"Asus has big plans for its little laptop and to the dismay of purists and Penguinistas, those plans centre on Windows. The company expects to sell five million Eee PCs this year, and Asus CEO Jerry Shen predicts that 'about 60 percent of these' will run XP rather than the Xandros OS with which the mini-note debuted."

Two new software build systems were ported to Syllable Desktop: OMake and CMake. They are available here. Both are cross-platform and both work on a higher level than the classic Make. However, OMake is a Make replacement (with a quite similar syntax, even), whereas CMake works on top of Make by generating traditional Makefiles and other project files. To meet one of Syllable's milestone objectives, and in keeping with the project's strive to reduce complexity and advance the state of the art, OMake was selected as the preferred make system for native Syllable projects. Support for OMake was implemented in Builder, Syllable's module-level build system. OMake itself will be added to a future Developer's Delight SDK. The Syllable system and its applications will migrate to it over time. Ported software will keep using their own internal build systems.

Every now and then, a computer comes along that makes a mark, that sets a trend, or that simply stuns you - but not because of its internals, its processor or its software, but because of its appearance. Through the history of computing, there have been a number of computers that were actually designed to appeal not just because of raw technology alone, but also because of stunning looks. Read on for a countdown of my ten most beautiful computers.

User Account Control is easily one of the most hated features of Windows Vista, according to readers. The seemingly endless stream of UAC pop-ups, asking you to confirm this action or that action, just get in the way (and aren't particularly zippy, given the screen redraw). Others don't mind UAC, but there's no doubt it's a controversial 'feature' of the OS. At the RSA 2008 confab in San Francisco, Microsoft admitted that UAC was designed, in fact, to annoy. Microsoft's David Cross came out and said so: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross. Cross had more to say than just that: Microsoft is going to put more emphasis on whitelisting.

Norman Deppenbroek has ported NewLisp to Syllable Desktop. NewLisp is a variety of the Lisp programming language meant for scripting, with a friendlier syntax and a practical approach. Also, newer versions of Objective Caml (3.10.2) and PERL (5.10.0) were ported. Kelly Wilson got OCaml to supports PThreads on Syllable Desktop. The new PERL is adapted to the new system structure of Syllable 0.6.5 and should be better at finding PERL extension modules. XML::Parser and Net::SSLeay were also ported and rebuilt for PERL 5.10.0. Binary packages for all these ports are available here.

The SymphonyOS project released a new version. "The SymphonyOS Project is pleased to announce the release of SymphonyOne 2008.1, our first major release in almost a year. SymphonyOne is an almost 100% rewrite of all the Mezzo desktop code taking advantage of more features of fvwm to provide a smaller footprint and more stable environment. Based on Ubuntu 7.10, SymphonyOne provides a complete desktop environment and full Ubuntu compatibility on systems with as little as a 200mhz processor. SymphonyOne also introduces our new WebApps system which allows you to make any website into a program in your programs menu which runs as it’s own process in it’s own window."

One in five Nature readers -- mostly scientists -- say they up their mental performance with drugs such as Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal. when asked how they felt about professional thinkers using drugs to enhance their cognitive performance, nearly 80% said it should be allowed. While this report reaches a different part of science, the usage of these drugs can be utilized by software developers alike. What is your opinion on this, somewhat new, development?

"Symantec's comprehensive security report on the malware industry from July 1 to December 31, 2007, is now available in its 100+ page glory. Symantec broke down information on patch development time by operating system and by the type of vulnerability encountered. Surprisingly, Microsoft had the shortest time-to-patch over both halves of 2007. In the first part of the year, Microsoft released 38 patches (two of which involved third-party applications) with an average deployment time of 18 days. From July to December, Microsoft released 22 patches with an average patch time of six days. Red Hat came in second, at 32 days for the second half of the year and 36 days in the first half. That's quite a bit higher than Microsoft's average, but of the 227 vulnerabilities Red Hat patched in 2007, 226 of them involved third-party applications. Apple, Sun, and HP all lag well behind Microsoft and Red Hat, though the gap for each company differs significantly between the first and second halves of last year."

Microsoft Research and EuroSys have awarded the 2008 Roger Needham prize to Contiki OS author Adam Dunkels for his open source Contiki OS, protothreads, and the uIP and lwIP embedded TCP/IP stacks. Dunkels is famous for writing code that runs in extremely small amounts of memory.

Comic: "Copyright".

"In a session at the Gartner Emerging Trends conference today, analysts Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver identified many reasons that Windows (and thus Microsoft) are in trouble. Microsoft's operating system development times are too long and they deliver limited innovation; their OSs provide an inconsistent experience between platforms, with significant compatibility issues; and other vendors are out-innovating Microsoft. That gives enterprises unpredictable releases with limited value, management costs that are too high, and new releases that break too many applications and take too long to test and adopt. With end users bringing their own software solutions into the office... Well, it's just a heck of a sad story for Microsoft."

GNOME 2.22.1 has been released. "This is the first update to GNOME 2.22. Come and see all the bug fixing, all the new translations and all the updated documentation brought to you by the wonderful team of GNOME contributors! A lot of work has been done in the stable branch to make it even more solid than it was."

And yet another release of the GNUstep live CD, version 1.8 this time. "GNUstep (this is a live CD, an operating system, a distribution) contains a lot of software for GNUstep, a free implementation of the OPENSTEP framework (which was also the base as Cocoa in Mac OS X)."

Sun Microsystems is today officially debuting its two new 'massively threaded' servers based on the UltraSPARC T2+ processor. The major advancement in Sun's new CMT SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers is that both systems support two processors - whereas previous offerings topped out at a single socket. Each processor - part of the 'Niagara' line - is equipped with up to eight cores and 64 threads, which is par with the chip's predecessors. But with a fresh ability to double-up, a single machine is able to process 128 instructional threads at the same time. Sun heralds the chip consolidation as leading to better performance per watt and space efficiency.