Microsoft Admits Some PCs Won’t Be Offered Vista SP1

"Right now, Windows Vista SP1 is supposed to be slowly winging its way out to 140 million Vista users, offering better general stability and improved copying performance (albeit perhaps not for dual boot users). After a protracted testing period, SP1 was made available for download in March, and was released for the Automatic Update service in mid-April, where it will in theory trickle down onto most Vista machines over the next few months. But just how many Vista users will actually ever receive it? Microsoft has admitted some users may never be offered the option to download SP1 via Windows Update.

Help Us Update Our OS Resources Page

A feature at OSNews for many years, the OS Resources page has been a popular reference for OS enthusiasts, but it hasn't been tended very much over the past couple of years, and it's in need of an update. While the OSNews staff will be working on making our own updates, we wanted to involve the readers, so we've set up an OS Resources Wiki to help with collaboration. Please "read more" if you'd like to help out.

Shuttleworth, Seigo Discuss Synchronised Release Cycles

Back in April 2008, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth pitched the idea of major open source projects synchronising their release cycles on a 6 month period. Projects like gcc, the Linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, as well as the distributions, would work out an acceptable release schedule. It would allow for easier collaboration between the various projects, and hardware vendors would be better able to support Linux since all major distributions would ship with the same kernel version.

It’s Time to Retire ‘Ready for the Desktop’

It's one of those catch phrases that never really seems to die out. Wherever you look in the operating systems world, at personal blogs written in crummy English, or at high-profile quality websites, there is bound to be someone, somewhere who used it. Even I, myself, used it in articles in a far and distant past, and I'm not particularly proud of it. "Ready for the desktop" is no longer acceptable - in fact, it's on its way out.

Where Is WinFS Now?

Back when Windows Vista was still known as Windows Longhorn, the operating system contained a very interesting and promising feature, a feature promoted as one of the 'pillars' of Longhorn: WinFS. WinFS was a storage subsystem for Windows, based on a relational database, that could contain whatever data you wanted to put in it. Thanks to the relational properties of the database, you could then create relationships between data, or let the computer do that for you.

Interview: Kevin Musick, BeServed; Haiku Code Drive 2008

BeOS (and Haiku) has a very powerful filesystem, thanks mostly to its extensive use of attributes and live queries to search through these attributes. In order to access these powerful features over a network, you need a network file system that also supports attributes and queries - cue BeServed, Kevin Musick's network file system. A few weeks ago, the code to BeServed was donated to the Haiku project as open source under a MIT license, so HaikuNews and OSNews decided to interview Kevin Musick together. In addition, Haiku launched the Haiku Code Drive 2008.

Fedora 9: an OS that Even the Linux Challenged Can Love

The Fedora team has clearly spent a lot of time trying to refine some of the smaller, but perhaps more common user interface elements in some thoughtful ways. Take, for instance, the new setting that allows you to manage power settings from the login screen. It's a small tweak but it makes shutting down simple. There's no need to login when you wake from hibernate - just shut down straight from the login screen. Similar attention to these basics can be found throughout the new release.

Wired vs Wireless: Sometimes There’s No Substitute for a Cable

In a June 2003 Wired Magazine interview, Martha Stewart said, "Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuff anymore." The article wasn't about networking, or even technology, but I was struck by that statement because it was echoed by several people when I was explaining that I was running many thousands of feet of cable in OSNews' "house of the future." "Is all that cable really necessary now that there's wireless everything?" people said. As much as I respect Martha Stewart's business and design acumen, neither she, nor those people who talked to me, know what they're talking about. When it comes to networking, there's no substitute for a wire, when a wire's available. -- This is the latest entry in our 2008 Article Contest.

The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces

Read Write Web has an interesting article on the concept of the contextual user interface. A contextual user interface - as the name implies - is an interface which adapts to the current wishes of its users, the context. The interface will change according to the actions the user takes; present a set of minimal options, and show other options as the user goes along. While the article makes some good points, it also contains some generalisations that I find rather debatable.

Introducing QGtkStyle

There is a group of consistency freaks out there (like myself) who are not very fond of mixing Gtk+ with Qt applications. The reasons for this are not just graphical, but also behavioural; Gtk+ applications behave differently than Qt applications (menus are different, layout is different, etc.). Trolltech obviously can't tackle the behavioural side of this issue, but they can tackle the graphical one. This is exactly where QGtkStyle comes into play.