As was to be expected, the Longhorn Reloaded team has been shut down by Microsoft. "It is with sad news that I have to inform you that today due to a cesit and decist letter we recived from Microsoft we are no longer able to provide you with a download link to Longhorn Reloaded. It deeply saddens me that although Microsoft hknew about this project for many months they only issued us with this notice a few days after we started to distribute the iso via torrents and ftp server."

"I was somewhat surprised (but pleased) at the level of interest back when I published my Windows Vista - 90 Day Vulnerability Report. It was about the earliest span of time I thought might give us some indicators, and the indicators did look good. Six months is a much more interesting time frame, and gives us the opportunity to see if the early trend indicators are holding up, or if the early signs of progress were a short-term gain."

"The Free Software community is well known for its diversity. This is most obvious at the application level, but even exists in the context of operating systems. David Chisnall takes a break from UNIX-derivatives and explores some of the more esoteric options." Note: From experience, I can say that the author's claim that "Haiku is more or less ready for their 1.0 release in terms of features" is a bit overambitious.

Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, has published on his blog an interesting status report for Python 3.0 ('Python 3000'), the upcoming major revision to the language scheduled for mid-2008. He discusses the rationale for redesigning the language, syntax changes, new features and libraries and inter-compatibility issues.

"One of the salient points repeated at the WWDC keynote was Leopard's support for '64 bits top to bottom'. However, a close peek at the slide shown this year showed a subtle difference to last year's - the word 'Carbon' was missing. Of course a storm of confusion soon ensued, with the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth from some quarters and polite shrugging from others. Apple stock fell and rose again, some developers professed bliss while others threatened to leave the platform, non-developers wrote learned analyses about obscure technical points, not to speak of reports of raining frogs or even an unconfirmed Elvis sighting in a Moscone restroom. Allow me to try to explain all (well, Elvis excepted)."

"Now that Fedora 7 has been released, Fedora project leader Max Spevack has a little bit of breathing room. Like nature, LWN abhors a vacuum, so we sent Max a list of questions and a request for answers. We are now happy to present the answers."

"At Phoronix we are constantly exploring the different display drivers under Linux, and while we have reviewed Sun's Check Tool and test motherboards with Solaris in addition to covering a few other areas, we have yet to perform a graphics driver comparison between Linux and Solaris. That is until today. With interest in Solaris on the rise thanks to Project Indiana, we have decided to finally offer our first quantitative graphics comparison between Linux and Solaris with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers."

There have been some interesting developments in the Haiku/BeOS world the past few weeks. Firstly, SkyOS developer Peter "Darkness" Speybrouck has been working on accessing SkyFS/BeFS partitions from Windows. Secondly, Opera 3.62 runs on Haiku. Lastly, if you have an Intel Mac, you can use VMware Fusion to run Haiku in Mac OS X; Haiku does not support EFI, so this is your only chance of running Haiku if you own an Intel Mac.

According to a notation tucked into the DOJ's joint statement with Microsoft regarding continued compliance with various agreed-upon standards and remedies, Microsoft expects Service Pack 1 for Vista to be in beta by the end of the year. In addition, a Microsoft security executive released data Thursday showing that, six months after shipping Windows Vista, his company has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP.

Geeks.com sent us in a next generation DVD player, the Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player. The model is the little brother of the HD-XA2 with fewer features, but it's the only HD player that sells at $230 while using the newer, second generation HD-DVD technology.

"If you visited the Plasma project's outdated Web site in past weeks, you might have gotten the impression that the team behind the project to revitalize the KDE desktop hasn't been up to much these past months. Delve into KDE's SVN repository, mailing lists, or the mind of lead developer Aaron Seigo, however, and you'll find a more exciting story." More here.

Mandriva has released Corporate Desktop 4.0 "Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Corporate Desktop 4.0, the brand new version of its enterprise-dedicated work station. Ergonomically designed, secure, comprehensive, easy to use and to administer: by consulting its corporate clients and building on its own expertise in the desktop area, Mandriva developed Corporate Desktop 4.0, a distro that can be installed in less than 15 minutes and extensively customized thanks to a new post-installation tool."

Microsoft is using the multi-touch technology that they implemented into their Surface Table and porting it to normal computers. Check out the video of a demo of a Vista laptop modified to use multi-touch.

The merger between compiz and Beryl now has a name: Compiz Fusion. "Our previous attempts to select a project name have not gone well. We tried a poll but the names in the poll were not pre-qualified to determine if they were usable and the 'winning' name was also a strongly disliked name. Kristian and I each proposed a plan to select a name, but that effort got sidetracked by a massive flame war on the mailing list. While our community has some democratic features, ultimately it is a meritocracy and the people who contribute the most value have the most say. So in the end a decision was made by the majority of the people who have contributed the most."