"After many rumors as to when Windows Vista would get its much-anticipated first service pack looked improbable, Microsoft has finally dropped SP1 on the masses. SP1 rolls together 23 security updates and 550 hotfixes into a 434.5MB download (726.5MB for the 64-bit version). Apart from improvements brought by individual updates that are now part of SP1, changes that SP1 brings by itself to Microsoft's flagship OS are numerous."

If you are sticking with XP - and plenty of us are - and you're planning to miss the upgrade to Vista read this article on the Australian PC World. It looks at big questions like: will Windows XP still be properly supported by Microsoft and, as a primary development target, by third parties? Is there something we've missed, some hidden gotcha that's going to trip us up?

Comic: "Omaha".

"You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. This upcoming battle will be presided over by Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft veteran currently running the team that's going to bring you the next version of Internet Explorer, 8.0. The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decision that lies perfectly, exactly, precisely on the fault line smack in the middle of two different ways of looking at the world. It's the difference between conservatives and liberals, it's the difference between 'idealists' and 'realists', it's a huge global jihad dividing members of the same family, engineers against computer scientists, and Lexuses vs. olive trees. And there's no solution. But it will be really, really entertaining to watch, because 99% of the participants in the flame wars are not going to understand what they're talking about. It's not just entertainment: it's required reading for every developer who needs to design interoperable systems. The flame war will revolve around the issue of something called 'web standards'."

"In May 2007 I ran some benchmarks of Dragonfly 1.8 to evaluate progress of its SMP implementation, which was the original focus of the project when it launched in 2003 and is still widely believed to be an area in which they had made concrete progress. This was part of a larger cross-OS multiprocessor performance evaluation comparing improvements in FreeBSD to Linux, NetBSD and other operating systems. The 2007 results showed essentially no performance increase from multiple processors on dragonfly 1.8, in contrast to the performance of FreeBSD 7.0 which scaled to 8 CPUs on the benchmark. Recently Dragonfly 1.12 was released, and the question was raised on the dragonfly-users mailing list of how well the OS performs after a further year of development. I performed several benchmarks to study this question."

Since there is absolutely nothing going on in the tech world today (really, we checked the internet), we figured some off-topic lightness might be a good idea for this Saturday night (it's night already in The Netherlands). The question we pose to you today has absolutely nothing to do with operating systems, computers, or technology: what albums are you most looking forward to in the coming one, two years? I blogged about my five most-awaited albums for 2008/2009, and this is my list (all albums are yet to be named): Fiona Apple's 4th album (I kind of really like Fiona Apple), the 7th studio album by The Cardigans, Garbage's successor to "Bleed Like Me", A Camp's coming second album, and Garbage front-woman Shirley Manson's first solo album. Post your favourites in the comments!

Geek.com reviews the ThinkPad X300. "The ThinkPad X300 is an exercise in balance. It’s designers were tasked with balancing performance and usability with size and weight and they did an excellent job."

"When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu. You can imagine how slowly it boots, even with Linux installed, and GNOME runs so slowly that it's quite irritating. I didn't want to reformat and install a lightweight Linux distribution like Fluxbuntu because the mini PC doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, and I already had 10GB of data that would have taken a long time to back up. Instead, I found and installed some lightweight software to improve her computing experience."

"The MonoDevelop team is proud to announce the release of MonoDevelop 1.0. MonoDevelop is a GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages. MonoDevelop enables developers to quickly write desktop and ASP.NET Web applications on Linux and Mac OS X. MonoDevelop makes it easy for developers to port .NET applications created with Visual Studio to Linux and Mac OS X and to maintain a single code base for all three platforms."

The Mac and iPhone SDK are based on the Objective-C programming language, a surprising alliance of C and Smalltalk. Features such as meta-classes, message sending, dynamism, C compatibility, etc., contribute to define the development experience on Apple's platforms. Here is a little list of things that, in Philippe Mougin's experience, contribute to make Objective-C a powerful and fun programming language.

"While Firefox 2 used less memory than it's predecessor, Firefox 1.5, we intentionally restricted the number of changes to the Gecko platform (Gecko 1.8.1 was only slightly different than Gecko 1.8) on which Firefox was built. However, while the majority of people were working on Firefox 2/Gecko 1.8.1, others of us were already ripping into the platform that Firefox 3 was to be built on: Gecko 1.9. We've made more significant changes to the platform than I can count, including many to reduce our memory footprint. The result has been dramatic."

"Apple co-founder and icon Steve Wozniak visited Australia last week to deliver a speech on how technology will continue to enhance our lives. Woz, as he is affectionately known as, is not shy in coming forward. On any topics. Here we gathered a collection of bite sized snippets that we found to be insightful and down right amusing."

Comic: "OS Risk".

PC-BSD 1.5 has been released. "System Updater tool: keeps system & PBIs up to date; sound detection program! Uses XML backend to identify and load modules; amd64 build of 1.5, including PBIs that are on our auto-build server; PBI icon preview library, now a PBI file shows the embedded icon on your desktop, not the generic 'PBI' format icon; Xorg 7.3; KDE 3.5.8; FreeBSD 6.3 Release."