years, through the end of the Vista lifecycle. The same won't be true, however, for the VB6 development environment, which left mainstream support for extended support in mid-2005.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA2 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA2. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Download from one of the mirrors.

", we reported on a Trojan horse for Mac OS X that is just like the entry for Earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that it is mostly harmless. A new vulnerability targeted at Apple's home-grown web browser, Safari, is another matter entirely. A German security firm appears to have been the first to discover the Safari flaw, which allows for shell scripts to be executed after clicking a link."

Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes, but users of Apple's OS X platform could pay a hefty price if they continue to live in denial, industry observers have warned. The biggest security vulnerability could lie in the fact that OS X users aren't "trained" to monitor and identify social engineering tactics that have been used against Windows-based users for years. Mark Borrie, IT security manager at New Zealand's University of Otago, said although he hasn't experienced any infections, he's concerned at the ease in which social engineering can be used against the Mac community.

Scientists at IBM say they have figured out how to produce smaller and more powerful microchips than previously thought possible. It is hoped IBM's announcement at San Jose on Monday will mean the creation of miniscule microprocessors which will save the IT manufacturing sector billions of dollars. The breakthrough revolves around the distance between the circuit-lines chip makers must 'draw' onto the surface of a computer processor. IBM scientists declared they can now draw lines on silicon much closer together than ever before.