"Microsoft has tried to radically change the design philosophy behind its office suites from 2003 to office 12. The difference between the interface of Office 12 and Office 11 (2003) is nothing short of staggering. The attempt has been to enhance the user’s ability to actually get to the function he wants to use quickly and without getting lost in the labyrinth of toolbars and menus." You can find info on beta testing Office 12 here. In related news, the slides from the PDC presentations are now available for download.

This article outlines the designing and building of a Mini-ITX computer which runs off of a USB flash drive. The designer's goal was to build a system which was silent and as simple as possible. In the end it was little more than a USB drive, a VIA motherboard, and a case. Puppy Linux was used for an operating system due to its light weight and ability to boot off of a USB drive.

You're ready to be a card-carrying Linux geek, but with several different Linux distributions available, you don't know where to start. Which one offers the best balance of tools, performance, and price? Bryan Hoff takes you through the most popular Linux distros and introduces you to a brave new world without Windows.

At the PDC last week, Microsoft announced Windows Workflow Foundation as a key component of WinFX in conjunction with Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. This chapter describes the motivation behind Windows Workflow Foundation and provides an overview of its features

"From its humble origins in the 'hacker' culture of US computer science laboratories in the 1970s, open source software has grown to become arguably the most influential and talked about phenomenon to hit the computer industry since the invention of the microprocessor. Many of the proponents of OSS seem to have been captivated by the idea of a free lunch and may have failed to consider the longer-term effect of OSS on our fragile software ecosystem. Let us examine some of the issues surrounding OSS that aren't normally aired in public."

LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query and in a nutshell, it makes query and set operations, like SQL statements, first class citizens in .NET languages. Watch an interview about LINQ here.

"Wish to learn about C++ programming for Symbian devices? My site is a tutorial in form of a blog. Also with a more traditional tutorial that collects and organize the content of the blog."

A recent blog post on ZDNet contends that Firefox is not as secure as promised by counting exploits. Joseph Huang contends that severity and the number of unpatched vulnerabilites matters, not just the number of exploits discovered.

"Every now and again I like to spend a while becoming really familiar with the various tools which I use frequently. This week I spent several hours experimenting with the various paging applications available to Debian users. Here is my guide to the common pagers, and what they can do."

Palm opened its first retail store in the Bay Area this week (Stanford, Palo Alto). OSNews was there today and we are sharing our quick look at it via pictures, here and here.

"Now that Firefox has become the first viable contender to Internet Explorer in years, its popularity has brought with it some unwanted attention. Last week's premature disclosure of a zero-day Firefox exploit came a few weeks after a zero-day exploit for Internet Explorer appeared on the Internet. Firefox not only has more vulnerabilities per month than Internet Explorer, but it is now surpassing Internet Explorer for the number of exploits available for public download in recent months." Note: Read this article, and especially the update, carefully before commenting.

Mandriva Linux 2006 RC2 has been released. You can read the release notes here, download locations are underneath the release notes. This will be the last RC before 2006 goes final.

The BSD Certification Group are running a new survey: the BSD Usage Survey. This survey aims to collect detailed statistics on how and where BSD systems are used around the world. The survey is short - only 19 questions - and should only take a few minutes to complete.

"There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's a topic of public concern and a "safe issue" for politicians, we can expect a flood of computer security-related legislation from lawmakers. So: computer security is definitely still a "hot topic." But why are we spending all this time and money and still having problems?"