AnandTech takes a very thorough look at Vista SP1, and they conclude: "As far as the Vista user experience is concerned, users shouldn’t expect any significant changes with SP1. In this respect Vista SP1 is much like any other Windows service pack, rather than being another XP SP2. To that extent if you threw a pre-SP1 system and a post-SP1 system in front of us, we’d need to do some low-level benchmarking to identify which one was using SP1. In day-to-day use, the difference is not obvious outside of the specific improvements we’ve talked about."

DragonFlyBSD 1.12 has been released. "This release is primarily a maintainance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel. The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year. Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release."

The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD 50000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering. The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google's Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation.

"The Linux Standard Base project aims to keep subtle differences between implementations of the operating system from making applications incompatible across distributions. Last month's release of LSB 3.2 continues along that road, furthering compatibility and encompassing new standards for multimedia and scripting languages."

Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs). The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.

"FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... So well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."

A huge 'discussion' took place on the desktop-devel mailing list of the GNOME project about a possible replacement for TomBoy, the Wiki-like note taking application-thing-program-utility written in Mono - it being written in Mono was the prime reason for the whole debate, which started here, and only got considerably nastier later on. "It would seem that lately there are a lot of FUD-spreading trolls crawling out of the woodwork trying to frighten people into thinking that GNOME somehow depends on Mono. Let's take a look at their most widely repeated claims."

As predicted by many, Apple today announced upgrades to their Macbook and Macbook Pro line of computers. Both feature the new 45nm Intel Penryn processors, larger hard drives, 802.11n wifi, and for the Macbook Pro, a multi-touch trackpad. Both are "available immediately, shipping immediately." No word on the iPhone SDK.

Preload is a Linux daemon that stores commonly-used libraries and binaries in memory to speed up access times; similar to Windows Vista's SuperFetch function. This article looks at Preload and gives some insight into how much performance is gained for its total resource cost.

"The Ubuntu development community has announced that the fifth Ubuntu 8.04 prerelease is now available for testing. Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 5 adds additional polish and reliability as well as a few intriguing new features. The official release of Ubuntu 8.04, codenamed Hardy Heron, is scheduled for late April and feature freeze is already in effect. One of the most significant new features added in alpha 5 is support for Wubi, a new installation mechanism that makes it easier for Ubuntu and Windows to coexist on the same computer. Wubi provides a complete Ubuntu installer that can be run in Windows from the Ubuntu Live CD. It installs Ubuntu into a folder on the Windows file system and sets up a boot menu so that users can choose between Windows and Ubuntu when the computer starts." My take: The Linux world is playing catch-up to the BeOS world, I see?

A federal judge said Friday that consumers may go ahead with a class action lawsuit against Microsoft over the way it advertised computers loaded with Windows XP as capable of running the Vista operating system. The lawsuit said Microsoft's labeling of some PCs as 'Windows Vista Capable' was misleading because many of those computers were not powerful enough to run all of Vista's features, including the much-touted 'Aero' user interface.

Comic: "Sigh".

"RISC OS Open and Castle have today published a new batch of RISC OS source code on the riscosopen.org website for everyone to get their grubby mitts on. This third installment of code comes after the first load of software blueprints were released in May and a second barrage in October, last year. The latest batch includes the messy insides of the RISC OS 5 USB system, various low-level hardware-related modules and a library for applications that use networks and the Internet." There's also a new Firefox release for RISC OS.

"For the past several weeks we have been referencing AMD's 'tcore' in several of our articles, which is a user-space software suite that has been developed and used internally at ATI by engineers to work on various aspects of their binary drivers. Tcore is primarily used for testing prior to the availability of the actual silicon for their forthcoming graphics processors. John Bridgman and Alex Deucher have been working tediously to get this tcore source-code sanitized and cleared for public release, and finally they have reached this milestone. AMD has just published the first bits of open-source 3D programming documentation for ATI GPUs. This 3D programming documentation covers the R500 series and even goes back with information on the R300/400 series as well. The R600 3D programming guide will also be out soon. This information available today is what will foster the growth of open-source R500/600 3D support for the Radeon and RadeonHD drivers as well as R600 2D acceleration."