The December CTP of Windows Vista has been released. ActiveWin has published screenshots, and a list of features, of the latest CTP of Windows Vista. Key areas of improvement in this CTP are security (Windows Defender, parental control, enhanced firewall, control over installation of device drivers, and more), performance, power state transitions, and the user interface ("evidence of Aero's progress in the December CTP includes the translucent 'glass' appearance of open windows, smoother transitions between windows and a re-designed start menu").

"Due to the recent upgrade of gcc and the subsequent full rebuild of everything that gets built with gcc, including java stuff with gcj, and the need to further test package selection windows in Anaconda, system-config-packages for upgrades, and the development tree in general once we settle down the rebuilds, we have decided to delay test2. Here is a new schedule that we will be working toward."

"Apple really is is the better way, but why? No, not for the trendy industrial design, not for the OS, not for the CPU, but for the money. It charges quite a bit, but it is not the 'reassuringly expensive' factor either, the price/performance is nothing to brag about. What makes Apple better is quite simply the fact that it doesn't compete."

Fresh from attending the Manchester leg of this year's Christmas RISC OS roadshow, David Llewellyn-Jones reports on the developments and products he saw on display yesterday evening. "It seemed like a good event with what could be described as a good atmosphere. The room was quite small - apparently smaller than the usual Birmingham venue - so that it was quite cramped with all of the exhibitors present. It was difficult to get a feel for the number of people attending, and I hesitate to speculate. You can get an idea of how busy it was from the photos below. There was a list for visitors to fill in and sign on arrival, so presumably RISCOS Ltd have a relatively accurate figure."

"This is an in-depth look at fish, the friendly interactive shell. Fish is a GPLed commandline shell, written for Linux and other Posix-like systems. I felt there was a need for this article after all the attention that has been given to Monad, Microsoft's upcoming shell. Unlike Monad, fish is not a new way to look at the shell concept. Fish is based on the same ideas as other Unix shells like bash and zsh, but contains many user interface improvements and makes shellscript into a proper programming language."

"There is a lot of confusing information about the GNU/Linux operating system, open source and free software, and related issues in the press today. Many of these technologies and concepts are difficult to understand because they deviate from the standard historical traditions of the software industry. There are also a number of sponsored reports and other corporate propaganda published around the Web that smear the image of Linux and free software. In the interest of making a few basic concepts clear, this article will bring light to the darkness perpetuated by uninformed journalists, campaigning CEOs, and misleading advertisements."

"The Power Mac G5 Quad is, simply, the most powerful Mac workstation to date. Offering four 64-bit 2.5 GHz processors (in a dual dual-core configuration), this top of the line system also sports numerous other improvements in architecture and various components, such as dual independent gigabit Ethernet interfaces, PCI Express and support for the workstation-class Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 512 MB graphics card."

Microsoft is crafting a tool dubbed LUA Buglight that will call out potential software conflicts with a security feature in Windows Vista, related to the new Least User Access, or LUA that lets people run the operating system with fewer user privileges.

David Kanter has just written an article on IBM's eCLipz project, the upcoming POWER6 MPU and its performance characteristics. The eCLipz project is aimed at sharing hardware between IBM's UNIX, OS/400 and mainframe servers; the POWER6 is just one element of this project. The article discusses the microarchitecture of IBM's POWER6 which is due out in 2007, and provides performance estimates for SPEC CPU 2000.

Adam Leventhal (one of the DTrace developers) was in volved in making DTrace work for BrandZ. He's written a blog entry on using this combination to have a look at the "top issue" (why is it that whenever you run top, the top process is top?). The blog entry shows how using DTrace and OpenSolaris (the only way that you can currently d BrandZ), can be of benefit to Linux.

Channel9 met with Bill Hill and the ClearType team again and see what's the latest with the fonts in Windows Vista. They talk about trends in display resolution, research done in aesthetics and quite a few other things.

"I've received several emails and seen several articles asking whether any eventual decision by Massachusetts to approve two different document standards (e.g., Microsoft's XML Reference Schema (XMLRS) as well as the OASIS OpenDocument Format) would be a serious blow to the goal of achieving long-term access to documents. The quick answer is that this is not a binary situation, because there are different types of standards that serve different purposes, as well as different situations that have different dynamics."

This chapter covers several methods to measure execution time and real-time performance. The methods give different types of granularity, from the program’s complete execution time to how long each function in the program takes.

Without much ado, the FreeSBIE team has released a beta of their upcoming version 2. "You can download the beta from the torrent. You can log in as user 'freesbie' (no password) and try 'startxfce4' or 'startfluxbox'. You won't find the preconfigured menus and settings as Dave's still working on them, but you can run `openoffice.org' from a terminal. All you readers are strongly welcome if you can give it a test and report feedback, we are working hard for the new release." Note: Let's try not to get knickers in a twist over the icon this time, shall we?