On Feb. 15, Microsoft will release to testers first beta releases of three Office Live small-business subscription services. Office Live is a family of add-on services designed to complement Microsoft Office, the same way that the growing stable of Windows Live services will extend Microsoft Windows. The LiveSide.Net Web site on Feb. 13 posted details on Office Live Beta 1's availability, as well as some screen shots of the pending Office Live beta releases. The Office Live beta bits will be downloadable by testers starting at 6 a.m. PST Feb. 15, Microsoft officials said.

As one can already see by the activity of the mailing lists, Haiku seems to be moving forward in a serious pace. Studio-33 takes a look at the latest build (many screenshots included, boys and girls), and concludes: "I was pretty impressed by this build. Deskbar and espacially Tracker seemed much more stable and Haiku didn't crash every four or five minutes like previous builds I tested. Work on Haiku seems to go pretty fast lately and more and more pieces are getting finished. Offcourse Haiku still needs a lot of work to become somewhat useable, but it is definately going in the right direction."

"Every time I've ever spoken with Mark about DLS to ask him if Ubuntu would come to the show and participate, he says the same thing - Ubuntu is hesitant to come to 'The Linspire show'. Now, Mark has never actually been to the Desktop Linux Summit personally, and try as I have to explain to him the history of the show, I can tell he's just not buying it - it seems that there is nothing I can say to change his view that the Summit is and has always been a 'Linspire show'. If Mark Shuttleworth is misinformed, I'm sure others are misinformed as well. So, rather than dodge the controversy that arose four years ago during the birth of the first DLS, I would like to address it head on."

"Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking graphics development environment that allows you to explore the incredible power of the graphics stack of Mac OS X Tiger. This article introduces you to Quartz Composer, walks you through a simple sample composition and provides a hands-on exploration to familiarize you with the way you can use it in your own projects. Once you start working with Quartz Composer, you may think of your projects in new ways, and find many more uses for its power and speed."

"Today, we're making the first source code of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community. There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. Because we don't believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the development process, and now this project can open its doors to that kind of participation. We wanted to start the conversation with working code. So we have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0."

"Nearly two years ago Microsoft announced that Windows Vista would sport a so-called 'tiered' graphical experience. The user interface would remain the essentially the same no matter what graphical prowess a machine was blessed with, but the best of the eye-candy and the whiz-bang effects would be reserved for the most modern of computers. While Microsoft has not put the official seal of **CONFIRMED** on any recommended hardware configurations, we have a good idea of what the company will consider as the base for the full-flavored, full-bodied Aero Glass experience."