Charles Torre again sits down with some of the people behind MSR's Singularity research OS. This time, they drill down into the architecture of Singularity and discuss design decisions, usage of safe code, Channels, SIPs, etc. They even manage to get Galen Hunt, the OS Guy, up to the white board to map out some of Singularity's architecture.

Surendra Verma, Development Manager on the Vista Kernel team, digs into Vista's new Transactional File System with Charles Torre. TxF, as it is referred to internally, is a new kernel construct that is part of an updated Vista NTFS. Surendra provides a high level overview of TxF in this video. Elsewhere, Microsoft is serious about meeting its ship date for Windows Vista during the second half of 2006.

"Office has enough irritations and 'secret' functions to fill a dozen thick books. For this story, we've selected some of the most notorious problems and the most useful tricks that we've discovered in our years of wrestling - or dancing - with the suite."

"All in all, SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS is the best Linux system I've used. It's easy to install and has a large selection of both desktop and server software. It has been extremely stable during my use. It is clearly an excellent choice for Linux beginners, with its fine documentation, easy installation, and comprehensive graphical configuration tools, while also offering software selection and powerful tools for the experienced user."

Apache HTTP server 2.2.0 has been released. This version of Apache is a major release and the start of a new stable branch. New features include Smart Filtering, Improved Caching, AJP Proxy, Proxy Load Balancing, Graceful Shutdown support, Large File Support, the Event MPM, and refactored Authentication/Authorization.

Is Apple planning to unveil a robust new content distribution system in January at Macworld Expo alongside its revamped media-savvy Mac mini? apparantly Think Secret believes they are going to do just that. The new content system and related media deals, which will include feature-length content, expanded televisions offerings, and more, will further cement Apple's increasing lead in digital media delivery.Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into.

When Lerone Wilson saw the ad for a director interested in doing a film on software development, he was skeptical, to say the least. Wilson's resulting "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks," the story of intern programmers at New York-based Fog Creek Software creating a product from scratch to shipping, is now finished, one of the first films to delve wholly into the life and culture of coding.

This edition covers: writing custom widgets using GTK+ 2.8, a closer look at GnomeMeeting, and includes an interview discussing the a recent 5,000 Gnome desktop deployment.

Microsoft is working on a significant new feature for Windows Vista, known as Restart Manager, which is designed to update parts of the operating system or applications without having to reboot the entire machine. "If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot." And here & here are some more shots of Vista build 5259.

Improvements to Spotlight searches, AirPort, Bluetooth, and RAW camera support are a few enhancements Apple reportedly has planned for an early winter release of Mac OS X 10.4.4 Update, a routine maintenance update to the Mac OS X Tiger operating system.

"We are pleased to announce the release of Fedora Directory Server 1.0! This version fulfills the promise to open all of the directory server source code that we made almost 1 year ago - 12/8/2004 - the date at which Red Hat acquired the code. Here are some Screenshots."

The FreeBSD Foundation received a donation of a blade system from Hewlett-Packard for use as a third-party software build cluster. This 20-node HP BladeSystem cluster triples the speed of the build process for i386 packages.

Scala is a modern multi-paradigm programming language running on top of a Java VM or .NET runtime. Recently version 1.4.0.3 has been released. Scala smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. In Scala, every value is an object and the language supports OOP for instance via subclassing , traits, and mixins. Scala is also a functional language in the sense that every function is a value. The language supports anonymous, higher-order and nested functions as well as currying. There is also integrated support for pattern matching, parametric polymorphism, etc.

"Recently, I got hold of a book named Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning (Tips and Techniques) by Steve Best. The book positions itself as a programmers guide to debugging and ways of increasing the performance of the programs that you write. The book explores the various tools that a programmer can access to iron out the bugs that crop up in the programs that he writes."